Meal Planning Vs Meal Prepping

There seems to be a lot of confusion between meal planning vs meal prepping. What are they? What is the difference? How do you do them?

Meal Planning

First, let’s start with meal planning. This is all about making plans for your dinners each week. Meal planning starts with setting a budget.

Next, talk with your family about what they would like to have for dinner. Life is better when everyone gets their favorite dish once in the week. While Taco Tuesday is a great idea, the same meal every week can get boring. Change it up… soft tacos, hard tacos, ground beef tacos, chicken tacos, and fish tacos. The choices are many.

Meal planning can get expensive if you don’t use the food you already have. This food costs you nothing out of pocket. It can continue to sit there until you must throw it away or you can use it while it is still fresh. Half of a cabbage in the bottom of the fridge, one lonely carrot, half a box of mushrooms that have seen better days, and leftover chicken waiting to spoil? Add an onion and fry that food up for a delicious stir-fry. Leftover stir-fry? Add some rice and take it to work for lunch. Think about how to use up the food you have.

Then, don’t stop there.

What’s in the freezer and pantry? Do you have a strange bag of sun-dried tomatoes? You bought them for a reason. Find that recipe or search for a new one online and use them. Is there a bag of mystery meat in the freezer? Take it out, thaw it, decide what it is and use it in the next few days.

Once you have accomplished these tasks, you can get down to the nitty gritty of meal planning. Don’t neglect the previous steps. They are an important part of meal planning.

Finally, sit down with your budget, meal ideas from your family, and list of food that you already have. How can you use what you have? What can you add to it to make a meal? At this point, select recipes to use for the week that go with the food in your pantry.

Make a list of the food you need to complete your meals. Search grocery sales to find the best place to shop this week for what you need. Take your list and go shopping. Once you get home with your food, meal planning is complete.

Meal Prepping

Meal prepping is about getting things ready for your dinners. Bring your groceries in and sit them on the table. Divide food out by meals.

(The following weekly meal plan has been simplified for examples sake. Five pounds of ground beef is too much for one week. A greater variety of foods is needed and desired.)

Dividing your meat into meals

Say you bought a whole chicken, cut it up. (Watch my video on YouTube to show you how.) The dark meat will go for the Teriyaki Chicken on Monday night and one large chicken breast for Chicken Pie on Sunday while the other breast will make a slow cooker dinner of Chicken and Rice on Wednesday.

The five pounds of ground beef can be divided up into meals too. One pound for Tacos on Tuesday, one pound for Spaghetti Sauce for Thursday, a pound and a half for burgers to grill on Saturday. One half pound for Vegetable Beef Soup for lunches and in-between meals, a quarter pound for Friday night homemade pizza, and three-quarter pounds for Chili that can be made for next week.

By dividing it all up, you have effectively meal prepped for all these different meals but let’s keep going.

Chicken Prep

Next, the Teriyaki Chicken needs to be marinaded. Combine the marinade and put it in a freezer bag, add the chicken and freeze. Now…the chicken is completely prepped for Monday’s dinner except for putting it in the frig to thaw on Sunday night.

Both chicken breasts can be boiled and shredded for their respective dinners. Save time and money by doing them at the same time. If Sunday is too far away, put that portion in the freezer.

The hamburgers should be pattied out and put away ready to go. The ground beef with added onions can be cooked and divided for the remaining meals.

Other meal prepping ideas for this week’s food

Cook rice for both the Teriyaki Chicken dinner and Chicken and Rice on Monday. It will be soft for the Teriyaki Chicken and it doesn’t matter for the slow cooker meal.

Better pizza dough takes a while to develop. Start your dough a couple days ahead. Wednesday evening would be good since you will have little to do from the slow cooker dinner.

Saturday is a good day to chop your veggies and prepare your Chicken Pie for Sunday.

Also, while preparing onion, lettuce, and tomato for burgers, prepare a green salad to eat with your Chicken Pie.

Lastly, the night before, gather all your ingredients for the next day’s meal. Have your recipe handy too.

Meal prepping is not hard, you must do all these tasks anyway for your dinners. The trick is to do your prepping at a more convenient time. Combine tasks to streamline preparation. The dinner hour can be stressful. Make things easier on yourself by thinking and doing ahead.

How can I help you with this? Check this out

https://motherwize.kartra.com/page/dinner-at-6.