MEAL PREP MONDAY 5.23.22
Welcome to my new series here on the blog - Meal Prep Mondays!
I have a long history with meal prepping that has evolved over time. For many years, I did “traditional” meal prep where I would make 5 of the same breakfast, lunches, dinners and snacks for the upcoming week. At the time, that worked great for me and I looked forward to spending my Sundays in the kitchen setting up my week for success.
Over time, life got busy and I just couldn’t justify taking a whole day “off” to do so much work cooking. I wasn’t enjoying it anymore so I stopped doing it entirely. Now that I have that time back, I’ve been enjoying this newer version of meal prepping. We order Hello Fresh for our dinners during the week, so I only have to worry about breakfast and lunch and the occasional weekend dinner if we feel like cooking.
I go to our local market on Sunday mornings and go with the flow. I see what’s on sale, what sounds/looks best in the moment and go from there. Once I get home, I prep the ingredients individually. That way it’s all ready to go but I can combine it in different ways so I’m not eating the same thing every day unless I want to!
For this series, I thought it would be fun to share my meal prep from the week before with you. That way you can see how I prepped the ingredients AND what I made throughout the week with those ingredients. Below is what I started with after returning from the market:
From these items, here’s what I prepped/made:
Blueberry Overnight Oats
Sliced tomatoes & mozarella
Lemon & lime wedges
Diced red bell pepper
Creamy Avocado Cilantro Dressing
Pickled red onions
Fresh corn off the cob
Last Sunday was a beautiful one, so I took advantage of the fresh cut lime wedges to make mojitos.
After spending time cooking/prepping, I like to make something more low key for dinner on Sunday nights that requires minimal effort. My local market made that easy for me last week with the fresh heirloom tomatoes, mozarella & basil. All I had to do was add some olive oil and balsamic vinaigrette and we had a light, flavorful caprese salad that couldn’t be beat.
The blueberry overnight oats are a good example of how sometimes I don’t mind eating the same thing every day. Overnight oats are my favorite because the base of them is simple (oats. chia seeds, coconut milk) and then you can add whatever is freshest that week to make different varieties. In this instance, blueberries were on sale at the market so it was a no brainer. I just dumped them into a bowl each morning and heated them in the microwave for 1 minute some days and ate them cold others.
I used the shredded chicken, pickled onions, chopped peppers, fresh corn off the cob and the dressings to make southwest salads some days and tacos for others.
The other great thing about this is during the weekends we are able to use up anything that didn’t get used during the week. By having these proteins and veggies prepped, I can throw them in breakfast scrambles or add the toppings to pizza, etc. Another thing I’ll try to do is incorporate any of the leftovers into the following week’s recipes as well.
Wishing everyone a good, productive week!