Meal Prep Sunday

Since Patrick got a new job he has been able to bring his lunch and we have been purchasing frozen meals. To help with the budget as well as improving his diet, we decided to start prepping meals ahead of time. 

Now as anyone does in 2016 we got online and researched this meal prep thing quite a bit. What containers to use, ideas of what to make, how other people plan their time to get it all done, etc. 

On Friday we took inventory of our cabinets. If it is food, in our kitchen, we know what we have and how much of it. We took that into account when finding recipes for the week so we could clean out some of the stuff in the cabinets and not have to purchase as many ingredients.

We decided to make a breakfast and 3 different lunches.

Breakfast Burritos
Pork Roast (in The Crockpot with Potatoes, Corn and Carrots) and a roll

Ham and Beans with cornbread
Roasted Chicken with mashed potatoes and Broccoli cheddar rice
oh and brownies for dessert

Once we knew what we wanted to make and found our recipes we made our shopping list. That is how we started Saturday, shopping.  Since we haven't done this before I was afraid we would run into a time crunch on Sunday trying to fit all this cooking in, so we cooked the breakfast burritos on Saturday night, as well as, starting the roast before bed.


On Sunday we Started the Beans and we Roasted the chicken, which were our most time consuming things. We also made the sides which were no big deal, and we finally got to get out our new containers and put the lunches together. 


We purchased these containers to put his lunches in. 

We made 10 meals so he is covered for 2 weeks worth of moderately healthy frozen lunches and breakfasts and even some more leftovers and it only cost a few dollars more than what we normally spend on frozen meals for one week.
I will tell you that I washed dishes throughout this entire process so while Patrick was cooking I was washing, Otherwise we would have ran out of bowls, and oh how our feet hurt after standing in the kitchen all weekend. We might need to invest in some kitchen mats.

We spent the majority of our Weekend working on Meal Prep "Sunday" in the Kitchen, hopefully we will get really good at this and it will start to take us less time to get it all accomplished. Maybe at some point we can fit all of it into Sunday.