How do I meal prep at home?
March 31, 2025
With the price of groceries these days we are all trying to stretch every dollar when it comes to meals. Meal prepping at home is an excellent cost-effective tool that anyone can do to reach their health and fitness goals!
Ever wondered how experts do it? Well, I – a registered dietitian and personal trainer am going to teach you.
First of all, make sure you have the essentials:
- A knife
- Cutting board
- Food scale
- Measuring cups
- Pots and pans
- Baking sheet
- Meal prep containers
- Favorite seasonings
- Groceries
While it is not required, it will make your prepping so much more efficient and fun, I also strongly recommend an air fryer.
So now that you have your essentials, let’s get down to the nitty gritty. Start by making a quick little note of the menu you are going to make for yourself. This serves 2 purposes: you are making a plan to follow that will help you stay on track while cooking and help you make your grocery list to make sure you don’t overspend or buy things you don’t need.
If you are new to meal prepping, I encourage cooking 1 or 2 dishes for 2-3 days out of the week. Why? Because it is not very different than cooking a dish nor is it super overwhelming and it helps you get into the groove of portioning and preparing meals for other days. Pro tip: make a dish you already know how to make and that tastes good heated up in the microwave. I’ve seen people trying to start doing meal preps for every meal and new recipes and they soon get tired, overwhelmed and decide to drop it all together.
So, let’s say you picked the classic dish: chicken, rice and vegetables and turkey meatballs with pasta & broccoli. Yum!
Now that you have your menu, you know what ingredients you are going to need and you can make your grocery list. In this case it would look something like this:
Grocery list:
- Chicken breast
- White rice
- Summer squash
- Zucchini squash
- Broccoli
- Salt
- Pepper
- Oil of preference
- Ground turkey
- Italian seasoned breadcrumbs
- Italian seasoning blend
- Eggs
- Parmesan cheese
- Marinara Sauce
- Pasta
Of course, always check what you have in your pantry and your freezer, check off anything you already have at home to not have double unless you want to start building up your pantry.
So, you went to the grocery store and you now have your ingredients. What’s next?
- Start cooking the food that takes the least amount of time to prepare for example measure your rice and put it in a pot, leave it cooking according to the instructions.
- While that is cooking you can start preheating your oven to bake your veggies.
- In the meantime, while the oven is coming to temperature line a baking sheet and cut your veggies. I like to cut them all and bake them all – even if some need different cooking times. You can always have different timers and take some out before and leave others cooking longer. Spray them with pam or lightly drizzle oil, don’t forget to season them! (If you don’t have an oven you can also steam your veggies in a separate pot.)
Note: I like to put some music on as background noise or my husband likes to put on his favorite podcast, so as to not make our cooking sesh so monotone!
- While your rice and veggies are cooking you can start making your meatballs, (we have a super easy dump-it-all-in-a-bowl-and-mix recipe on our Instagram) After the meatballs have been mixed, you can wait to scoop them into balls if you only have one baking sheet and are using it on the veggies or you can start putting the meatballs into another baking sheet so that they can bake along with the veggies – just remember to put a different timer for your meatballs.
- After that, you can start boiling water in a pot so that you can cook your pasta noodles.
- Meanwhile all that is cooking you can start grilling the chicken breast!
- Once the food is cooked, the fun part begins. You get to plate everything in your meal prep containers! It’s not required, but I do advice using a scale to make sure your meals are adequate and will keep you full; mainly weighing the protein and portioning out the rice, pasta, beans or other starches and dressings with measuring scoops etc.
Note: One of my favorite tips that I learned from chefs about meal prepping is plating garnishes and details matter. Chefs look at food with different eyes wanting food to look as appetizing as it tastes. Making a pretty and yummy meal prep is one of those details that will elevate your experience as you are heating up your food and eating it. There is no need to spend a ton of time on it. Simple questions to ask yourself is: are there enough colors on the plate? Or can a sprinkle of seasoning or sauce elevate the dish?
For example, on the first dish: white rice, seasoned chicken & veggies. If I made white rice and wanted cauliflower, I would accompany another pop of color on the plate. It can be as simple as adding carrots to the veggies or adding peas or corn to the rice or even black sesame seeds. For the pasta dish the meatballs, pasta, sauce and broccoli are all different colors. I would add some parmesan cheese on the top for garnish (bonus when you microwave it, it will melt and look so good) or if you want something simpler, a light sprinkle of dry parsley would look really nice as well.
- Measure and portion the food to combine a dish into a meal prep container, don’t forget to add your garnish.
- Save any leftovers for repurposing into another dish or have your leftovers as snacks.
Pro Tip: Meal prepping can be time consuming and tiring. After a hard day’s work and cleaning up the kitchen and washing pots and pans, we order take out!
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High fives,
Tayde