How to Meal Prep for the Week in Under 1.5 Hours (+ a Sample Meal Plan for 2)
A detailed 4 step plan for meal prepping from an expert meal-prepper, including a spreadsheet template, sample meal plan, sample grocery list, and meal prep plan.
Meal prepping seems really daunting when you aren’t in the practice. But what if I told you that you could easily do it under 1.5 hours? And you could even watch a movie or some YouTube video while you did it?
If you’re not convinced yet, there are countless benefits to meal prepping. I’m sure there are many more, but the key ones I’ve experienced are:
- Saving time throughout the week
- Enjoying healthy and fresh food, and maintaining or losing weight as a bi-product
- Reducing food waste, which in turns helps fight against climate change
- Reducing your grocery (and Postmates) bill, helping you fight against rising inflation
When I talk to friends and family, the hardest part seems to be getting started. I mean look how complicated Harvard makes it seem. And I’m not going to pretend like it’s easy. Sure, it’s easy for me now after 2 years, but it was admittedly difficult getting started. Now that I’m in the habit, it’s just a part of my week. I weirdly look forward to it and even offer to meal prep extras for my friends.
So here I am to show you how to meal prep in 4 easy steps.
- Meal plan
- Break down said meal plan into a task list
- Grocery shop
- Prep and put away groceries
Step 1: Plan your meals
Meal planning is half the battle. Heck, it might actually be 70% of the battle. Understanding how to prep your meals is exponentially easier when you know what you’re cooking. It becomes even easier if you meal plan with prepping in mind.
Meal prepping and planning began out of necessity for me. When COVID lockdowns first hit, my partner and I committed to only grocery shopping once every 2 weeks. That meant no more random trips to the store because I forgot a lemon or we ran out of mustard.
This practice forced me to get smart about my meal planning. Say a recipe calls for sweet potatoes; those are super cheap in a big bag (Costco or Trader Joe’s especially). Therefore, if you know you need a sweet potato for dinner one night, why not incorporate sweet potatoes into your lunches too.
To make this even easier for you, I detailed an easy 3 step process here (with a free meal planning template!). In that article I talk about picking items on sale, in season, and grouping ingredients together — all of which make meal prepping easier. I also show you a sample meal plan with a grocery list and prep plan at the bottom of this article.
Step 2: Break your meal plan down into what you can prep ahead of time
As I detail out what we’re going to eat each week, I take note of what can be batch completed ahead of time. Those same sweet potatoes from above are super easy to bake in the oven at 425 for 40 mins (pierce ’em first!). Then you’ve got ready-to-eat baked sweet potatoes all week.
Great examples of batches of foods you can prep on a Sunday:
- Grains: rice, farro, quinoa, oatmeal
- Smoothies
- Potatoes
- Protein sources: pulled chicken or pork, tempeh, tofu, grilled chicken
- Salad dressings
- Roasted veggies
- Chopped veggies & dips
- Overnight oats or chia pudding
- Chopped herbs, garlic, ginger
As you can see from the above list, your possibilities are seemingly endless! They can range from prepping your whole meal to just prepping small ingredients (like chopping herbs) that you know are going to be annoying after an 8 hour work day.
Step 3: Grocery shop
I think most people don’t realize that prepping can begin as early as grocery shopping. Not only am I strategic about what I buy, but I’m strategic about how I put items in my reusable bags.
I always offer to bag my own groceries, because it saves me time later when my items are already organized. I like to do the following:
- One bag for dry goods that will go in the pantry. This bag also includes items that I might prep that don’t go in the fridge, like sweet potatoes (if you can’t tell, I love sweet potatoes).
- One to two bags for refrigerated/freezer goods. I tend to put my freezer items by any meat I’m purchasing to help them keep cool (I also bring a cooler bag, but this is unnecessary). As I place items in this bag, I try to keep ones I know I will begin prepping towards the top. This is not always feasible, though, as you don’t want a big box of Trader Joe’s frozen rice crushing your figs. For me, I use one cooler bag for fish/meat/frozen items and one bag for the remaining fridge items.
- One extra small bag in case I’m making a specialty stop like Mitsuwa for udon noodles or the farmer’s market for fresh stone fruit.
Since the most daunting part of meal prepping is time — any little moment of time you can save is worth it!
Step 4: Prep and put away groceries
You’ve made it! time to start prepping.
The first thing I do is put away my groceries and leave out anything I am prepping.
Next, I start with the longest-taking items first and work my way to the shortest. Guess who’s back? The sweet potatoes! Since things like sweet potatoes, roasted vegetables, and grains can sit for 30+ minutes, you want to get those started so you can kill two birds and save time.
Here’s a sample order I’d go in:
- Sweet potatoes
- Grains & roast veggies
- Protein sources
- Chop vegetables
- Smoothies
- Dressings & dips
Once everything is finished, I let items cool and put them into appropriate containers. I personally like to prep my lunches in full and combine into one Tupperware, but many people like to keep their ingredients separate to switch it up. You just want to make sure cooked food is cool before you put it away.
Sample meal plan, grocery & prep list
And there you have it! Meal prepping almost never takes me more than 1.5 hours end to end, and most of the time it’s shorter than that.
To help you get started, below is a sample meal plan (and actually what I am cooking next week!). Feel free to use my template to prep yourself and make sure to let me know in the comments how you fared.
The meals:
The grocery list:
Based on the above meal plan, here’s how the grocery list shakes out:
Here’s the items I already had that will be used this week, in case you need to buy:
- Salt & pepper
- Olive oil & avocado oil spray
- Kewpie mayo
- Cornichons
- White vinegar
- Ketchup
- Apple cider vinegar
- Rice
- Parsley
- Soy sauce
- Rice vinegar
- Honey
- Garlic
- Tortillas
- Lime
- Udon noodles
- Kimchi
- Eggs
- Sesame seeds
- Shrimp
- Chicken
- Farro
- Japanese sweet potatoes
- Tahini
- Chickpeas
- Nutritional yeast
- Dijon mustard
- White miso paste
- Paprika
Hit me up in the comments if you’d like this in an editable format👇
Tidbits on how I came up with this plan:
- I get the Whole Foods weekly flyer and saw chicken sausages, broccolini, and short rib were on sale.
- We already had a bag of frozen shrimp, parsley and dill, and a huge bag of Japanese sweet potatoes at the house. We also had some jicama wraps that were going to go bad, and they pair wonderfully with the short rib taco recipe. Hence, I selected meals towards the beginning of the week using each.
- Snap peas are in season and have been phenomenal at the farmer’s market, which helped me select my lunches for the week. I also threw asparagus, berries, green beans, cabbage, romaine, green onion, onion, pear, and mushrooms on there as they are all in season.
- When we make burgers, I like to do a 50/50 bison & beef mix. Ground bison and beef come in 1lb packages, which means there will be the perfect amount for 1 additional round of burgers. My partner likes to space out eating the same thing (whereas I could eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner daily), so I placed our second round of burgers on the following weekend when we were going to have company again. Plus, we will definitely have extra buns and leftover special sauce!
- I pulled from many house staples that we normally have on hand. Farro, nutritional yeast, frozen udon noodz, rice crackers, kewpie mayo, rice, all the mustards, miso, chickpeas, tahini, apple cider vinegar, garlic, shallot, soy sauce, rice vinegar, oils, and spices. I also always have smoothie-fixings around such as chia, flax, protein powder, maca, cacao, and frozen spinach. We were out of some staples like almond butter, almond milk, gochujang, and ginger — normally we’d have those already.
- On Monday I have a drink with a friend planned, but not dinner. So I picked the fastest, easiest meal we can make.
My Sunday meal-prep to do list:
- Put short rib in the crockpot
- Put sweet potatoes in the oven
- Start my veggie stock (I keep scraps throughout the month in a freezer and then make a big back of veggie stock once I have enough. Which happens to be this week! It will be used in the Udon dish and to cook the farro.)
- Sautee tempeh
- Chop snap peas & basil, + snacking bell peppers
- Make smoothies
- Make salad dressing
Check out the other posts in this series:
How to Meal Plan in 3 Easy Steps (+ a free spreadsheet template!)