Since many of you seemed to have loved my meal prep post the other day, I thought I’d continue where I left off. Today it’s all about dinner. While I like salads for lunch, I’m all for warming meals at night. Warming stews, asian noddle dishes or lentil bowls is what I live for. Contrary to my lunch meal preppig post, this one actually requires you to cook at night. But the idea is to prepare as much as possible on Sunday already. That way, all you have to do is do the fun part of cooking: whipping it all together!

Most meal plans obviously go from Monday until Sunday. But let’s face it. Weekends are different. Whether you love long breakfasts, Sunday brunch with your friends or dinner with your family, it’s hard to meal plan for the weekend. That said, I am not a mother, so with families, this might be different. Correct me if I’m wrong here.

I am defiitely not a meal prep professional, but over the years, I’ve developed some tricks that enable me to meal prep without stressing out about it.

Here are 10 things that make meal prepping and planning easier:

1. Find recipes that you would like to make during the week. Finally dig out all the pinterest recipes that you’ve been meaning to try forever or browse through the new cookbooks (clears throat).
2. Don’t be too proud to make your favorite meals once a week. Family favorites make everyone happy and satisfied.
3. Write down your plan on a sheet of paper. That way, you’re more likely to stick to it. You may even pin it to your fridge.
4. Modify the recipes seasonally and according to your taste. Seasonal vegetables are more nutritious, cheaper and available everywhere.
5. Write a shopping list and – depending on the recipe size – write down twice the amount of ingredients.
6. Cook once, eat twice. That’s the mantra of meal planning.
7. Buy as many groceries as you can on Saturday. Then buy fresh ingredients on wednesday.
8. Cook starchy foods such as rice, quinoa or millet on Sundays and store them in glas containers in the fridge. They supplement any dish.
9. Cut onions on Sundays, chop garlic and grate ginger. This will come in handy during the week. Also on Sundays, chop the vegetables for Monday and Tuesday and store them in glass containers in the fridge.
10. Do not stress about it. Meal Planning should make your life easier and less stressful.

Meal Plan for 5 days (Mon-Fri) for two people:

Montag: Mediterranean Quinoa with sun-dried tomatoes  (cook twice the amount to eat twice)

Donnerstag: Asian Sesame-Noodles (cook twice tha amount to eat twice)

Friday: Quick and easy tomato spinach pasta (cook once to eat once)

Shopping list on Saturday:
red lentils
250 g of green beans (or sugar snap peas)
7 carrots
1 broccoli
2 zucchini
2 cans of chopped tomatoes (400 g each)
brown rice
quinoa
400 g rice noodles (or pasta of your choice)
1 glass of sun-dried tomatoes
tomato paste
paprika
kalamata olives (optional, I love them)
3 shallots
250 g of fresh beetroot
750 g of tomatoes
2 stalks of rosemary
1 can of coconut milk
2 cans of chopped tomatoes (800 g in total)
tamari (gluten-free soy sauce) or plain soy sauce
lime
organic lemons
spring onions
300 g of pasta of your choice (I like whole-wheat spelled, lentils or buckwheat pasta)
almond butter (cashew or sunflower seed)
30 g of almonds
sesame oil

Shopping list on Wednesday:
200 g of spinach
1 bunch of rocket
1 red bell pepper

Usually a staple in a healthy kitchen:
fresh basil
garlic
red onions
fresh ginger
chilli flakes or cayenne pepper
cinnamon
thyme (dried)
honey (or coconut blossom sugar, maple syrup, rice syrup)
sea salt and pepper
coconut oil or ghee
extra-virgin olive oil
apple cider vinegar or white wine vinegar
vegetable broth or my easy peasy homemade vegetable broth paste (takes 5 minutes)

Food preparations:

Sunday:

• Finely chop onions, shallots, garlic and ginger for all dishes and freeze in portions. This saves you a lot of time during the week.
• Peel the beetroot and cut it into pieces. Cut the tomatoes and remove the seeds. Roast the beetroot and tomato in the oven as described in the recipe, allow to cool and put in a glass container in the fridge. If you like, you can already cook the soup completely, then you just have to warm it up on Monday night.
• Cut the vegetables for the Bali Buddha vegetable stew and store them in a glass container in the fridge. My tip: replace the beans with sugar snap peas. This saves you some time on Tuesday because you don’t have to cut off the ends of the green beans.
• In the meantime prepare dinner for Sunday.

Wednesday:

• Prepare the sauce for the Asian noodles and store in a glass container overnight.
• Spiral the carrots and zucchini or use a julienne to cut them into thin strips. Store in an air-tight glass container in the fridge over night.

Enjoy!

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Summer holidays are almost over (at least here in Germany they are coming to a close), so it’s time to get back to work! But let’s make this year different than the others, shall we? How about buying less lunches? How about skipping dining halls? This year, we could do something crazy and bring our own lunches! Ok, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We could at least try to bring our lunch more often. Not just because it saves money, but because it cares for our body. It means putting our body first.

Ok, this was a bit theatrical, but isn’t true? With just about 90 minutes of meal prepping on Sunday, you can prepare four lunches that might even last until dinner. My boyfriend and I have tried it out, and together we needed less than 40 minutes to prepare it all. If you’re alone, you can definitely make it in under 90 minutes.

So here comes the grocery list that you’ll need to put your body first four times of the week:

Grocery list for four lunches for one hungry or two medium hungry people:

Stored in a mason jar, the salads stay fresh for at least two days. I hate to admit it, but in my case, they lasted from saturaday until thursday. Please trust your instincts more than my fridge situation. The recipes in this post are supposed to fit into a 950ml Ball Mason Jar and hence, are quite generous in size. Jannis and I had dinner with just one jar and a little bit of feta cheese on top. But if you’re really hungry, then go have one jar for lunch. The ingredients won’t have you crashing after two hours, but keep you satisfied for longer.

Let’s move on to the recipes. The ingredients are layered from bottom to top, the exact measurements can of course vary depending on the size of you jar. You don’t need to follow the recipes 100%. Just play around with it, have fun and don’t stress.

For the dressings:

Have fun planning you lunches!

xx
Lynn

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