Make Meal Prep Interesting: How to Get Different Meals Out of One Recipe
When you’re trying to eat healthy, planning out your meals and prepping food for the week ahead is a great way to set yourself up for success. By having healthy meals ready to go, it’ll be easier for you to make healthy choices when you get hungry. Making a plan for the week can also help you hold yourself accountable to your decision to eat healthfully. After all, if you already have your fridge stocked with the food you plan to eat, you can’t let all those groceries and hard work go to waste! Organization and planning are great strategies that will help you reach your goals.
However, I won’t deny that there are challenges that come along with using these strategies. It would be great if we could all make a different recipe for each meal, every day of the week. For some people, this might be possible. But for many of us, it’s not a practical expectation. This could be because of limited time and/or energy. As someone who lives on their own and cooks for one, I know how tricky meal planning can get. I have limited food storage space and I don’t like wasting food (or money).
For many people, it’s more practical to make a large batch of one recipe to last them throughout the work week. The issue with this is that mealtime can get monotonous. It can be a bore to eat the same meal, over and over. Not only can meal boredom take away from the enjoyment of your meals, it can decrease your motivation to stick to your healthy meal plan. So what’s a well-intentioned meal prepper to do?
My suggestion to you is, when you’re doing your meal planning for the week, look for basic recipes that can be used as a foundation for multiple different meals. Choose recipes that become a different meal just by adding a couple ingredients or serving it with various side dishes. If you’re not quite sure what I mean, I’ll give you an example of a recipe I recently made into 4 unique meals.
Last week, I made a big batch of tomato sauce. The recipe was pretty basic. It only took 30-45 minutes to make.
Basic Tomato Sauce
Yield: 5 servings
Ingredients
2 tablespoons oil
1 large onion, chopped
4 large carrots, peeled and chopped
6 stalks celery, chopped
10 medium vine tomatoes, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 tablespoon dried basil
1 tablespoon sriracha
zest of one lemon
juice of one lemon
2 tablespoons tomato paste
salt and pepper, to taste
Instructions
1) Heat oil on medium heat in a large pot. Saute the onion until it starts to turn translucent.
2) Add the carrots to the pot. Cook until they begin to soften, 5-7 minutes.
3) Add the celery and cook until it starts to soften.
4) Put the chopped tomatoes into the pot. Cook until they start to turn mushy.
5) Add the garlic, oregano, basil, sriracha, lemon zest, lemon juice, and tomato paste. Reduce heat to medium-low. Cook until the veggies are at your preferred level of softness.
6) Season with salt and pepper.
At this point, I already had an opportunity to introduce some variety. I decided to leave most of my sauce chunky, but I set aside some sauce to puree in my blender. My first, most obvious, meal idea for this recipe was to eat it with rice pasta. And it tasted great! But I had a few other ideas for what to do with this recipe.
The next day, I ate this sauce as part of my brunch. It went great with my roasted sweet potato, which was simple to make. All I needed to do was cube a sweet potato and toss it with some oil and spices. I used cumin, paprika, chili powder, and salt & pepper. After baking the potato at 400 F on a lined baking sheet for about 25 mins, my meal was almost complete. I whipped up a couple of eggs and microwaved some sauce in a Pyrex container. Voila! Brunch was served.
For my third meal, I added a couple of ingredients to my sauce: chicken breast (cubed and pan-fried), frozen corn, and a canned 6 bean blend. I ate my lunch over a bed of rice.
Finally, for the fourth meal, I ate my leftover beefed-up sauce with some cornbread. You can find a gluten free cornbread recipe here: https://www.thesplendorousceliac.com/blog/how-to-convert-a-recipe-from-gluten-y-to-gluten-free
So there you have it! That’s how you can take one basic recipe and get a few different meals out of it. It doesn’t have to be complicated or time consuming.
A couple other examples of basic recipes you could use are…
Soup: https://www.thespruceeats.com/easy-homemade-vegetable-soup-3377947
Divvy up the soup into containers and add a particular source of protein to each portion. For example, chicken in one container, beef in another, beans or lentils, cheese, etc.
Quinoa salad: https://www.twopeasandtheirpod.com/easy-quinoa-salad/
Try making a couple different salad dressings to use throughout the week. You can also play around with using various veggies and sources of protein. Or you can throw in a distinct addition each day: corn kernels one day, roasted sweet potato the next day, then some chia seeds or hemp hearts, etc.
How do you keep meal prep interesting?