Meal prepping is more than a fad. It is a crucial activity that saves money, time and food. If you don’t know where to start, don’t feel discouraged. Prepping for anything, especially hunger, can be a bit overwhelming for just about anyone. Meal prepping can be fun and extremely rewarding once it becomes second nature. An easy way to start is to portion out some of your favorite foods into easily reusable containers and plan for a week ahead. If that’s too much, go for just a few days at a time. These containers work great in our home.
Use leftovers either as a main meal or add to other dishes. Or add new flavor with sauces or extra seasoning if you’re bored with how it your meal was initially. And eat all of it after it’s been portioned out. If you’re not sure if you can stand it any longer, try finding another recipe you can integrate the rest of your meal into before giving up and throwing it away. I threw away radish greens for years before trying a new recipe to use the scraps.
Buy the correct amount without going overboard. This can be tricky when you first start but after a while it becomes habit. If you underbuy, you can get creative and fill in any gaps with other items in your kitchen. This is a great opportunity to learn something new and experiment with food that needs to get used. It’s been a lifesaver to keep track of what’s in our pantry instead of just winging it by memory.
Use food in order of importance and triple check that the expiration date really knows what it’s talking about. Sometimes those dates are just guidelines and don’t have true meaning to a food’s shelf life. For Thanksgiving, although I was skeptical, I opened and successfully used a can of sweetened condensed milk that was 2 years past the date. And it was delicious. This is an easy step if you remember not to buy more than you need. Like not to buy new cereal and open that one immediately when you have 3 boxes of cereal already open. Pro tip: Unless the new box was a discount because it’s about to go stale.
Try new recipes and get comfortable with it. It is very simple to fall into a routine and make the same stuff over and over but you’re missing out on valuable flavors and meal options by sticking to the same old thing all of the time. The Practically Sane Mom Recipes Page has some yummy options for all diets that you can check out.
Portion control helps drastically for so many reasons when you’re trying to cut back on food waste. It’s also healthy to watch your caloric intake, even if you eat a limited amount of food in a day. If you made too much food at home or bought too much while eating out, eat a small amount at a time before continuing to consume your meal. Store the rest for later.