By Richmond Natural Medicine

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March 2, 2018

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Getting Into a Habit Of Healthy Eating Starts With Planning A Weekly Menu That Will Make Eating Healthier More Manageable

As a follow up to the last Batch Cooking: How to Stock a Monthly Pantry article, these small tips will help you prep for a week of healthy meals employing batch cooking methods that save lots of time for busy weeknights. Once you get into the habit of looking ahead at your week and anticipating your schedule, it makes planning your meals much more manageable, and if you plan your time appropriately dinner time will rarely be a stressful time because most of the work will already be prepped. Below are my top 4 tips for planning a weekly menu that I use with my clients over and over again.

Step 1: Plan your recipes. Pick about 3-4 recipes you’d like to make for the week and keep them reasonably simply. I find that pinterest is a great place to store your weekly ideas, rotate through them and store the best ones to use over and over again. Choose recipes that make large portions so you can store them for leftover lunches such as crock pot soups, casseroles, and salads. Keep portioned out servings in glass containers for lunch time servings that are quick and easy to pack.

Step 2: Grocery shop for those recipes before the week starts, ideally on a day off or the same day you’re preparing these recipes. Once you have your recipes picked out, stock your pantry with all of those ingredients so you have everything to get started. Ideally the recipes will have overlapping ingredients like whole grains, spices, vegetables or seasonings so you can mix and match and not have to buy individual ingredients for every single recipe.

Step 3: Batch prep as much as possible and store for later. When you have about 2 hours, prep as much as you can from each recipe so when dinner time comes around later most of the prep work has already been done. Pre-chop your veggies, pre-roast a bunch of root vegetables, go ahead and soak/cook your grains, marinate your meats, soak your beans and even pre-measure your spices if that will save time. You can also prep entire casseroles to just put in the oven the night of. This makes putting dinner together on busier nights much easier because 75% of the prep work has already been done.

Step 4: Look at your calendar – pick out the busiest nights to utilize for your batch cooked weekly meals and then reserve 1-2 slower (usually weekend) nights to cook for the night (or as a family). Batch prepping is ideal to plan ahead for the nights you know you won’t have a lot of time to cook. But it’s always nice to save one or two nights per week to cook together if you have a household, or spend an evening cooking for yourself and enjoying that as a slower process.

Examples of great batch cooking meals: Hearty Chili / Lasagna / Crockpot Meals / Giant Colorful salads with grilled chicken, salmon or chickpeas / Black Bean Burgers / Soups & Stews