A different take on "Food Prep"

45CC65A7-A9FA-444A-B2AB-08EC623657EB.JPG

Somewhere along the way Sunday became “food prep day.” And I get why. But I’ve never found that having one day a week when I make a crap ton of food for the entire week really worked for me.

My three main reasons for this are 1) it was a lot of chopping, cooking, cleaning to pack into one day; 2) I’m not generally jazzed to eat the same food all week long; and 3) the food generally just doesn’t taste as good by the end of the week.

So instead I “prep” when I can throughout the week. Most often, that means cooking a larger batch at dinner to have leftovers for a meal or two. But it also frequently means roasting veggies when I get the chance - like at 2 in the afternoon on a Friday - or cooking up something with dinner that isn’t actually going to be eaten that night - we baked chicken breasts in the oven the other night while we cooked steak on the stove for dinner.

Doing it this way means that most of the time we have the makings of a full or at least a partial meal in the fridge that just needs to be heated up. “Prepping” food like this also means that I always have a rotation of nutritious food in my fridge, even on the weekends.

When I used to do bulk cooking on Sunday I always found that by the time Friday night rolled around I had either run out of the food I’d made or I was just over eating the same thing. This often led to eating out, which often led to poorer food choices. Given that the weekend can be a nutritional black hole for people, I like to do whatever I can to stack the deck in my favor, which for me means having some already cooked nutritious food in the fridge going into the weekend.

Today I roasted up some asparagus (Little Miss’ favorite veggie), baby broccoli, and rainbow carrots.