7 Tips for Meal Prepping as a Family: Schedules, Meal Prepping, and More

For working parents, cooking on weeknights can be tough. It’s not easy to come home after a busy day of work and whip up something delicious for your whole family. That’s where meal prepping comes in! If you have medical considerations, such as hyperemesis gravidarum, you can find nutrition resources from TheHealthKing.com. Furthermore, these tips will help you master the art of meal prepping.

The Benefits of Meal-Prepping Together

Meal prepping as a family is a great way to bond with your children while teaching them a very valuable life skill! Everyone needs to know how to cook, and by meal prepping with you, your kids will get the hang of it at a young age. If you’re a working parent, you might feel like your time at home is often spent doing chores rather than playing with your kids, but cooking together allows you to combine both!

Having a Good Schedule

Meal planning can be challenging for those with busy schedules and hectic lifestyles, but having a good schedule can make all the difference. With an online schedule maker, you’ll have visibility into your day-to-day tasks and activities so that you can plan meals in advance. This may help ease the stress of preparing food and give you more time to focus on other important tasks. Additionally, if you have regular meal times incorporated into your schedule, it will be easier to stick to your diet and stay healthy.

Choosing Meals

With so many recipes at your disposal, how can you decide what to cook in a given week? Kitchn recommends choosing dishes based on common ingredients so that you can save time and money on grocery shopping. It’s also a good idea to pick out a few sheet pan, one-pot, or crockpot recipes so that you don’t need to use as many dishes while meal-prepping!

Grocery Shopping

Grocery shopping with your kids can be chaotic, especially when your children are young! If it’s tough to get your kids out of the house in a timely fashion, you could order groceries online. If you’re bringing your kids along for errands, Eat lunch before you leave, make an organized shopping list, and give your older children tasks to keep them busy.

Prepping

Choose a weekend day to tackle meal prepping as a family! Of course, the kitchen can get chaotic with so much going on. Give your spouse and kids assigned jobs so that everyone isn’t trying to do the same thing at once. To make things easier, season meats several ways on the same pan with aluminum dividers, roasting different vegetables together based on their cooking times, and freezing blended smoothies in muffin tins.

Storing Portions

In order to make meal prepping work for your family, you’ll need to have the right storage solutions. Stackable bins and jars are great for portioning out dinners and lunches. You may want to keep smoothie ingredients in plastic baggies so that you can easily dump the contents into the blender at breakfast time. Keeping salads and oatmeal in portable jars that you can pack up for work is a great option, too. You can also freeze certain dishes – just make sure to leave room below the container’s lid for liquids to expand.

Healthy Snack Choices

When you go grocery shopping and get ready for meal prepping, you can also pick up some nutritious snacks for you and your children to enjoy throughout the week. It can be fun to make some snacks on your own, like protein balls, but buying a few pre-packaged snacks is also convenient! You might want to get baby carrots and hummus, apples that you can slice up to dip in peanut butter, whole wheat crackers, berries, fruity popsicles with no added sugar, bananas, or even dehydrated fruit like banana chips.

The Takeaway

Meal prepping can help you save precious time on weeknights. You don’t have to cook a different dish from scratch every night in order to enjoy healthy, home-cooked meals as a family! With these tips, you’ll be able to plan out a simple weekly menu, shop for everything you need, cook together, and store portions for everyone.