
Today I was motivated enough to do all of the meal planning for the next two days. Like I already mentioned, I used the MealPrepPro App on iOS to plan the food for my boyfriend and for myself.
His calorie goal is set to 2400 calories, while mine is at 1900, which is why you can see a difference between the left (mine) and the right (my boyfriend’s) glasses.
I prepared some overnight oats for the next two days, as well as strawberry cheesecake chia pudding as a snack. The overnight oats still have to be topped with shredded coconut, the chia pudding has to be topped with graham crackers.
For lunch we will have some tempeh wraps, with a honey-mustard filling, so I prepared the tempeh filling and we’ll assemble the wraps when needed. For Dinner I prepared some Pizzas with a Tortilla crust, as well as some vegan sausages and grilled bell pepper as a topping and right before eating, I’ll add some honey and arugola.
All recipes were done fairly quickly, but I will say that it was a little cumbersome to weight every ingredient. The meal planning app has a feature where I can insert the total weight of a meal and it will tell me how to divide the food between the two of us for both days. This is fairly straight forward for things like oatmeal or chia pudding. However, for the pizza I had to divide every ingredient individually in order to assemble the pizza with the right proportions. I am not really sure how this could be simplified, considering that we need different amounts of calories.
Another aspect I thought about is the amount of prep work I have to do right before eating. I am lucky enough to work from home on four out of five days, so it’s usually not a big issue for me to do a couple additions right before eating. However, it’s a little bit of an issue for me if I have to assemble my food at work. First of all, I don’t like having to take more than one container to work, because it’s just annoying having to carry all of that stuff. I don’t own a car, so I use public transportation to go there and when having multiple containers per meal it usually won’t fit into my backpack, so I would have to carry an extra bag for food. It’s also more convenient if I can just throw a single container into the microwave, instead of having to divide the heated part of my dish from the cold part (for example the tempeh from the salad in a wrap) and then assemble everything in a cafeteria full of people.
Prepping for four different dishes already causes an incredible amount of chaos in the kitchen, so I think it’s crucial to have a completely clean kitchen right before starting, otherwise there will be no space to cook (even though if stacking dirty pots, bowls and plates on top of each other, while holding a hot pan in the other hand would be an Olympic sport, then Switzerland would have found their top athlete). In our household this is my boyfriend’s job (since I’m doing all of the cooking), so I just have to make sure to tell him when I plan on meal prepping, so he has enough time to clean beforehand.
So the first lessons I took away from meal prepping were to favor simple recipes, where I don’t have to weight several ingredients separately and recipes that can be fully assembled the night before.
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