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Story: How to meal prep for the week in just 3 hours

"Here’s one I made earlier": How to meal prep for the week in just 3 hours

"Here’s one I made earlier": How to meal prep for the week in just 3 hours

Story

Kitchen Stories

MEAL PREPPING IS MUCH MORE THAN A RECENT FOOD FAD. PREPARING MEALS IN ADVANCE IS HEALTHY AND SAVES MONEY,

but it can take up a lot of time. We’ll show you how to meal prep for your entire working week — in just 3 hours. There are many ways to feed yourself over the course of a day. Here’s one: drink your first coffee of the day en route to work, grab an apple from your office kitchen, look for some snacks a little while later to stop your stomach from growling and sprint to the supermarket’s salad bar during your lunch break. Fill the time until you go home with more sweets and snacks, only to arrive home utterly exhausted from your day and with zero motivation to cook anything. But as luck would have it, the delivery driver is already ringing your doorbell.

You’d agree that this doesn’t sound all that great. But everyone knows why it happens: your fridge is half-empty, your free time after work is precious and the space in your mind is taken up by other things. While a balanced diet is highly important, it’s something that we rarely devote sufficient attention to, unfortunately. Meal prepping has been on everybody’s lips for years, but you might be one of those people who looks at their colleague’s rice bowl and then at your sad bag of salad, wondering: “How on earth do they manage that?”

Cook up a storm in your oven, from breakfast to dinner

On a chilled-out Sunday, when you’ve got plenty of time and feel rested, take 3 hours to prepare your meals for the upcoming week. It might sound like a lot of time, but you won’t need to do any chopping, cooking or grocery shopping for the next 5 days. Deal?

Your secret weapon for efficiently preparing your meals is an oven that cooks a vast array of items at the same time.

Your secret weapon for efficiently preparing your meals is an oven that cooks a vast array of items at the same time.

Thanks to the CircoTherm® system in NEFF ovens, you can cook your ingredients for the upcoming week on 4 levels: from granola and roasted vegetables through to chicken breasts. What makes it unique? The hot air used by this system is circulated around the dishes on each level, cooking the food without mixing the aromas from individual baking trays. After all, you don’t want your muesli to taste of chicken, do you? The CircoTherm® system is energy-saving, quiet and even keeps your oven cleaner.

The holy trinity of meal prepping: protein, vegetables and grains

From animal protein to plant-based sources

From animal protein to plant-based sources

The recommended daily protein intake is 0.8 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body mass. For a person who weighs 65 kg, this would amount to a figure of between 52 and 170 grams. But who makes sure they get this at every meal, unless they do a lot of sport in their free time or for their job? Meal prepping will give you a helping hand with this because you simply can’t get away from the issue of protein. If you give it some thought, you can cook enough protein in advance to ensure you don’t need to worry about it during the week.

No matter whether you go for meat or fish, or vegetarian or vegan options, there is a wide array of protein sources for everyone. Of course, there are near-endless possibilities in terms of spice blends and marinades, so you can pick out something that really tickles your taste buds.

And you don’t need to plump for just one source of protein, either. In our recipe, we fold parchment paper into small parcels so that the chicken fillets cook in the marinade, ensuring that they stay tender. With this technique, you can fill your parcels with anything you like, from chicken and prawns to tofu and more.

A timeless classic: roasted vegetables

A timeless classic: roasted vegetables

Roasted vegetables aren’t just a side dish, they can be at the heart of your dishes. There are a couple of rules to abide by as far as oven-cooking goes, but there’s plenty of scope to take your own tastes into account.

Above all, the cooking times for the various vegetables play a key role. To ensure that the vegetables are evenly cooked after they’re finished in the oven, cut vegetables with longer cooking times into smaller pieces than vegetables that will cook more quickly. This balances things out, making sure your potatoes are not still raw by the time your onions are done. As a golden rule, you shouldn’t put too many vegetables on your baking tray. They should be positioned next to each other, with a bit of space in between, rather than on top of each other. This space enables the steam to dissipate and helps conjure up the aromas created during roasting process.

Olive oil and other alternatives

Olive oil and other alternatives

You need only about 1-2 tablespoons of oil per baking tray. Olive oil is the traditional choice, but you could also opt for nut oils or grapeseed oil to change up your routine of roasted vegetables. As far as spices are concerned, the world’s your oyster. Take salt and pepper as the basis, and then turn to your spice rack and unleash your creativity. It’s a really simple way to experiment with new flavors. Either season all the vegetables together, or give each vegetable some TLC with different spices.
These seasonal vegetables are ideal for roasting:
Spring: mushrooms, asparagus, cauliflower, potatoes
Summer: eggplant, broccoli, fennel, zucchini
Fall: pumpkin, carrots, beetroot, peppers,
Winter: Brussels sprouts, parsnips, salsify, turnips

Meal prep 5 days’ worth of food

The basis of meal prepping: grains

If meal prepping was a house, grains would be its foundations. Even if you’re starting off by prepping for just a few days, it’s always a good idea to cook up a large portion of your chosen grain in advance. If you store it in an airtight container, it will keep in the fridge for around 3 to 5 days. Whether you decide to use your grains as a side dish or the basis for fried “rice” (which works well with spelt and similar grains), there are a variety of ways you can use them throughout your week. If you want to shake things up even more, you can cook two or more kinds of grain at the same time. When you think that cooking the grains will take anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes, you’ll see that you’re saving yourself a lot of time during the week. Spelt, buckwheat, couscous, rice, millet, quinoa and bulgur wheat are just a few of the (faux) grains that are perfect for meal prepping.

Meal prep 5 days’ worth of food

To wrap things up, you just need to decide how to bring together all the components you’ve prepared. You can either combine them with each other straight away or store them separately. As a general rule, you should always let the ingredients cool before storing them in air-tight containers in your fridge. Our 5-day graphic reveals how you can prepare a total of 15 meals from chicken fillets, chickpeas, roasted vegetables, granola, cooked brown rice and sauces.

From yogurt topped with granola through to sweet potatoes for breakfast, from chicken curry through to roasted vegetable salad, see this overview as inspiration that you can change or expand to suit your taste. Of course, you can always pep the dishes up a little with fresh ingredients, such as tomatoes, cucumber, fresh herbs, chopped nuts, a dollop of (plant) yogurt or cheese.

Recipe

Meal Preparation Sunday (combination of 8 recipes)

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Tips & Tricks

Techniques: Sous-Vide

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