Heather (presenter) gives a practical, first-person tutorial on simple meal planning and batch food prepping to reduce waste and simplify weeknight meals. Her routine: spend ~30 minutes choosing 2–3 recipes and making a grocery list; reorganize and prep produce when putting groceries away; then spend 90–120 minutes on a weekend day batch-cooking staples (hard-boiled eggs, roasted squash, lasagna, desserts) to make weeknight meals take 10–15 minutes. She also recommends involving children, sharing simple recipes and photos on a community page, and inviting viewer contributions.
Questions this video answers
About 30 minutes.
Two to three recipes.
About 90 minutes to 2 hours.
10–15 minutes (max).
Chapters
Hi, everybody. Heather here. Today we're going to talk about food planning and prepping. Now, just hearing those words might send shivers up your back, but I promise it's less daunting than it may sound. For years, I threw rotten vegetables and fruit and all kinds of things away because I never planned. And I would go to the grocery store and whatever looked good is what I would buy, and then I would forget about those foods and a month or two later, end up having to throw everything away. We do not want that to happen. So with this boost, the idea is to really eat through the foods, all the foods in your fridge every few weeks. So within two or three weeks, you want to kind of go through that whole fridge, and you'll love how you feel when you're doing it. So where do you start? Well, I will tell you in my house, I will spend 30 minutes. That's it, 30 minutes, going through cookbooks. This is my favorite, by the way. It's called Made Whole. I love the ifm food recipes. I think they're fantastic. I spend 30 minutes going through those. I will find two or three recipes I like, and then I will write them down on my whiteboard with the page number of the recipe. And once I've got that figured out, I'll go to the grocery store and get everything I need. When I come home, I will kind of reorganize the fridge with the new things, making sure everything is visible. And as I am putting vegetables in and things like that, I'll actually rinse those off, chop them, and get them prepped for the week so that I don't have to do that later. So that is day one, on my second day of the weekend, or whatever your weekend is on that second day, that's when I cook. And I'll hit the timer for 90 minutes, 2 hours, and I will make a week's worth of meals. And I will make. I mean, I'll make everything. I'll hard boil eggs, I'll roast a spaghetti squash. I will do a dessert or two. I will make a lasagna of some sort. And once I have those things made, get them stored in the fridge, and voila, the week is suddenly much easier. So on the weekends, and that is when I am really cooking, that's creativity. It's fun, it's enjoyable. I don't feel stressed during the week. I do feel stressed, and that's when I need meals to take 10 minutes, 15 minutes max. From starting pulling things out of the fridge to getting the plates on the table. For my family. And so if you do some planning, if you do some food prepping, this too can be your experience. And it's not hard. I will share all kinds of food, pictures and recipes, kind of simple recipes, recipes with very few ingredients so that if you're starting with fewer ingredients it's even that much easier. So I'll share those over on the community page. Also on the community page I have a list of seven or eight ideas in addition to the ones that I shared going deeper into planning and prepping. And if you have ideas of your own, we'll would love to hear them. Please add them to the list so that the whole group can benefit. The last point I wanted to share is that it's great if you have littles running around the house to get them involved. Maybe it was a little easier over the summer for me than now, but it's great if once a week, once a month, they find a recipe, help identify which ingredients you need, and then go to the grocery store with you and make them. It's one way to get kids much more involved in food and understanding where it comes comes from. That's it. If you have any questions, find me over on the community page. Take care.
