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Eating homemade meals all week long doesn’t have to be a chore. Meal prep these simple recipes ahead of time for those busy days! You'll find breakfast ideas, lunches, and snacks in this list.
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Benefits of Meal Prepping
- Nutrition: If you're finding yourself hitting up the fast food lines too frequently, you might find you're lacking some variety and vegetables in your diet. Prepping your meals ahead of time ensures that you're getting all of your nutrition needs in. (Nutrition varies from person to person and this is not medical advice - if you have specific needs, consulting with your doctor or a dietician is always your safest best.)
- Save money: Convenience foods are typically more expensive in the long run than buying ingredients at the grocery store. You can usually stretch your dollar and make several meals for the price of what one takeout meal costs.
- Time management: While you will spend more time in the kitchen initially, you will end up saving time on a daily basis. Instead of having to spend half of your lunch break driving to grab lunch, you can just eat or reheat what you've premade. You also won't have to wake up super early to prepare a healthy breakfast if all you need to do is grab and go.
- Reduce food waste: Meal prepping, especially using the same ingredients throughout the week for different meals (like a big batch of rice), will reduce your food waste. Plus, you'll be less likely to forget what you purchased at the grocery store.
Meal Prep Containers
Picking the right containers for meal prepping can take some trial and error. Here are my personal favorites:
- Pint jars are the perfect size for overnight oats.
- These 4-ounce containers are great for sauce and salad dressing.
- Glass Snapware is my favorite for storing full meals. The lids snap closed on all 4 sides, making the lid super secure, and you can reheat your food right in the container. If you don't like to use glass, they also have plastic Snapware.
- For salads, I LOVE my Bentgo stackable container. It keeps the dressing and ingredients separate from each other so your salad doesn't get soggy.
Ingredient Prepping
One of my favorite ways to meal prep is to just prep ingredients. Instead of making a whole meal, you prepare some ingredients that you can make several different meals with. This is great for when you don't want to eat the same thing all week or don't have a ton of time to assemble entire meals.
Some of the ingredients I like to prepare:
- Roasted Sweet Potatoes
- Baked Tofu
- Roasted veggies or chopped-up fresh veggies
- Rice
- Tofu taco meat
- Roasted chickpeas
Just with that list of 6 ingredients, plus sauce or dressing, you could quickly whip up:
- Tofu tacos
- Chickpea tacos
- Tofu and rice bowls with veggies
- Roasted chickpea and sweet potato bowls
- Taco salad with tofu meat, chickpeas, rice, and veggies
- Tofu wraps (like chicken caesar wraps) with lettuce and caesar dressing.
Below, I've compiled a list of my favorite vegan meal prep recipes to make meal time easy, nutritious, and super tasty all week.
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