5+ Meal Prep Sites to Learn Cooking and Freeze a Week’s Food in Advance
Reading Time: 6 minutesLearn the basics of meal prepping to cook a whole week’s worth of food in advance to save time, money, and energy.
Meal prepping is a popular method of preparing a week’s worth of meals on a Saturday or Sunday. Then, you don’t waste time thinking about what to eat or start cooking from scratch on weeknights. It saves time, effort, and money and is a hit among working professionals, college students, and families with kids.
These websites offer some of the best ways for beginners to understand how meal prepping works and how to get started. Some offer different recipes, while others specialize in food storage methods like freezing. Meal prepping is the logical next step after you’ve mastered your favorite recipes.
1. Budget Bytes (Web): Meal Prepping 101 for Beginners and a 4-Week Meal Prep Plan
If you’re completely new to meal prepping, start with this Meal Prep 101 guide for beginners. Budget Bytes is known for teaching how to cook simple, healthy, and delicious recipes without overspending and is a favorite food blog among college students.
The guide explains the basics of meal prepping and answers frequently asked questions newcomers have. You’ll learn which foods work well for prepping and which you should avoid, how long they will stay in different storage methods, and what you need to get started. Budget Bytes also gives two helpful tips on starting your journey by going small and a few ‘meal prep formulas’ so you can prepare your meal plans to your taste without relying on readymade online resources.
Once you’ve learned the basics, head to Budget Byte’s Meal Prep recipes section. You can browse by categories like breakfast, beef, chicken, pork, vegetarian, or no-reheat). Each recipe notes its overall cost and cost per serving. If you’re struggling to figure out how to put them all together, check out their 4-week meal prep meal plan. If you don’t want to pay the $12 for the extra grocery lists, monthly plan, and PDF, you can still see which recipes are included in what order and put it all together on your own.
2. The Kitchn Power Hour (Web): Meal Prepping Guides for Any Diet or Need
The Kitchn is one of the best sites for beginner cooks to learn the basics. The team of writers and editors specializes in breaking down complex kitchen skills and concepts into simple and easy-to-follow instructions for anyone. The Kitchn Power Hour is a series teaching how to prep meals for an entire week in just one hour.
Each power hour follows the same pattern. There’s an objective like a $50 budget, one-pan meals, 1500-calorie days, easy Mediterranean diets, etc. Then you’ll get how many people the plan will feed, the prep time (sometimes two hours), whether it covers only weekdays or weekends, and how much cooking will be required each weeknight.
Most plans are made smartly to overlap ingredients so that you don’t end up with leftovers in your fridge. The author then explains their method for getting the prep done, which is aimed at a regular home cook with standard equipment you’ll find in any kitchen. Different authors write different articles for meal prepping, by which you’ll gain various useful ideas and tips.
Apart from Power Hour, The Kitchn also includes non-hourly meal prepping plans and recipes you can read in the same sub-section. Thus, instead of going with the same meal plan each week that quickly gets boring, you can mix and match these for some variety in your meal prepping.
3. Workweek Lunch (Web): Variety of Meal Prep Recipes and Experienced Guides
Workweek Lunch is an online meal prepping subscription service to get custom plans that fit your nutrition and time requirements. The focus is on both meals that you can prepare in advance to carry, as well as cooking in advance for weeknights. But even without subscribing to the service, the site’s blog has some of the best guides and resources to learn how to meal prep for the whole week.
Start with the piece on meal planning for beginners, which focuses on the essential step of getting into the habit of planning before you start prepping. This includes a free meal planning template that makes you list not only the dish but also the items, giving you a clear action plan for your prep.
Then you can browse the site for different guides on meal prepping. For example, you can learn prepping based on your household size, whether meal prepping for two, for kids while you’re busy parents, or for the whole family. Or you can prep by budget, type of cooking method (freezing or no-reheat lunches), and other such ideas.
Workweek Lunch has one of the largest collections of meal prepping recipes we have seen, and it’s helpfully broken down into sub-categories on the main page. For example, you can browse by protein (chicken, seafood, beef, tofu, vegetarian) or by cooking method (one pot, freezer friendly, no-reheat, 30-minute).
So should you pay for their subscription? Several online users have noted how Workweek Lunch’s subscription plan helped them get started on the meal prepping journey. After about nine months to a year, many were able to switch off the subscription and prep their meals since it had become a habit. But in those initial months, Workweek Lunch was like a good personal trainer who coached you through the difficult stages of learning a new skill.
4. The Family Freezer and Freezer Fit (Web): Freeze-Friendly Recipes and Free Cooking Classes
Many weekly meal prep plans center around cooking on the weekend and freezing meals in batches, whether in containers or vacuum-sealed bags. The Family Freezer and Freezer Fit are experts in this skill, offering several recipes and plans and free online cooking classes.
The Family Freezer, headed by Kelly McNelis, has a slew of creative freezer-friendly meal prepping plans that she demonstrated in easy-to-understand videos. McNelis’s preferred cooking method is the Crockpot or Instant Pot, so you’ll need to get one of those if you want to follow along. She also often teams up with Costco for meal plans using bulk ingredients so that you can eat healthy while on a budget. However, be warned that the blog’s recipes and meal prep plans are really difficult to browse. You’ll need to search with the right keywords to find what you want.
Freezer Fit offers only one free online cooking class to cook along with host Susana Ojeda West, where you’ll learn 12 different recipes for a diverse meal prepping plan. But the site truly shines with its freezer-friendly recipes index, which you can filter by diet, cuisine, chef (West or Michele Swaczyna), cookbook, cooking method, protein, ingredient, or dish.
We recommend watching the cooking classes if you’re new to freeze-packing your meals for the week. There is plenty of helpful advice on techniques and tips.
5. r/MealPrep and r/MealPrepSunday (Web): Best Meal Prepping Discussion Forums
Given the internet’s intense interest in meal prepping, it’s no surprise that Reddit has multiple communities dedicated to discussing the method. r/MealPrepSunday is the biggest of these, with about 3 million members, but r/MealPrep has been increasingly active recently.
Both subreddits encourage users to post their latest meal prepping recipes, week-long plans, or participate in discussions about topics related to the method. Beginners can safely tag their queries with a ‘Question’ flair to get long-time meal-preppers weighing in with their experience and expertise. Of course, in either subreddit, good Reddiquette behavior is a must.
Surprisingly, neither subreddit has the best Reddit guide to learning meal prepping for beginners. Instead, you can find that on r/EatCheapAndHealthy by user u/RinTheLost. This is the definitive meal prep guide, explaining what it is, how to get started, and assorted tricks before following it up in the comments with different posts for recipes, food freezing guides, dorm or no-kitchen-access, no fridge or reheating, containers, and more. If you have a question about meal prepping, chances are it’s answered in this guide.
Invest in Good Containers, Bags, and Lunch Boxes
The most common tip among all the websites and forums dedicated to meal prepping is to invest in good containers, reusable vacuum-seal bags, and lunch boxes. It might sound like blogs shilling for affiliate link revenue, but there’s more truth behind this.
Several beginner meal preppers give up on the method when they’ve used inferior storage products that don’t last the intended time. And once the food is ruined, they blame the meal prepping method rather than the storage. Don’t fall into this trap, and make sure you get some good quality bags and boxes to store the food you have worked hard for. It’s worth it.
Reference: https://www.makeuseof.com/meal-prep-sites-learn-cooking-freeze-food/
Ref: makeuseof
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