Many of us would love to have home-cooked meals every day but, but that is sometimes hard to do when you have a busy schedule. And that is where this make-ahead meal hack comes in.
With this hack, you will have hot flavorful meals minus the stress of preparing all of them from scratch every single day. This means more time for yourself and your family, which is perfect.
For you to have a successful experience, you need to have a couple of things first. You will need some airtight food containers because you need to preserve your meals the right way, some labels to know when you stored them, and some meal ideas.
To get you started here are a few make-ahead meal ideas that will make this whole process easier:
- Meatballs
Meatballs might just be on your menu every weekend. They are fun to prepare because you can come up with unique flavours every time and they are simply absolutely delicious.
You can decide to prepare them beforehand and then freeze them before baking or frying. This helps to maintain a nice texture and flavour. Then when you're ready, you can simply remove them, proceed with the prepping process, cook and enjoy.
- Vegetable soup
Vegetable soups are healthy and delicious but they can take quite a bit of time to prepare. If you want to save on some time, you could start the process by preparing your stock which will take about an hour.
While your stock is boiling, you can chop all the ingredients you need so that they will be ready for cooking when you have time. Store both of these well so that you will have an easier time preparing your soup.
- Stir fry
Stir fry is one of the easiest meals to prepare. It's also so convenient because you could literally whip up a meal with ingredients you already have in the fridge.
This is something you can prepare even when you're back from work because it doesn't take long. An idea is to fry or steam your veggies and store them. Then on a later date, simmer in a sauce to complete the meal.
In case you won't have time to add some sauce, you can still have them as they are.
- Pasta
A pasta dish is another easy meal that you can easily make ahead of the week. You could have it with a vegetable or meat stew, or both even.
One idea that you might like when you're on a budget and want to do something quickly is to prepare it like a stir-fry with tomatoes, tomato paste, garlic, onions, and a few spices.
You will basically fry your ingredients along with the spices, then store them. When you're ready to prepare your meal, you could just warm up your sauce, prepare some fresh pasta and mix it all together.
- Grilled pork salad
With this meal, you could prep your pork and marinate even up to a day. You can also chop your salads and prepare the dressing so that everything will be ready.
All that will be remaining is grilling the meat and pairing it with the salad. Yum!
