Food Prep

thoughts on prepping without overwhelm

I have feelings about food prep. It can serve you so well and be an essential in crazy busy seasons, but if you don’t do it right it can be more trouble than its worth.

Everybody stay calm, I love a good food prep- having homemade snacks ready to go, a couple of dinners I don’t have to think about? Literally priceless. But elaborate social media videos, with mountains of neatly matching containers full of creative and perfectly portioned meals can honestly start to feel….daunting. In general, cooking can feel overwhelming when we are so oversaturated with Pinterest board meal ideas and it feels like theres an unspoken pressure to be making new, interesting food all the time.

Honestly I even get overwhelmed by it all- and I’m the health-food-food-prep girlie (so I’m told) and in crazy hectic seasons it often falls through the cracks.

My grounding point for cooking from scratch without overwhelm is, for the most part, simplicity. I think we forget that generations past, when everyone cooked three meals a day, were most often eating simple, repeated food that was mostly just ingredients. Meat and two veg, bread and cheese, eggs and fruit. Removing the mental load of reinventing the wheel every day works wonders for demystifying cooking from scratch (as does a well stocked pantry with go to ingredients you can always rely on, see my pantry staples post for that side quest).

Food prep can and absolutely should be a part of that, but doesn’t have to mean coming up with a full range of fantastic meals at the start of every week. Spending hours every week prepping breakfast lunch and dinner can absolutely pay off, but you have to look at your lifestyle and your season and figure out what works for you. Once you figure that out, you can repeat the basics every week and only add new things when you have the time and energy.

Meal vs Food Prep