Meal Prep for the Week (1)

If you’ve always cooked every day, you can make your life easier by starting to meal prep for the week. 

For a few months now, I’ve begun to meal prep or batch cook for the upcoming week and it’s been great. It’s lovely to see that for a few days you don’t have to worry about lunch or dinner.

It’s quite relieving.

For the upcoming week, I’ve prepared a few basic things, not much, because we still have plenty of food in the fridge, that I don’t want to go to waste.

Because that is the whole point of meal prepping no? To eat well for the week and also, to avoid food waste. And we definitely should strive to do that, if you’re not doing it already.

What I’ve prepared:

• Cooked Bacon (in the oven) – this one revolutionized my world. I will never cook bacon on the stove again!!
• Hard-boiled eggs
• Cooked quinoa
• Prepped mini peppers
• Egg cups

Ingredients for the Egg Cups:

• 5 eggs
• 1 teaspoon of fresh parsley (finely chopped)
• 2 teaspoons of chives (chopped)
• 1 big handful of Emmental cheese (grated)
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1/2 a bell pepper or 2 mini peppers (chopped)
• 2 tablespoons of green onion (chopped)

Add all the ingredients into a bowl, whisk with a fork and pour the mixture into a muffin tin and the preheated oven at 190*C, for 25-30 minutes, or until golden and puffed up.

They deflate after they cool down a bit.

Since the oven is preheated, let’s cook some bacon.

Arrange the bacon slices in a single layer on a wide baking sheet (it’s ok if they’re close because they’ll shrink while cooking).

And bake them until they’re your desired doneness. For some, the bacon should be crispy, for others no.

Nonetheless, they come out delicious. And they cook 100% evenly throughout.

Meanwhile, we’re making the quinoa on the stove.

Rinse dry quinoa in a sieve until it’s clean and you can’t see any more bubbles (a natural compound called saponins). Pour it into a pot, add water (or stock) just to cover the quinoa, salt and bring it to a boil.

When it starts boiling, turn the heat to low, cover it with a lid, and cook it for 15 minutes approx, until it’s not crunchy anymore. You will see it when it’s done because it looks different than when it was dry.

Now for the hard-boiled eggs. Add as many eggs as you want to a pot, cover them with water and bring it to a boil.

I cook them for 10 minutes but you can boil them as little or as much as you want.

While the eggs are cooking, we can clean the mini peppers, to stuff them with cream cheese (or hummus) in the upcoming week.

Wash, cut, and deseed the peppers. And they’re ready to be filled with cheese or hummus or anything you like.

There you go! Some simple ideas to get you through the week, especially for breakfast.

I hope you start meal prepping, because it’s a great tool for busy families.