Plan & Prep | March 13th - 19th | Changing things Up a Bit This Week!

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I've chosen to shake this week's Prep & Plan post up a little by giving a more insight into how we make meal prepping work for us. Meal prepping does not always look the same week to week - some weeks require more, some less. 

I like to approach meal prepping from multiple angles that maximize efficiency in the kitchen: 

    "Planned Overs" - extra portions of a meal made on purpose [this is especially helpful for small             families who struggle to scale down recipes]

    Utilizing the Oven While it's On - bake or roast meat or vegetables to have for sides, salads, etc

    Ingredient Prepping - you're already dicing one onion, why not dice the onion for tomorrow's                 dinner too? This also helps to reduce dishes that need to be washed!

    Make Use of Down Time -  when waiting for something to bake, water to boil, etc. prep items like         fruit cups or dry snacks. 

My goal is to give you some inspiration for making meal prepping work for your lifestyle, I feel many people have the idea that meal prepping means making all the meals you're going to eat for the week at once with no variety, or spending hours in the kitchen on a Sunday. That doesn't have to be the case!

This week I also chose to remove the weekend days from my meal plan. We rarely plan those days out in advance, typically only if we are making food to share somewhere (not very often these days!). On the weekends we usually end up eating leftovers that didn't get consumed for lunches, making simple meals with what we have on hand, or going out to eat (about twice a month). I will still share this in my WWA posts though.

Meal Plan & Prep for the 3rd Week of March 2021

Meal Plan (Monday - Friday)

Breakfasts for the Week
  • Breakfast Bowls
  • Granola Bars w/ Peanut Butter
  • Bagels w/ Cream Cheese
Lunches for the Week
  • Sticky Ginger Chicken (I used the sauce, but subbed wings for cubed chicken breast & added peppers and onions), rice, and green beans
  • Leftover Chili (from the pulled pork chili I made for my Dad over the weekend)
  • Pesto Chicken w/ Green Beans
  • Creamy Beef & Shells w/ Vegetable Side
  • "Pickity Bits" (cheese, crackers, nuts, etc) and Misc. Leftovers from Dinners
Dinners for the Week 
  • Monday - Shake & Bake Pork Chops, Baked Potatoes, & Green beans
  • Tuesday - Creamy Beef & Shells w/ Green Beans
  • Wednesday - Shake & Bake Pork Chops, Green Beans, Knorr Pasta Sides, Beets
  • Thursday - Kielbasa, Baked Potato Skins, Beets
  • Friday - Chicken, Potato Cakes, Leftover Veg or Freezer Veg
Snacks for the Week
  • Blueberries, Strawberries, Grapes, Watermelon, Goldfish
  • Also Available: carrots, popcorn, cheese sticks, nuts, pretzels, etc

Meal Prep for Breakfasts

This week's breakfast bowls were inspired by the two slightly-soft russet potatoes lingering on the kitchen counter. Breakfast bowls are easy to customize and reheat well. If you have a little extra time in the morning, you can leave out the scrambled egg and cook a fresh fried or poached egg to top the potatoes and veggies (or leave the egg off if those aren't your style!). These breakfast bowls included potatoes, orange peppers, onions, eggs, and cheese.


 For breakfasts this week we also had a couple everything bagels from a local bakery, and I keep granola bars and peanut butter in my desk at work. 

Meal Prep for Lunches

Work lunches are a great way to take advantages of "planned-overs" - extra portions cooked for dinners that we use for our work lunches. This week I made "planned-overs" of extra cooked chicken and steamed green beans. The chicken and green beans were added to some leftover pesto pasta to make pesto chicken, and green beans were also added to the sticky ginger chicken dish I made for Ben's lunches. Ben tends to be a more adventurous eater than I am, so I often make him lunches that consist of flavors that would not appeal to me - he gets more variety, and I get to have fun with different recipes - a win-win!


I like to informally break out lunch meal prepping into two blocks of Monday-Wednesday, and Thursday-Friday. Lunches for Monday-Wednesday are based on planned-overs or an extra dish made on Sunday or Monday night, and lunches for Thursday and Friday come from planned-overs from dinners on Wednesday and Thursday night. This keeps meals from getting to repetitive and stale.

Ingredient Prep for Dinners

Dinners around here are a mix of prepped ingredients, planned-overs, and fully cooked-from-scratch meals. I enjoy having a "fresh" dinner, but I do not want to spend more than thirty minutes putting it together! To help make dinner time quicker, I like to pick recipes or meals that use similar ingredients, with different flavor profiles. This allows us to mix and match starches, proteins, and vegetables into unique combinations that feel like a new meal.


This week I trimmed three pounds of fresh green beans, chopped five bunches of green onions (most will get frozen), baked three extra russet potatoes, and baked a package of chicken tenders, half coated with pesto, half with just garlic, onion, and paprika (this is the base seasoning I use for chicken). I also sliced eleven thin pork chops from half of a pork loin, baking two for dinner Monday night, saving three in the fridge for Wednesday's dinner, and freezing the rest, plus the other half of the pork loin, for later use. This may seem like a lot, but everything was baked or diced while waiting for the baked potatoes to cook for dinner! 

Snack Prep

This week for our lunch/work snacks we have fruits cups - strawberries and blueberries for Ben, grapes and watermelon for myself. Ben will also grab a yogurt and I will bring popcorn or a cheese stick. We don't always eat our work snacks, but they are nice to have on hand in case lunch was not as filing as expected. 


I hope you like the new format! What's on your menu for the week?

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