When it comes to mealtimes and having a big family, there are often many challenges to overcome. These can range from having enough time to cook a large meal to feed everyone, figuring out the weekly shopping budget, and ensuring the food you cook will be to everyone’s liking. Meal prepping could be something you consider doing to help with this.
Why meal prep?
There are several benefits to meal prepping such as batch cooking to save time, where you plan out your whole week’s meals you will reduce food waste and save money, portion size control is easier, and you will probably even try foods you never thought of before. So, if you have a big family then here are a few meal prep tips that you could implement into your life, to try and make it a little easier.
Get good quality and enough Tupperware
A very important first step is to make sure that you have good quality and enough Tupperware to put your food into. It is easy to be tempted and corner cut by just getting the cheap reusable plastic tubs, but these will break, and become deformed and food generally won’t keep for as long in them as they don’t have airtight sealable lids. If you buy cheap containers, you will generally end up just throwing them away or giving up on meal prepping, so instead, invest a little more into some proper containers of various sizes and uses.
Batch cook to save yourself time
Something that attracts many people to the idea of meal prepping is how much time it can save you in the kitchen throughout the week, and a great way to use this to your advantage if you have a big family is to batch cook a meal to last a few days. For example, you could cook cowboy stew in a crock pot for a simple and hearty meal that could spread over a few days. The great thing about batch cooking is that if you cook “too much” you can always freeze what you won’t use in the near future, allowing for a quick and easy meal later on down the line. There are loads of great recipes to choose from.
Plan your meals and set a budget in advance
If you can set aside a little time to write out your weekly meal prep ideas and create a list of all the groceries you need, you will not only save yourself time when in the store looking for the items, but you will save yourself some money by not overbuying items that you don’t actually need. Another benefit to doing this is you can also work around any weekly or monthly food budgets you have and know roughly what you will be spending before you even get to the store.
So, regardless of whether you want to try meal prepping to minimize your food waste, reduce the amount of time you are having to spend in the kitchen, or help you stick to your food budget better, there are many benefits to doing it.
