By: Kristie Collado
Kristie has been the digital programming manager at Food Network for over six years. She’s a trained pastry chef who has been creating food content for more than fifteen years.

Healthy Meal Prep Ideas

Even though there are so many reasons to meal prep (save time, save money, eat better — the list goes on and on) we know that the thought of planning and cooking so much food all at once can be overwhelming. The good news? It’s so worth it. And, there are plenty of ways to make it easier! Learn a handful of pro meal prep tips, master a couple of shortcuts that make prep easier and gather up the right recipes and, before you know it, you’ll be settled into a routine that allows you to turn one simple ingredient into a myriad of delicious dishes. (Don’t believe us? Just check out our ideas for prepping chicken!) Whether you take a structured approach and plan out concrete meals or lean towards an ingredient-prep strategy that allows you some flexibility throughout the week, we’re confident you’ll be glad you took the time to plan ahead. All of the recipes in this roundup will come in handy but start with this versatile sesame chicken. You can just as easily toss it into a salad for lunch as you can a stir-fry for dinner.

Meal Prep Steamed Vegetables

When it comes to prepping for the week ahead, we love cooking off lots of veggies so we can reach for them instead of something less healthy in the scramble of making a weeknight meal. Blanching a vegetable in boiling water and then plunging it in an ice bath is great when you’re making just one kind. But for a large-scale production, our go-to method is steaming. You can use the same water for multiple batches, steaming one vegetable after the next. The result: a rainbow of perfectly cooked vegetables at the ready for grain bowls, pastas, salads, frittatas and more.

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