Meal prepping makes eating healthy much easier. You can throw together a few meal packs on a Sunday, put them in the fridge or freezer, and then reheat them when you need them. Quick, simple, nutritional.
But pre-prepared meals can suffer from a lack of something very important: any taste or flavor. Not only does reheating make it harder to preserve these elements, but many people fall into the habit of making their meal prep just quick and simple.
Taste matters. No longer do we as a species have to find sustenance where we can. We have the freedom to make meals that we like, to use ingredients we know we prefer, and we don’t just have to like it or leave it.
And if that’s the kind of attitude you’ve fallen into with meal prepping, it’s no wonder you’re finding it such a struggle right now. When food isn’t tasty, we don’t want to eat it. It’s really as simple as that.
So let’s find a fix for this problem. If you’ve been leaving out the taste from your meal prep, here’s how to mix it back in.
Prep Sauces as Well
Preparing a meal ahead of time doesn’t mean that’s the only thing you can actually eat. You can do the prep, put it in the fridge, come back for it when you need it, and then add some flavor!
You just need to prepare sauces ahead of time too, and then add them to the mix separately when the time comes to eat. This way you won’t have the sauce soak down into the food, making it mush and totally running the texture.
It also saves any sauce from needing to be frozen, as they’re much easier to prepare and can be kept in the fridge for much longer too.
A lot of sauces are either tomato or cream based, but you can make up any sauce you like here. Even if it means buying it ready-made from the store, and then drizzling it into the food whenever you want, you’re simply bridging the gap between meal prepping and making tasty AND nutritious meal prep.
Get Yourself an Easy to Use Spice Rack
Easy to use means spices you know you like, you know add hits of flavor, and you know can be easily mixed into most meals. Just make sure you’re not only sticking to salt and pepper here!
To do this, you’re going to need a little bit of experience with the spices we use in cooking, but you can look up recommendations on food blogs and meal prep forums.
Alternatively, if you’re willing to experiment, you could throw in any spice that smells good, or has the right health properties you’re looking for. Add things in pinch by punch until you get the flavor profile where you want it.
And this is incredibly important. We’ve all added a bit too much turmeric to something and had it turn completely yellow, with the spice overpowering any other flavor in the recipe.
Buy High Quality Frozen Ingredients
A lot of people stop using fresh ingredients in their meal prep, as they go bad very quickly and it’s hard to use up a full bag of fresh vegetables on a week’s worth of containers.
After all, it’s hard to convince yourself to eat things like broccoli or green beans for breakfast, so you’re probably not going to use up the full portion.
This can make buying fresh a waste of money, even if it’s more convenient to have fresh ingredients you can just chuck in for a bit more fibre or iron wherever you need it.
But you can rely on frozen ingredients here too, especially if you can get your hands on pre-prepared kinds that just need reheating alongside the rest of the food.
When it comes to frozen meats you’d like to use, always buy from a high quality brand. For example, if you’re going to order frozen lobster meat online, make sure the business is well known for their care with seafood.
You need to know you’re getting ethically sourced, well prepared meat for your meal prep. Not only is it tastier, even without any extra sauce or spices, but it means you’re getting value for money as well.
And if there’s one extra benefit of meal prepping, it’s that it isn’t just supposed to save you time. It’s also supposed to save you money on your groceries, and help you to cut down on fast food options as well.
Try Recipes Before You ‘Prep’ Them
Never go to all the trouble of meal prepping a dish you don’t know you like. Try it as a normal meal beforehand and see if you enjoy it. If you do, you can add it to the meal prep list. If you don’t, no harm done, and no money wasted.
If you like, you can sign up to a meal delivery service to get new recipes delivered on a regular basis. Once you’ve tried them, you can use them again and again – with a handy recipe card to work from too.
Find Your Love for Meal Prepping Again
Have you lost your love for meal prepping? Maybe it’s because you got bored of it, or you find it wasn’t helping you as much as you feel it should have been? Either way, most of the problems with meal prepping come back to one thing: how tasty your meals actually are.
Because if you’ve been preparing the same food over and over again, you’re not going to find them very tasty anymore. And if you’ve been making up prep containers and not getting the hits you’ve been expecting, it’s the flavor that’s probably been missing.
But you can find your love – and usefulness – of meal prepping once again. You just need to mix in more and better tastes, and try out a few new things that’ll keep your weekly rotations more novel and exciting.
