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What is “Food Prep”?

When we say “food prep” here, we’re looking at advance preparation, not the everyday sort of food prep.  (That should already be on your daily routine!)  This can come in a number of forms, and it can be very extensive or fairly minimal.  Let’s consider some of the options.

Freezer Cooking

Perhaps the most obvious form of advance food preparation is freezer cooking.  Even under this umbrella, though, there’s a huge amount of variation.  You could do all-out “OAMC” (once a month cooking), preparing 30 meals for the freezer in a day or two.

Some people love doing it this way; most of us don’t.  You could cook whole meals in “mini-sessions,” using whatever meat was on sale in a given week or preparing breakfasts or desserts for the freezer.  You could double up what you’re already preparing and put the “extras” in the freezer.

There’s also the option of prepping and freezing things that are recipe components, rather than whole meals.  I like to have browned ground beef and shredded cooked chicken in the freezer to make daily meal preparation faster.  (The really nice thing about these is that they thaw a lot faster than whole slabs of meat if you forgot to get anything out ahead of time — which I usually do.)

Mixes

Mixes and seasoning blends are another make-ahead option that often make less mess than freezer cooking, and rarely require any cooking.  You can make up mixes for just a few things (like Ranch dressing mix), or you can go all-out and convert a number of your recipes to mixes and throw them together so you have them for convenience.

Prep for the Week

It may be that you don’t have this type of advance food preparation in mind at all, but that there are some foods you need to eat throughout the week that are easier “batched together” for efficiency’s sake (or even just for the sake of only making the mess once!)

If you bake your own bread, you might want to bake the week’s bread all at once.  Or maybe you want to make a pot of beans and/or rice, or roast garlic to use throughout the week.  These don’t have to be “big” things — they could just be preparations that you can do all at once at a set time, rather than having to do them on multiple evenings when you’re scrambling to get dinner on the table.

So What Exactly Am I Organizing?

So where does the organization part come in?  Well, it will vary somewhat, depending on how “big” you’ve decided to go with your preparations, but the heart of the matter is setting aside a space for storing the “information” or “paperwork” that accompanies your advance preparation.

If the only prep you’re doing is chopping veggies or baking bread for the week, it may be sufficient to jot a list on your menu.  (You have a place for your menu, right?)  But if you plan to do anything substantial, you’ll probably want to do some planning, and it’s good to have a place set aside for these plans.

I recommend that you either have a section of your recipe binder or household binder designated for these things, or that you have a separate kitchen binder specifically for this purpose.  (Mine is separate, just for manageability because my recipe binder is so huge.  The kitchen binder is just a 1″ binder.)

STEP 1: Decide whether you need a separate place for food prep plans, or if an existing notation method (like your calendar or menu) is sufficient, and designate a place for this.

If you have big plans…

If you plan to “go big” with this, you will also need to sort out what type of planning needs to be done.  I would suggest that the most basic thing you’ll probably want to start with is a list of those foods which can be prepared ahead of time.  (This might be an actual separate list, or it might just be a particular way of marking the recipes already in your book or software.)  Just as the master main dish list eases the process of meal  planning, having a list available can make it easier for you to decide what to prepare.

If you’re scaling recipes and/or planning a large cooking session, you may have other planning forms to use, as well.  Freezer cooking session plans often include checklists of preparations (so you can compile the preparations for all recipes into a single list), containers needed, etc.  Worksheets for scaling your recipes up can also be helpful.  (If you adapt a lot of your own recipes for the freezer, this might also be a good place for a list of foods that freeze well/foods that don’t freeze well.)

But it doesn’t necessarily need to be that complicated.  I might decide that I want to make four mixes this week off my list.  I will need to be sure I have the ingredients available and the recipes on hand, obviously, but then I don’t need any other fancy paper plans. 🙂

Just have a place to store the “blanks” for any forms you use for this purpose, as well as a place for storing the assembled plans, if you think you might use them again.

Other Miscellaneous Kitchen Papers

This is not exactly food prep-related, but there’s one last category of kitchen paperwork that didn’t really fit in anywhere else, so let’s tackle it here: the miscellaneous stuff.  I don’t know about you, but I have a certain category of paperwork that accumulates in the kitchen, because it’s specific to the kitchen, and if I don’t intentionally address it, it piles up and makes a mess.

This is things like ingredient panels and/or instructions off the packages of bulk foods, instruction manuals for kitchen tools, take-out menus (for those rare occasions when we order food to be delivered — and this is uncommon enough that we can never remember what’s available!), etc.  These need a place or they’ll just pile up and become clutter!

STEP 2: Set aside a place for miscellaneous kitchen papers.

Depending on what they are, they are probably best kept in your recipe binder or kitchen binder (or whatever is your equivalent), but think about what you have and how it tends to get used, and address it appropriately.  It might be the case that they don’t even all end up in the same place.  Perhaps cooking instructions go in the recipe binder, appliance instructions go in the kitchen binder, and take-out menus get their own pronged folder.  Whatever works for you!

If you’re just stumbling across this, please click here for the other posts in the series.

Updated Sep. 22, 2019. Originally published Feb. 26, 2013.