The difference between our meals during weeks when we take the time to plan and prep and the weeks when we don’t are night and day. I’ve shared a few of our weekly meal plans in some of my Monday morning weekend recap blog posts, but I’ve had more than a few of you request a more elaborate post about our meal planning routine. Today’s post will take you through our weekly meal plan for this week and includes details as to what I prepped ahead over the weekend to make throwing dinner together a breeze at the end of a long day.
Please note: All recipes I followed for this week’s meal plan are linked below.
One Week Meal Plan: Prepping 5 Healthy Dinners
- Monday: Vegetable Noodle Soup with Fresh Berries
Prep ahead: Chop celery, carrot, garlic and onion.
Day of: Cook soup on stove top. (I added some frozen shelled edamame to our soup on Monday night for a punch of protein and made a double batch so we’d have leftovers.) Serve with fresh raspberries and blueberries on the side.
- Tuesday: Italian Meatloaf with Roasted Brussels Sprouts and Whole Wheat Garlic Bread
Prep ahead: Prepare meatloaf and cover but wait to bake it. Prep sauce. Chop the ends off Brussels sprouts and slice in half.
Day of: Bake meatloaf. Toss Brussels sprouts in olive oil and garlic salt and roast while meatloaf is baking. Heat sauce and bring to a simmer. Spread a smear of butter on top of a couple of slices of whole wheat bread and sprinkle lightly with garlic salt before toasting.
- Wednesday: Chicken Sausage Hoagies with Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Prep ahead: Slice 1 large onion and 1 large sweet bell pepper. Slice 4 chicken sausage links and combine everything in a baking dish. Drizzle with olive oil, salt and pepper. Cover and store in the fridge. Roughly chop 4 sweet potatoes. (You will save two of the chopped sweet potatoes to serve for dinner on Friday night.)
Day of: Place chicken sausage, peppers and onions in the oven and bake at 350 for 45 minutes, or until onion becomes soft. Toss chopped sweet potatoes in olive oil and Montreal Steak Seasoning (or salt and pepper) and roast along with the chicken sausages. Scoop cooked chicken sausage, peppers and onions into whole wheat sub rolls and serve with sweet potatoes. Store leftover sweet potatoes in the fridge.
- Thursday: Black Bean Quesadillas with Leftover Veggie Soup
Prep ahead: Chop vegetables for quesadilla. (I used onions, peppers and kale.)
Day of: Cook quesadillas on stove top. Reheat leftover vegetable noodle soup from Monday night.
- Friday: Breakfast for Dinner: Chicken Sausage and Spinach Frittata with Fruit Salad and Roasted Sweet Potatoes
Prep ahead: Chop pepper, onion and chicken sausage. (Note: You can also make the entire frittata ahead of time and simply reheat it for dinner if you prefer! I intentionally planned a frittata for dinner on Friday night in case we end up going out to dinner instead since it would also work well for breakfast on Saturday morning.)
Day of: Make frittata and top with a sliced avocado. Reheat leftover roasted sweet potatoes from Wednesday night’s dinner. Chop favorite fruit to make fruit salad.
And that’s this week’s meal plan! Woop!
When it comes to leftovers, I will often eat them for lunch the next day or they’ll sometimes make an appearance for dinner later in the week (like the veggie noodle soup on Monday reappearing on Thursday). For me, the key to food prep is chopping up everything that needs slicing and dicing ahead of time. For some reason, chopping vegetables is always quite time consuming for me and if I have to take the time to chop Brussels sprouts on a weeknight, I’m much more likely to forgo a serving of veggies at dinnertime. Simply setting aside some time on Sunday to prep some of our meals for the week makes it much easier to eat healthy during the week.
And added benefit of meal prep? Our kitchen is (usually) cleaner! Since most of the food prep is done over the weekend, there are significantly less dishes to do while preparing dinner during the week. Heck yes!
Finding Recipes + Easy Access Screenshot
As for how I go about finding recipes, I’ll often just go by whatever I’m craving, past favorites, new cookbook or magazine finds and tasty-looking recipes I find on the internet or food blogs. I will often screenshot whatever recipes I find online so I have them on the phone, making them both easy to find again and consult during my weekend trip to the grocery store. Then, when it’s time to make the recipe, it’s easy for me to find it in a flash because it’s saved as a screenshot on my phone. Screenshots for the win!
Question of the Day
I’d love to turn it over to you guys and hear about any tips and tricks you may have up your sleeves when it comes to meal planning and food prep. Please feel free to share your tips in the comments section of this post!
Have a great Wednesday!
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First of all, thank you for posting realistic, simple recipes! That meatloaf looks awesome.
I live between mine and my boyfriend’s apartments currently, so food shopping is hard because things go bad if I don’t plan right. So I try to just plan 1-2 meals/week that I can use as leftovers for lunch.
Also, breakfast & snack prep keeps me from eating complete garbage at work when cravings hit. I’ll usually keep a box of plain oatmeal packets and peanut butter in my desk drawer then just throw fruit or whatever toppings in my bag in the morning and go. For snacks I like roasting a big batch of cashews or pecans with different spices for a healthy and filling afternoon snack (and have used some of your recipes for that!). Finally I rely heavily on frozen veggies and buy whatever meat is on sale to keep in the freezer so I can easily make soup, stir fry, or crockpot recipes while I’m running during the week.
This is such an awesome post and had some really great ideas! I’m not a huge meal planner, but lately I’ve realized how much it does help now that we have two kiddos instead of just one….life is crazy already. I like having frozen things on hand –veggies, fruits, bread, etc. and I use the crock pot a ton!
This question may have been asked already, I just didnt have time to read the comments. What are your thoughts on doing a post like this every week or every other week? I like getting new ideas for dinner. I LOVED this post!!
Chase is a sweetie pie; congrats!!! Sorry I’m late congratulating! I read your blog daily, just rarely comment.
Thanks,
Rhonda
Love the idea!!! I’ll definitely share more meal planning posts in the future since it really has been so, so helpful for us. I’m glad you liked it!
Your meals are so much more involved than my usual weeknight dinners! I throw them together each night without much prepping these days. But at least I always go get all the things I need over the weekend, so when the evening comes – it’s just time to cook. Thanks for sharing your plan, Julie! 🙂
I was looking for some new recipe inspiration, so I bought Juli’s book on Amazon after you recommended it a few weeks ago. OMG – obsessed. I made the Buffalo Chicken Casserole for dinner this week. I can’t get enough!
isn’t it great!!? i love it and need to buy her first cookbook, too!
I wish I could meal plan like you – we pretty much eat on the fly. I blame living right by a Trader Joe’s, as they make it too easy! I really like how you chop the veggies ahead of time – I think I might try to do that more often!
My husband and I recently bought an app called Paprika– you can use it on your phone or on a computer. It is a true game changer! It’s super easy to store recipes (if you enter in website it will save the recipe for you) and generate grocery lists. Plus, since it’s easy to sync up, we both can add groceries to the list on our own phones. I think it’s a few bucks but it’s 100% worth it!
I have enjoyed cooking a batch of oatmeal in the crockpot lately and dishing it up in single serve dishes for the week. I will also make a batch of mini muffins on the weekend and freeze them for grab and go breakfasts.
Tooootally with you. Why does slicing veggies always feel like it takes 15 years/night?!
For meal planning, I’ve been along-time daytime planner, strangely much more so than planning our evening meals. Everything from freezing scrambled eggs for quick breakfasts to creating healthy, veggie combos for lunch has kept me on-track and ready to go!
Thanks for sharing your recipes. I’ll have to try some of them out, stat!
I finally started planning at least one leftover night a week. I was throwing away too much food before! I also always cook up extra roasted veggies when I make them for dinner to reuse the rest of the week. For meal planning I try to make sure if I buy something i plan meals to use it all or when I plan meals I go off what I already have and need to use up.
I would also love to see a post like this every week! I love getting new ideas like this!
Every week, I send myself an email listing the days of the week and links to recipes/dinner plans for each day. Under the weekly list, I include our grocery list. I send the email to myself in reply to the previous week, so that all my recipes from the entire year are in one email chain. When I go to the grocery store, I purchase based on my list, but if the store doesn’t have something or it’s not in our price point, I can refer to the recipe to consider swaps or refer to a previous email to purchase ingredients based on a prior recipe.
When I’m cooking, I just have to pull up the email and click on the links. This method has worked incredibly well for us for 4 years! It’s fun looking back on previous years and finding old recipes. Heck, I could tell you what I ate on this exact day 2 years ago! My recipe choices are based on previous recipes and recent pinterest pins – which also forces me to actually TRY my pins! 🙂
This is a great meal prepping post! If you’re interested, we’d love to have you as a featured blogger at True Meals! We are an online meal prep directory and marketplace that launched last month. If you’d like to check us out, we’re at http://www.truemeals.com !
Please let us know! 🙂
If I didn’t meal plan we’d be eating In-N-Out almost every night…hmmm…maybe I should reconsider my meal planning. HA HA HA
Besides chopping up veggies, etc for the week, I usually also make a dish on the weekend that I can portion out and freeze for later. Chili or a thick, hearty soup {like my carrot & sweet potato with sausage soup} are perfect because they don’t get gross & mushy once you have defrosted them.
All you meals look delicious!
Meal planning buys me extra time during the week. We don’t have children, but I work from 8-4 and like to workout when I get home and sometimes have client work to do after hours. I dedicate Sundays to cooking anywhere from 2-3 suppers that I store in containers we can just heat up during the week. I also try to make enough for 1-2 leftover suppers and another night is dedicated ‘soup and sandwich’ night. I can take my time in the morning getting ready, maybe fold clothes, journal, scripture study, etc. knowing I don’t have to stick my head in the freezer and frantically look for something to make then spend an hour on Pinterest looking for a new way to make it!
Great post! I also see you have Juli Bauer’s new paleo cookbook hiding in one of your pics. I’m tempted to get it – how do you like it?
Oh sorry I just saw you already answered this question about the cookbook!
How do you store the prepped food during the week? Is it refrigerated or frozen? Have you had any issues with things going bad?
Thanks for this post, Julie! You have totally motivated me to start Sunday Meal Prep. We have a 6 month old, and I just returned to work so dinnertime has become a total disaster (between making dinner and clean-up). My question for you is – about how long on Sunday did all this prep take you?
Wow what a good week of eats! What kind of chicken sausage did you use? I’ve seen this combo a lot and want to make it since my son actually likes all of the ingredients. However, the only natural chicken sausages I can find in my local store are the ones that are precooked and only require being heated in the oven for about 10 minutes (like Aidells). I would think cooking those this long would dry them out.
These all sound amazing!! I love early food prep, it definitely makes weeknight dinners way less stressful. I’m also a big fan of frozen chopped veggies (onion, bell peppers) and pre-minced garlic. That always saves me lots of time too when I need a meal quick. Sometimes if I don’t use all of my meal prepped foods (typically chopped veggies) during the week, I just save them in a ziploc separately and label them to use in the future 🙂
I’m all about crock pot meals to help save time. I know you use the crock pot a lot. Plus, it usually makes several servings, so you have several meals in one! I love my go-to slow cooker bbq pulled pork.
2.5-3lbs pork tenderloin
8 oz. bbq sauce of your choice (I always add a little extra)
1 chopped onion
2-3 cloves garlic
hot sauce (amount up to you)
Salt and pepper the pork, cover with garlic, onion, and bbq sauce. Add hot sauce. Cook on low for 6-7 hours. Done!!
So simple, so delicious! I usually have it with veggies and a potato of some sort one night, then make sandwiches with it another night, and I’ve even made omelettes with it! Yum!
I save all the recipes I find online into Evernote and it works so well!
I also like to prep a batch of steel cut oats in the crockpot to have throughtout the week for breakfast.
Great ideas! In addition to prepping, we are using our slow cooker a lot. Our best recipe is hardly a recipe, but here it is: put 1 chopped onion, 2lbs chicken thighs, and 1 jar of salsa verde in a slow cooker on low for 8 hours. Shred the meat with two forks, and tuck into tortillas with sliced avocados, and other taco veggies. You can even assemble the night before and keep it all in the fridge overnight, then get things going in the morning. It makes a lot, so freeze what you don’t use and pull it out another night. Life saver!
LOVE this post SO my much!!!! Will e doing this for next week!
I just made the toasted sub sandwiches with Chicken Sausage and Veggies. SO GOOD! Thank you for sharing!
I used to just prep lunches and sometimes a easy grab and go breakfast, but lately I have finding myself taking an hour or two on Sunday to chop veggies and such for dinners I have planned throughout the week and it saves me so much time on weeknights! Thanks for sharing the recipes! How is the PaleOMG cookbook? I have thought about purchasing it.
Totally with you on the veggie slicing/chopping/peeling on a weeknight. I suppose my only way around this is frozen veggies, which is good for some recipes. We freeze some sauces too, so if we have a plain chicken breast and aren’t sure what to do, we can add in a sauce that we made earlier.
I need to get back into my proper meal planning routine again. Thank you for the reminder!
Hi Julie,
Ive followed your blog for a while, im Scottish living in London. I love this idea of prepping ahead ive a little 12m old in tow so know the trouble with veggie chopping.
Im totally intrigued by the vegetable soup with the berries on the side…. is this a taste sensation im missing out on or do you eat them at the end?
Thanks
Lyndsey
From the stories you share. I came up with a great idea. Rather than spend hours of culinary delicacies, on lazy weekends, I will follow your meal plan. I will have plenty of time to watch TV, read books, … great