Strategies for Easy and Enjoyable Weeknight Cooking

Love to Cook? Hate to Cook? Weeknight Dinners Are a Challenge Either Way

Lucky for us, there are tons of meal delivery services offering healthy, ready-to-eat options. Depending on your budget, this may not be an option for every night of the week. Plenty of services also make cooking more convenient by providing recipes and pre-portioned ingredients, but these too can get expensive quickly. For those interested, we tried out a few and will share our reviews later in this post.

Regardless of your budget, there’s an age-old saying about teaching a man to fish that comes to mind. Learning to source and prepare food that you enjoy and that sustains you is a life-sustaining skill. It can be low stress and possibly even fun with a little forethought and some preparation.

Keep It Simple and Think Ahead

When it comes to weeknight dinners, keep it simple. Then think ahead — what veggies are in the fridge that need to be used? What protein would go well with that? If your freezer is well stocked (which I recommend whenever possible), move your proteins for the next few nights to the refrigerator to thaw. What do I need from the store?

Time Savers

• Chop and freeze onions in ½ cup portions that can be used just like fresh with only a few extra minutes of cooking time.
• Chop fresh herbs and freeze them in an ice tray with a bit of olive oil.
• Use a food processor or Cuisinart to speed up chopping or shredding items you don’t have prepped in advance.
• Heartier vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, bell peppers, and carrots can be washed and prepped ahead of time. America’s Test Kitchen recommends storing them in an airtight container layered with damp paper towels for up to a week.

Slow Cooker Whenever Possible

My favorite evenings are when I come home after a busy day or a crazy afternoon of running kids around and walk into the smell of a ready-made, home-cooked meal. There’s nothing to it—prep the night before, refrigerate overnight, set the slow cooker up in the morning before leaving.

Slow cooker meals usually yield lots of leftovers to use for lunches or another dinner later in the week. If I could slow cook every meal, I think I would—easy, tasty crowd-pleasers that typically involve less expensive cuts of meat (especially important when you prioritize high-quality proteins that are grass-fed, pastured, or wild). Hard to argue, right?

Get Ahead of the Game

An unorthodox strategy I’ve found success with is to get a night ahead. Many have heard of prepping for a couple of hours a couple of days per week, but I’ve never had a ton of success with this.

When I can, it helps—but I’ve found this strategy more enjoyable and equally effective:

• On Sunday night, I make two dinners—one for Sunday and one for Monday.
• On Monday, typically after dinner, I cook for Tuesday.
• And so on for the rest of the week.

I’m still cooking every night, but this way I’m able to do it at my own pace, enjoy the process, and remove some stress from my day. If the protein is quick to cook (like fish) or if I’m grilling, I do that the same day—but I prep the veggies, salad, etc., the night before.

Double Up on Easy Meals

Busy weeks go more smoothly and are more enjoyable with a couple of simple strategies: meals that are easy to double should be doubled.

• Taco meat takes almost zero extra effort to prep and cook, freezes well, and is handy when you need something quick.
• Chicken pieces (we have an amazing chicken thigh recipe in rotation) keep well in the fridge for a couple of days.
• Meatloaf — make two loaves and freeze one cut and packaged in dinner-sized portions.
• Meatballs — make a bunch, freeze extras on a cookie sheet, then bag or containerize them for quick access.

Meal and Grocery Delivery Services Can Help

Meal delivery services can be a lifesaver during busy periods.

• We’ve used Munchery, which doesn’t require a subscription but needs to be ordered ahead. The meals are typically less expensive and made from higher quality ingredients than takeout.
• When life gets hectic (both my husband and I coaching our kids’ practices and games), I subscribe to Methodology for a few meals per week, then cancel once things settle down.
• We also tried Thistle, which was good but less satisfying because their higher-cost animal proteins were supplemented with legumes—not our preference.

If those aren’t available in your area, look for meal delivery services that use high-quality proteins (grass-fed, pastured, wild) and go from there.

What About Hello Fresh, Blue Apron, and Sun Basket?

Your Facebook feed has no doubt tried to sell you these services. Full disclosure—I haven’t tried all of them, but those I did didn’t solve my biggest problem: time between coming home and having food on the table.

The luxury with these is the ability to change up your menus easily—no searching for recipes, no shopping lists, no shopping. Everything you need for the recipes is in the box.

Sounds great, but it didn’t save me time when I needed it most.

Another challenge was the quality of proteins used. Unfortunately, “natural” is not a regulated term and isn’t very descriptive. This is a subject for a future post, but simply put: for the money spent on such services, I’d rather have Good Eggs deliver a high-quality protein and some veggies and experiment with a recipe I find online or in a magazine.

My Secret Weapons: Good Eggs and Thrive Market

I can be sitting at a baseball game “watching” my kids play and doing grocery shopping for the week or next few days at the same time.

Everything else aside, simply having a plan for what you want to make and having all the ingredients on hand is key.

Make a menu for the week, shop or order the ingredients, and you’re ahead of the game.

Prepping or cooking ahead removes pressure and makes the process more enjoyable, so prep/cook ahead whenever possible.

We love Fitpacker containers for individual meal storage and glass Tupperware for meals. Foodsaver is great if you’re limited on fridge or freezer space.

Never Go Hungry

The food we eat has a huge impact on how we feel, how we look, and our overall health—but life is busy.

Figuring out a strategy that helps you eat well throughout the week without adding stress makes healthy eating possible and sustainable.

Learning to fish—and possibly teaching your children to do so—means you’ll never go hungry.

What strategies are working for you?

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