Operation: Stop Eating Awful Raw Spaghetti
After the 5th handful of raw spaghetti on a Tuesday night, I was done. It was time to grow up and get some real food. With the encouragement of my co-writer Jami, I launched my covert Operation: Stop Eating Awful Raw Spaghetti (SEARS)
Phase 1 — Research
My research began by looking at a few subreddits listed in Jami’s subreddit guide, namely r/sundaymealprep and r/eatcheapandhealthy as well as this post in particular .
From there I created my necessary equipment list:
- A protein — Ground beef
- A starch — Rice
- A vegetable — Zucchini
- A sauce — Korean BBQ sauce
- Sandwich (Bread + Crab dip filling)
This lets me create a meal with a mixture of different nutrients and it’s certainly more filling that granola bars and oatmeal.
Phase 2 — Preparation
The next leg of the operation was to buy my food and get ready to cook. Through this I learned a hard lesson and almost failed the operation.
I learned it’s meal prep SUNDAY for a good reason. I ended up buying my groceries on a Wednesday night, and after coming back from work, I just did not have the energy to spend 2 hours making a big meal. When the weekend came around and I was rested enough, my ground beef had gone bad and I had to take another trip back to the grocery store. This time, I stared cooking as soon as I got back home to avoid any more spoiled food.
So don’t do like I did, make sure you have a block of time planned out to cook before any food goes bad.
Phase 3 — Cooking
Phase 4 — Evaluation
Overall, with my first attempt at meal planning I spent $36.66 even with having to replace my spoiled food. Combined the food I got was roughly enough for 8 meals ($4.58 per meal), and much cheaper than the $6.40 it costs me to buy a sandwich or the $11.00 for a burger.
Here’s the breakdown of what my grocery bill looked like:
Even with my mishaps, meal prepping was a positive experience and I’ll certainly be doing it again in the future. I don’t have the dozens of Tupperware containers needed to plan out an entire week, but with how successful this was, I’m thinking about buying some. The feeling of biting into a home cooked meal after sustaining on office granola bars was fantastic, not to mention the fact that I didn’t have to cook for 4 days!
With that, operation SEARS was complete. I managed to save money, and also eat healthier and actually feel full. For those of you who do not or have not meal prepped before I’d encourage giving it a shot!
