The Struggle Meal Survival Guide
How I Save 6 Hours a Week by Meal Prepping
Plus food safety, good habits, and keeping things fun!
Le Répertoire
I estimate that the average person can confidently make about about a dozen dishes. And that’s nothing to be ashamed about! After all, not everyone is a professional chef.
But cooking is fun! You should regularly step out of your comfort zone and learn new recipes and techniques. There might be a method that will take your food to the next level, and you haven’t even found it yet!
If you want to expand your culinary skill set, here are some great beginner resources:
- 25 skills every cook should know by BBC Good Food
- Cooking Basics by The Spruce Eats
- Cooking Basics and Flavor Profiles by The Culinary Cook
I also highly recommend the video library of Jacques Pépin, Gordon Ramsay, and Julia Child, who are culinary legends.
Avoid double work
One reason why you want to acquire more skills is batch cooking, the backbone of meal planning.
Batch cooking saves a ton of time: Say you bought chicken thighs for your weekly protein, and since you want it nice and fresh for each dinner, you cook each thigh from raw to ready every night.
But each dinner, it takes you about 20 minutes to make the chicken. And that’s not even factoring in cleaning up, or side dishes.
You might be wasting an hour a day where you’re just standing in the kitchen doing busy work. Over a week, that adds up to six or seven hours. That’s a day at the office! Wouldn’t you want to use that “shift” better, like working on your side hustle, or spending time with someone special?
Instead of repeating the same steps over and over, consolidate them. Don’t cook an individual portion each day — cook the entire batch at the start of your week. Chicken, spaghetti, tacos, whatever.
Here’s a related idea:
When you grab your veggies, don’t just cut what you need for tonight’s dinner, chop everything at once. That way, each night you’ll be prepared, with product already in place. In fact, this idea of preparedness is a critical part of professional cooking, which we call mise en place. Proper “mise” is the difference between a successful dinner service and going down in flames when the restaurant gets busy.
This is why organizing your meal plan is so important: By knowing all the steps involved in your menu, you can cross things off ahead of time. We all want to relax after work or school, right? Not having to bring out the cutting board and veggies, bang your knife for a couple minutes, then clean it all up will make for a nicer day.
Double work — the bane of every chef’s existence — wastes way more time than you think. And considering we’re meal planning to save money, and time is an even more precious resource than money, you should always avoid double work!
Proper Food Storage
Temperature danger zone
One of the most important things any cook — professional or amateur — must always keep in mind is the temperature danger zone. This is a range of temperatures where food-borne bacteria can multiply exponentially in food. The result? Food poisoning.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines this range as 40° to 140° Fahrenheit, as a rule of thumb. (For my metric system friends, this converts to 5° to 63° Celsius.)
In other words: Room temperature is bad temperature.
Never let ready-to-eat food sit out. Keep hot food hot (in the oven or covered on the stove top); and keep cold food cold (in the fridge), until it’s time to sit down and eat.
Let hot food cool down before storing it in the fridge
While you may think this violates the temperature danger zone rule, it actually helps.
By putting steaming-hot food into your fridge to cool, you compromise the entire contents of the refrigerator — that steam will warm up everything else inside.
Instead, let hot food cool down for about twenty minutes before quickly storing it. Also, keep the lid off the container…
Maintaining quality
… because it will compromise the food quality.
If you’re cooling hot food in a closed container, the steam will condense when it reaches the lid, and your food will be covered in water. Yuck. Instead, keep the lid ajar, so steam can escape.
But don’t dilly-dally in putting that lid back on. Airtight food storage is really important not just for safe food, but for delicious food.
Refrigerators don’t just cool food, they dry it out. Dehumidifiers in the fridge pull out moisture — which are starting points for spoilage — but a side effect is that it dries out food. Keeping your food airtight will prevent this, so never leave things in your fridge uncovered.
Avoiding Burnout & Boredom
Variety: The Spice of Life
One of my favorite things about cooking is that you never run out of things to learn. Whether it’s an ingredient you’ve never heard of, a technique you’ve never seen, or an instrument you’ve never used, a chef’s journey of discovery never ends.
As I mentioned earlier, you should try different things. Incorporate fun, new recipes into your meal plan. Make an Italian gravy from scratch and eat spaghetti for the week! Try your hand at classic, inexpensive French dishes like cassoulet or ratatouille!
Just One Cookbook, The Woks of Life, and Serious Eats are some of my favorite sources of recipes, and are a great starting point for inspiration!
By keeping a routine exciting, it stops being a chore and starts becoming a habit.
Don’t torture yourself
Be flexible. If you’re too strict on meal planning, you’ll burn out and abandon it. What’s the point of going through the trouble of making a meal plan, only for it to be so strict you give up and regularly splurge?
If you’re really craving some ice cream or a pizza because it’s been so long, then treat yourself! Just be smart about it.
Hopefully you reach the point where you’re so efficient with budgeting your groceries, you’ve got some wiggle room tucked aside. I like to call these sanity purchases, because they break up the monotony and keep me from going crazy.
Have fun
One of the greatest quotes I’ve ever heard came from one of my bosses at the JW Marriott. It was opening week, we were crazy-busy with banquets and events; and we were loading our speed racks and Queen Mary fleet to get ready for a party where we’d be cooking out in the lobbies for guests.
Amid the chaos, our sous chef — a wonderful, always bubbly lady — was about to go back down to the main kitchen after setting us up. Before departing, she left us with a smile and these words:
“Just remember, guys: Have fun! Because what’s the point of doing it if you’re not having fun?”
Money may be the root of all evil; but it also makes the world go round.
Controlling your finances controls your freedom, and meal prepping is a powerful way to take control of your finances.
Thanks for reading. Now, go start that meal plan!
