Day Before Meal Prep

An excellent time-saving mind-easing good habit to get into is looking at your meal plan every night before you head to bed. I am usually too tired to do any real meal prep at night, in fact I hardly do much of anything productive after the kids go to bed, but I do take a peek at my menu to see what needs to be taken out of the freezer for the next one or two days’ meals. It depends on what the food item is as to how many days prior to a meal it should be taken out of the freezer. A 3 lb pork loin is going to take at least 2 days in the fridge to thaw whereas a flash frozen salmon steak will only take one night. I try to anticipate all frozen items that will be utilized in a meal when making my monthly menu and I make notes in my monthly menu calendar in blue (blue signifies frozen to me) on the days that frozen items should be taken out.

In addition to thinking about your next day’s meal the night before, it is best to make sure that you have all your ingredients for tomorrow’s meal (and the day after that’s meal ideally) the day before. In a perfect world, if you are meal planning and shopping for everything well in advance this isn’t a problem. However, we have all wanted to make some specific meal and went to the grocery with the best of intentions only to find out that our grocery store is completely out of an essential ingredient. To celebrate Saint Dominic of Silos day (which was yesterday but we are moving that meal to today) I decided to try a new Dominican stew which would introduce two new ingredients to our family. One new ingredient was a plantain which was easy to find. The second was yucca. Our local grocer does not carry yucca and when I inquired I was lucky enough to speak to the produce manager who had worked in produce for nearly 30 years and was familiar with every fruit and vegetable known to man. He suggested trying another store located in a more Hispanic community. After 3 phone calls I sent my visiting brother-in-law to hunt down a yucca. Of course I didn’t have to do this, this dish is more of a fun experiment and I had help from a visiting family member so we went for it. But we did it yesterday not today, the day we are cooking the stew.

I know people who think about what is for dinner in the early afternoon. Then they realize they don’t have everything they need and they head out to the grocery. If you don’t have a gaggle of young kids or if your schedule permits these multiple grocery tips maybe it works for you as long as your meal does not require a lot of cooking time. That would be disastrous in our house so a little day ahead preparation out of pure habit makes meal prep a breeze.