Healthy Mustachian Meal Prep Ideas

[EngineerOurFI]

Our  largest budget sinkhole right now is food costs.  Trying to work on losing weight while getting a grip on our  out of control food spending (grocery + fast food lunches + restaurants).

My wife has mostly ditched her Starbucks habit in favor of making coffee at home (k-cups or brewed).  I’ve taken to eating cereal at home for breakfast or oatmeal at work - so that’s one meal covered.  We’re working on getting back to cooking at least 4 dinners at home per week and trying to increase from there - half the time we have leftovers for one of us for lunch, but we need other lunch options. 

 I’m looking for reasonably healthy and reasonably mustachian meal prep ideas for lunches.  Could be something that I “assemble” at work to some extent.  I have several ideas, but I feel like none of them are even on the Richter scale of ideas most MMM folks must use in order to keep their grocery budgets so darn low.

The ideas I’ve had so far are: chicken and bean rice bowl meal preps, some kind of stew/pot roast meal prep, grilled chicken/veggies, or assembling sandwiches at work and keeping some kind of snack like bananas etc as a side.

Any resources/advice on meal prep or grocery shopping from mustachian perspective would be appreciated.

[MonkeyJenga]

The wiki here has a lot of resources: https://www.reddit.com/r/EatCheapAndHealthy/

[Metalcat]

Could you not have leftovers for lunch??

[lentil]

A lot of people do best with incremental changes. For us, we went from eating out for lunches ($5-10/meal) to eating Trader Joe's frozen lunches ($2-4/meal), then started substituting leftovers for an increasing number of those meals (<$1/meal). The really big savings were actually in that first step, but the health and taste benefits that grew with our cooking skills have been considerable.

Anyway, these days we cook one or two bulk meals each week, something like a huge pot of chili/soup/curry, or rice bowls, or whatever. We freeze most of it into glass bowls, each of which is 1 meal, and that pretty much takes care of all our lunches for the week. By cooking bulk meals before our freezer is empty, we ensure that we (almost) always have several things to choose from, which helps combat any food boredom. For times when one of us needs more calories, it's easy to add something like nuts, fruits, or cheese into the lunch packing.

Budgetbytes.com has a lot of recipe/meal ideas also.

[Cgbg]

Budgetbytes is excellent, and she has some good bowl recipes. I’d still keep the ingredients separate and just throw a bowl together the night before.

I keep it pretty simple. Leftovers are lunch for the most part for dh so I make sure I make at least an extra serving of dinner. He doesn’t like to take last night’s dinner for lunch- so the leftovers age another day or so before he taps into them.

For me, I bake a bunch of seasoned chicken breasts (using a recipe from the kitchn.com - super yummy) twice a week and slice a part of one the night before for the next day’s lunch. I add some cut veggies and some fruit and a small piece of cheese and that’s lunch for me. If I make dal (white girl dal from kiwiandbean.com) then I’ll usually have that for lunch during the week instead (with rice and a piece of fruit). That dal gets better after a day or so in the fridge.

Sliced chicken breasts also get used on a main dish dinner salad or as a quick fajita dinner.

[runbikerun]

I tend to do curries, chilli or paella for lunches - I can usually get four days' worth from one large pot and then treat myself to a Friday burrito. Vegetarian options seem to last a little longer (and are cheaper as well as reducing your carbon footprint), and are ridiculously easy to put together.

[Not There Yet]

Second Budget Bytes.  https://www.budgetbytes.com/?s=meal+prep

[kei te pai]

Meal planning is the key I think. Look for recipes, shop accordingly, then stick to the plan as far as possible.
Your freezer is your friend. Try to have a couple of meals there to heat and eat when plans go astray.
Sandwiches freeze well if you avoid fillings such as lettuce and tomato.
buy some good quality containers , it makes a big difference to what state your food is in by lunchtime.

[seemsright]

Meal planning is the key I think. Look for recipes, shop accordingly, then stick to the plan as far as possible.
Your freezer is your friend. Try to have a couple of meals there to heat and eat when plans go astray.
Sandwiches freeze well if you avoid fillings such as lettuce and tomato.
buy some good quality containers , it makes a big difference to what state your food is in by lunchtime.

I think knowing how to cook with basic ingredients is the key. Finding ingredients on discount, on sale etc then making a plan for your food for the week is the key. I find that if I meal plan before the store I spend way way more.

Also being really flexible with what you eat will help you save some money. I found some bones on deep discount in the mexican part of the grocery store. So I made some bone broth, and we will have some rice bowls and a soft boiled egg, some roasted veggies and a drizzle of sesame oil and dinner will be done. But I could have not gotten this meal cost down as low as it will be if I did not...have the time at the store to look around, I buy 50# of rice at a time, and the roasted veggies will be what needs to eaten up first.

We also have weeks where we use up what we have on hand. The potatoes that need to be eaten we will grill those up with some olive oil and what ever seasoning we have on hand, what ever meat we have leftover in the fridge put on top of some salad greens, maybe some homemade pickle and I call that dinner.

I still spend way two much at the store. I am working on getting the cost to go down, but I am finding that food prices are in general going up and I am treading water to keep feeding hubby, I and our 8 year old with the budget we have. I spend the entire afternoon trying to process the ingredients we had on hand so I can make meals this week.

[socaso]

A recent thing I figured out for inexpensive lunches is buying the giant bagged salads from Costco and packaging them separately then adding a protein. The first couple of weeks I got one bagged salad ($4.99) and one rotisserie chicken ($4.99) and I got 6 salads out of that. That was perfect for me and my husband to eat for lunch and the other 2 workdays we did leftovers of some kind.

Another thing I do is plan my entire month's menus in advance. I use the sale flyers for the current week and look for the best loss leader sales on proteins and make meals around that. I plan 2 weeks worth of meals and rotate them through the month so that each of the two weeks happens 2 times in the month. This helps because I buy all the protein(s) I need at the less expensive price and also any non perishables such as canned goods I go ahead and stock up on. I freeze any items like chicken or other meats that I'm not using immediately. It also makes grocery shopping for the rest of the month easier because I just have to fill in perishables each week. This helps save money because if a recipe calls for something I don't usually stock (like a spice or sauce, etc) I use it in two meals that month and it doesn't go to waste.

[Cromacster]

I've been trying One Meal a Day (OMAD) for the last two months and I love it.

I've never been a breakfast person to begin with and regularly just ate lunch and dinner.  Now I am down to just eating between 5pm-8pm.  I eat more than a normal dinner, but I definitely eat less overall.  It's hard to cram a whole day of calories in a small window.  Even harder if you are choosing to eat high fat and low carb.

Sundays I will typically make a bunch of meat (it's summer so the grill has been running full force).  Steaks, Salmon, Burgers, Chicken.  Grill it on Sunday.  Then I will eat the meat in or or with a big salad.  Throw in a couple fried eggs and homemade guac and your eating like a king!

I would like to try this eating style with less meat, which is definitly the most expensive part of my diet by far.  I currently eat about 1.5lbs of meat a day.  Most of the alternatives I don't enjoy or my body doesn't enjoy.  But I admit I haven't researched too much in what a vegetarianish keto diet would look like.

[ketchup]

1 medium head of cabbage
2 large onions
~4 cups water or stock (homemade)
~24oz tomato paste
whatever other extra vegetables you have lying around (peppers, mushrooms, etc.)
1.5lbs of ground beef/pork/whatever you've got
salt, black pepper, cumin, red pepper flakes, or whatever spices you like

Slice up cabbage into ~1"x1" strips, dice onions, other misc vegetables, throw in stockpot.  Add water/stock and tomato paste.  Add spices, mix and boil until somewhat cooked, add meat, add more spices, mix again, and cook until done.

Scale recipe up/down as needed; none of the ratios are too important.  Freeze some of it.  I keep it in 64oz deli "leftovers" containers and scoop portions out into a bowl at work to microwave.

Half hour of prep, one week of lunches, not too expensive, satiating as fuck.

[Roscoe]

I'm in the same boat.  New to pursuing FI and the food expenses we currently run at are super high.  This is the area where I think I can carve off a decent amount of money to move the needle.  Looking forward to hearing additional discussion.

[Sugaree]

Do you have a slow cooker?  Between that and freezer meals, I have just about gotten to the point where I only cook about three days a week.  Pair a meal that needs time in the oven with a slow cooker meal.  Like last night, I made a sweet and sour pork sheetpan thing.  While it was in the oven, I put together the stuff for the pulled pork chili we're having tonight.  I put the crock in the fridge and turned it on this morning before I left for work.  I only had to clean up the kitchen once for two meals.  The chili is a little more expensive than what I usually make, $9 for the batch, but I should be able to freeze at least half of it for another day.  I try to get three dinners and a lunch from each meal I cook.  A dinner for me, my husband, and my son.  And then a lunch for whoever remembers to grab it out of the fridge in the morning.

[EngineerOurFI]

Wow - Thanks for all of the great ideas!  I'm just finishing up a 2 week work trip and will be back in home the states next week.  We were good about cooking every night and me taking leftovers for lunch, but we really need to shift to more of a meal prep mindset in order to reduce the number of days per week we *have* to cook, as mandating nightly cooking (even if it's a slow cooker setup) just isn't working now that we have a toddler in the mix.

Thanks for all of the great meal prep and grocery tips.  I'll report back with my (hopeful) success/improvement.  Definitely some tasty, healthy, AND cheap options in the above posts.

I started a journal shortly before this work trip to help keep myself accountable on this "wallet and waistline" plan that my wife and I have.  We've been steadily reducing our expenditures without formally tracking budgets.  However, I just hooked up Mint and started tracking there - hoping June 2019 is the first "fully" tracked month in Mint - but looking back at the automatic tracking from previous months and I'm just embarrassed by our lifestyle inflation in terms of grocery + Fast food + dining out spending.  Looks like we creeped up ~400% total grocery/fast food/dining out spend from where we were 2-3 years ago.  Facepunch.  Here's to making June 2019 and onwards better.

[mm1970]

The type of meal prep we do/ have done totally varies on our schedules, kids schedules, etc.

Method 1:
- Cook 2 big meals on the weekends, and alternate for dinner until they are gone
- Cook 1 more meal on weekend for lunch

Method 2:
- Cook 2 big meals on weekends.  Alternate for lunch AND dinner until they are gone (sooner)
- Crockpot Wednesday

Method #3
- Cook 2 meals on the weekend and eat leftovers until they are gone
- Wing it the rest of the week.

Lunches:
- Bean burritos
- Burrito bowls
- Sandwiches
- Salads
- Stir fry with rice
- Pasta


Method #4: repetition
- Saturday night: stir fry with rice
- Sunday night: pasta
- Monday: stir fry leftovers
- Tuesday: pasta leftovers
- Weds: crockpot
- Thu: crockpot leftovers
- Fri: frozen pizza

When my second kid was a baby, we got into the habit of Method #1.  It helped to designate one particular meal to be "lunch only".  It also helped with weight loss, because there was very little incentive to overeat even delicious food when you have it 4-5 days in a row.

So, sandwich week I'd buy turkey and cheese and we'd have sandwiches every day.
Pasta week, make a big batch and portion it out.
Sometimes, if we got bored, I'd put some of the leftovers in the freezer in individual containers for the following week.

These days, I eat salad for lunch every day.  My husband uses the method 1 - meaning he'll eat homemade bean burritos one week, sandwiches the next, leftovers the next.  Depends on what we have.

[habanero]

If you get a sous vide circulator and/or a preassure cooker you can use very cheap cuts of meat. This are generally very, very tasty but requires a long time to cook properly. I regularly start the sous vide the evening before or in the morning before going to work and when I get home the meat is ready.

If you want to eat on the cheap its hard to beat vegetarian. Healthy, tastefull means can be cooked for next to nothing in cost of ingredients.

Cook for more than one meal and freeze in portions. Very handy for busy days and the meal can be prepared by someone who doesnt really know how to cook.

Soups are great for not having to throw anything away. Can be made out of virtually anything.

[horsepoor]

Hard boiled eggs or egg salad + extra veggies
Tuna salad + extra veggies
Roasted butternut squash
Baked potato/sweet potato with cottage cheese

Per @habaneroNorway I use my immersion circulator to make sous vide eggs in 8 oz mason jars.  They are about right for two eggs plus some cheese, green onions or whatever else you would normally put in an omelette.  They store well in the fridge and are easy to grab in the morning, along with maybe a quick salad or green soup.

And BTW - [urrl=https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/basic-green-soup]Green Soup[/url] is amazing.  I make big batches when my garden greens are coming in, and pressure can it.  But you can make it any time with whatever's cheap - spinach, collards, kale, broccoli, mustard greens, etc.  Just mix it up. Frozen veg works fine too. I add more garlic and chile flakes than in the linked recipe, so it has a little more punch.