Three healthy meal prep ideas to help save money and time

One of the biggest expenses we all have is food. This expense can be even greater if you’re eating out a lot. Eating out is easy, especially if you work long hours or you’re always on the go. And stopping for that morning coffee on your way to work and buying lunch can easily add up to money you could be saving.

One reason why people are often reluctant to take food with them to work is because it’s time-consuming to prepare, but today we’re going to share with you 3 easy meal prep ideas that will save on both time and money!

1. Chicken, vegetables and rice - Chicken is a healthy protein that’s not hard or time consuming to cook. Simply toss a few chicken breasts in the oven with your favourite seasonings and bake until done. Next, choose the vegetable of your choice. You can go with fresh vegetables, canned, or frozen. Even frozen only take a few minutes to cook. For rice, purchase the instant rice that only takes 5 minutes or so to cook. Make sure you make enough for a few days of lunch. To mix things up, you can change the vegetables, use the chicken for sandwiches, or however you’d like.

2. Soup - Make a big batch of your favourite soup and freeze it. Not only will you have an easy lunch to reheat while at work, but you can also use it on those nights when you don’t have a lot of time to cook dinner. You can even make a couple of different kinds of soup so that you don’t get bored with what you’re eating.

3. Smoothies - Smoothies make a great healthy and easy breakfast, lunch, or mid-day snack. What’s also great is that you can change up the taste of them very easily. To save time, buy all of your ingredients and then combine different flavours into freezer bags and freeze them. When you wake up in the morning, toss a bag into the blender with whatever juice, milk, or other liquid of your choosing and your smoothie will be done in just a minute.

Additional tips - Buy a few containers to put your prepped lunches into so it’s easy to toss into your work bag and go. Plastic containers are very cheap and usually come in bulk. For smoothies, mason style jars work great to transport them in and you can often buy bulk smoothie cups with straws online very cheaply.

Looking for more ways to save time on making food? Check out our blog - meals you can make in under 20 minutes!