Planning Ahead: A Meal Prep Thread

Hey everyone! Since "planning ahead" is my only reliable household skill, and since my family is making plans that might mean our usual hands-on cooks will be less available at meal times, I'm cautiously poking my head back into the world of meal planning/freezer-to-crockpot/etc. This seems more doable for me than me taking over making dinner regularly - I can do prep/pre-cooking days on the weekends when my sis is available to help, and then I can just heat something up on weeknights for my wife so she doesn't have to cook so much.

My determination is somewhat cooled by the fact that when I try to google meal planning or freezer-to-crockpot options, the first (million) resources I run into are at least adjacent to the whole sphere of Mormon housewife blogging, which is... kinda triggering for me. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. So! Here's a place for us to share what we already know, share experiments, etc, in a context that's Not That.

 

My first offering: the one bit of cooking-ahead that my family reliably does is Sunday Chicken.

On Sunday, we take a whole chicken and roast it. We've gone through a couple of iterations of how exactly we do the roasting, but specifics don't matter a ton. Right now, we put celery & carrot & quartered onions in the bottom of our dutch oven, lightly salt the chicken inside/outside before setting it on top breast down, and then roast covered in a 400F oven for ~an hour depending on chicken weight.

We eat any of the roast chicken we feel like, shred the rest of the meat for wraps/quesadillas/whatever throughout the week, and throw all skin/bones/cartilage back in the dutch oven. I usually add some minced garlic & extra salt and pepper too. Then I put in ~10 cups of water, put it back in the oven at 200F, and forget about it until Monday morning.

On Monday morning, strain, and you have a good amount of tasty chicken stock! Sometimes I use this for nice soups, but honestly it's just as good when we use all of it as the liquid for condensed/canned soup bc it makes "we don't have energy to really Cook" more nutritious and, like, incredibly tastier.

We don't manage this quite every week, but we're enjoying it a lot when we do. It makes lunches & simple meals thru the week easier.