The secret to a healthy meal plan isn’t a laundry list of recipes or ingredients. Instead it’s all about meal prep, batch cooking, and how you layer the basics to get you in and out of the kitchen fast.
Be honest and ask yourself this:
- How much time, energy, and stress do you put into meal planning each week?
- How often do you throw away leftovers because you’re just plain tired of them?
- How much of your valuable monthly budget goes out the window with them?
Now that you’ve answered those questions, we’re going to ask you to take everything you thought you knew about meal planning and toss it down the garbage disposal.
Go ahead, and let ‘er rip.
The original concept of meal planning as we know it entails making a bunch of meals that initially sound really good, but ultimately don’t complement each other, meaning eating the leftovers until you’re sick of them, or worse, letting them waste away before being dumped in the garbage.
Because let’s face it, unless you have a family of six or more, big batch casseroles, overflowing soups, and pastas that never seem to stop twirling can last a lot longer than you think.
There are plenty of meal plans with recipes calling for an exhaustive list of ingredients (some of them obscure or expensive), and cooking techniques that can get way more advanced than our work week can handle.
But real life doesn’t have time nor bandwidth for plans like that.
This Is the Secret Ingredient You’ve Been Missing
We need fast and easy, not long and tedious, because even though we enjoy cooking, we don’t want to spend all of our free time in the kitchen.
That’s why we created a totally new and intuitive way to meal prep that’s the opposite of single dinner meal prep.
The concept behind our batch cooking basics guide is simple and efficient and simply comes down to creating satisfying layers of delicious, healthy food your entire family will love.
The foundation of this healthy meal plan is five basic recipes that when combined act as an interchangeable base flavored with a master sauce of your choice to build just one meal, or even a whole week’s worth.
Get your copy of the Nourished Planner Batch Cooking Basics meal prep guide here.
Layer It On
Yes, five basic recipes and one master sauce is all you need to create endless amounts of meals thanks to our food layering technique that adds variety to your week so you don’t feel you’re eating the same thing over and over again.
For example, this easy Asian Marinade and Master Sauce can be used as:
- a marinade for your favorite proteins
- a salad dressing for salads or cold noodles
- a flavor elevator when added to the cooking water for a more flavorful rice, grains, or pastas
- a killer sauce for sautéed or roasted vegetables, stir frys, or pastas with sauce
Batch these easy steps ahead then layer the individual recipes with other ingredients or condiments to create totally new meal combinations.
This way, yesterday’s grilled steak becomes tomorrow’s tacos and the next day’s grain bowl.
Using this meal prep method guarantees a variety of textures, flavors, and nutritional value that multiplies, and when combined, won’t taste like the same old thing.
Batch Cooking Basics at Your Fingertips
In our downloadable Batch Cooking Basics guide, we give you the five basic recipes and 20 additional ways to mix it up.
Plus, you’ll get:
- meal planning tips, tricks, and hacks
- a kitchen must-haves guide
- a chart to guide the perfection of your own five basic ingredients,
- the five basic ingredients recipes (including four delicious sauces)
- and over 20 ideas for layering ingredients together.
The Nourished Planner and the Batch Cooking Basics guide work in tandem. They’re simpatico, like two peas in a pod, like Laverne and Shirley, like peanut butter and jelly (okay, you catch our drift).
But seriously, we designed the planner specifically so that it would be extremely user-friendly for meal planning.
The Batch Cooking Basics guide breaks it all down for you and arms you with a better strategy for tackling meal planning, so you spend less time deliberating and cooking, and more time living and enjoying. Sounds pretty great, doesn’t it?
The reality is, healthy and delicious food doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, when your cooking method centers around meal prep and batch cooking, the most basic of ingredients can easily be transformed into craveable dishes everyone will want to eat (and want seconds of)!
The Secret Is Batch Cooking Basics
Get your copy of the Nourished Planner Batch Cooking Basics meal prep guide today and save time and money when you start eating healthier today.
Learn how to add more variety but not much more time in the kitchen with the secrets to turning 5 basic recipes into 20+ meals by basic ingredients in different ways, so your weekly meal planning doesn’t taste like the same old thing.
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You have some great tips here for living a healthy life. It is important to live healthy, but not necessarily needful to go on a diet. Just being smart with what you eat and how you eat it is enough. I like how you said to not ignore cravings, ignoring cravings is hard.