Meal Prep Made Easy
Two weeks ago, I asked my dear friend, Greg Pitts, to send me his grocery list. I am tinkering with my diet, taking a few things away, adding a few things, and I will be writing about the big experiment next week. I am using his diet as a model for my own. Pitts is really dialed in when it comes to what he eats. Even in the middle of my bachelor party, I looked over and he had packed homemade sandwiches so he could control as much of his nutrition as possible. Then we got into the tequila and that was all over. Nonetheless, on the way home, I asked him to send me his grocery list as a starter kit for some changes to my diet. Below is the email he sent filled with a step by step guide to meal prep and even a nod to his masterful knife skills. Enjoy.
-Anders
OK, so here is what I generally do for the week. No matter which vegetables you want to eat, the key is that it needs to be as easy and accessible as possible to eat the veggies, otherwise it becomes a real burden trying to prep them. After a couple years of doing this, I've developed a pretty good system. First step is to get a decent chef's knife and learn how to use it. It's fun, but be careful at first. I've still got a visible chunk of one of my fingers missing from when I was learning.
I always have these vegetables in stock, stored, and sliced:
- Yellow Onions
- Red Onions
- Green Onions
- Red Radishes
- White Mushrooms
- Red Bell Pepper
- Green Bell Pepper
- Spinach
- Roma Tomatoes (I don't pre slice these because they go bad)
- Avocado (I don't pre slice these because they go bad)
My goal is to always have this stuff chopped and available throughout the week. If I run out of something, I slice it again immediately while I am cooking. This keeps the burden of slicing the veggies spread out over multiple days. It really sucks to have to spend like an entire hour doing that shit. If I'm missing something or I chop the last of something, I put it on my mental list of things to buy. Some things that don't go bad quickly (like onions) I just buy one of pretty much all the time. Depends on what you eat.
What is also awesome about this is that you always have vegetables to throw into anything you want. For example, I always throw onions, spinach, and mushrooms into my scrambled eggs in the morning. If you are making meat at night, you can mix your pre-chopped red onions with avocado into a spread that gives a real fresh taste. It just makes vegetables readily available all the time, which makes them way easier to eat.
For lunch, I usually eat a salad which is leads into the other awesome part about the picture above. What I make the salad I just open a bunch of tupperware things, sprinkle the vegetables I want into some spinach, and I'm done. Takes like 2 minutes for me to make an awesome salad. I make them three at a time, after three days they start to go bad.
I also add ~1/3 cup of sliced almonds (Costco), ~1/3 cup sunflower seeds (Sprouts), half a Roma Tomato and half an avocado. If I have leftover chicken, that goes into the salad as well. So it takes me less than five minutes and I've got three of these. Lunch for three days.
What I snack on during the day:
- Carrots (whole, trimmed and peeled)
- Celery (full stalks trimmed and chopped in half)
- Cucumbers (chopped in slices)
Generally, I cut a bunch of this stuff all at once and put it in baggies for easy access. Sliced cucumbers last about three days in a sandwich bag before they go bad, celery about 5 days, and carrots last over a week. You can see that in the first picture up there.
For dinner, I'll try to have one of these. Depends on what I want, but I generally have leftovers for the next night.
- Kale
- Broccoli
- Brussel Sprouts
- Asparagus
- Cabbage
I usually make a big batch of organic brown rice too, so that I have easy access to carbs.
What I end up with on Sunday night is this. All the eggs on the right are hard boiled, left are not hard boiled.
Pretty impressive, right? Give it a shot this weekend and let us know how it goes.
