Are you someone who wants to eat home-cooked and healthy meals but does not have time to cook? Especially on weekdays when you are crunched for time, cooking a complete meal can become a hassle. This is exactly where lunch meal prep becomes very useful. You don’t have to depend on food delivery and frozen meals.
Let’s say you have 30 mins for lunch on weekdays. Out of those, you will need 15 mins to eat. That leaves you with less than 15 mins to cook. Here I have listed five ideas for lunch meal prep that you can easily use in your day-to-day life to achieve this target.
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Table of Contents
Knead Dough for Chapati
The usual choice for lunch in Indian house is sabzi with chapati. If you have kneaded dough, making chapati for two takes at the most 10 minutes. So the first lunch meal prep idea is to knead the dough on weekend or whenever you have and store it in the fridge. The kneaded dough can be stored in the fridge for up to three days or in the freezer for two months. Therefore, you can knead twice a week (this is what I normally do) or knead once, divide into small balls, and store them in the freezer in an airtight container.
Tip: The trick to making the dough last longer is to add salt to flour at the time of kneading.
Chop Vegetables
Making dry sabzi becomes a 5 minutes job if you have chopped vegetables in the fridge. Vegetables like carrots, capsicum, cabbage, cauliflower, etc. can be easily stored in the fridge for up to a week. Onions are probably the most used vegetable in Indian kitchen so I will insist on chopping onions and storing in the fridge. You can also buy pre-cut vegetables from supermarkets.
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Prep Chilli, Garlic, and Ginger
My third lunch meal prep idea is to prep chilli, garlic, and ginger as they are used in most of the dry sabzis.
- Ginger – peel, grate, and store in the fridge
- Garlic – peel, grate, and store in the fridge
- Chilli – you can either finely chop and store them in the fridge or just remove the tops as it helps in keeping them fresh longer
Make Stuffing for Paratha
Another quick and easy meal to prep for is paratha. Once you have prepped for it, you can easily make six to seven parathas in fifteen minutes.
- You can knead and store dough for methi paratha. Just like the normal dough, it can be stored in the fridge for four days and in the freezer for up to two months in an airtight container. As with chapati dough, don’t forget to add salt to this dough as well.
- For other parathas like aloo paratha, muli paratha, or gobhi paratha, you can make stuffing on weekend and store it separately. Aloo masala can be stored for two days while muli and gobhi stuffing can be stored for up to five days.
Store Sabzis that Last Long
You can cook sabzis like karela or baingan on the weekends. They can be stored in the refrigerator for up to a week without any compromise in taste, making them a busy working couples best friend.
Conclusion
Lunch meal prep is a great way of reducing cooking time. It is especially useful for weekdays when you don’t have enough time to cook. Once you start segregating different elements of the meal and batch process, you can eat fresh homemade meals every day.
