Holy Mother of Joseph, I never thought I would become this organized to the point where I actually do a FULL WEEK VEGAN MEAL PREP. Can I get a HALLELUJAH!

Okay, I need to stop being over-dramatic.

A few weeks ago, I decided to get my hypothetical sh*t together and make an entire work week worth of food, so that

a) I could film it, and

b) I don’t have to worry about cooking or prepping food for the rest of the week.

I am generally quite good at prepping my lunches and making sure that I have food for a few days, rather than just cooking one meal at a time (who has time for this?!). But this was the first time I made an entire 5 days worth of food in one go, including all meals and snacks!

Full Week Meal Prep (YouTube Video) – see below for full ingredient list

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tPYw9jjhhk]

Not going to lie, it did take a long time (probably around 2.5 hours, but this includes filming and taking photos). But it was so awesome to have all the food ready to go and not having to worry about it for the whole five days.

Not only did I do a full week meal prep, but I actually wrote down everything and EVEN wrote down all the ingredients AND measurements!! Who thought this would happen?

I do apologize in advance and say that these measurements are APPROXIMATE and I don’t know for sure how accurate they are (I don’t actually have measuring cups or spoons currently). But generally, I don’t do a lot of measuring when I cook, because most of the meals that I make are so simple that you don’t really need to measure… why complicate things if you don’t need to?

Full Weekday Vegan Meal Prep (Affordable)

Now, I get lots of questions regarding meal prep, so I thought I’d write down a few tips and answer some common concerns people may have.

Please note that i am NOT a meal prepping expert or a professional meal prepper (I wonder if that’s a thing…?). I am just another person learning as I go and trying my best to prepare good meals so that I stay on track, save money and hopefully become fitter.

Meal Prepping Tips and Common Questions:

• In the video, I show you the meals in the order that they will be eaten. While I was prepping though, I like to start by making the ingredients that will take the longest to cook, first.
  • For instance, I cooked the barley (for the lunches) first in the rice cooker and while that was cooking, I started on chopping the sweet potatoes that needed to be steamed. Then I put the sweet potatoes in the steamer and while those were steaming, I started chopping the rest of the vegetables for the chili.
  • I made the chili first because I knew that this would take the longest to cook but I just had to leave it cooking in the pot and didn’t need to do much else. While the chili was cooking, I finished up everything else.
• In order to make the food last longer without spoiling, make sure you put everything into the fridge as soon as possible. Don’t let your food sit in room temperature for too long (unless it’s fruit or something). This food lasted me the whole five days (I froze some of the chili because I made too much).
• Speaking of the chili – this is super freezer friendly and I always make big batches and freeze some of it for later.
• Once you’ve frozen something, only heat it up once to avoid food spoilage.
• I generally don’t freeze fresh vegetables – not sure what the rule is with this, but I feel that freezing fresh vegetables ruins it somehow. If I want to freeze produce, I like to cook it first, then freeze. I could be wrong about this…. too lazy to research! Hah… just google “can I freeze (insert food here)”

ANDDDDD that is it! I really hope you guys enjoyed this meal prep video and my “tips” – let me know if you like this type of video accompanied with a blog post and I will definitely do more. These are a lot of work, so your feedback and commentary are totally appreciated.

Love you guys 🙂