A beginner’s guide on how to meal plan and meal prep for the week for seamless, delicious meals.

Do you often find yourself stressing over what to eat for dinner, scrambling for meal ideas, spending too much money on takeout, or struggling to maintain a balanced diet? If you want to cook less, eat well, save money throughout the week, say hello to meal planning! This is a game-changing habit that can transform the way you eat and save you time and stress throughout the week.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to meal plan and meal prep effectively, the compelling reasons to start, and the essential tools that will make your meal planning journey a breeze.

What is Meal Planning and Meal Prepping?

Meal planning and meal prepping go hand-in-hand to serve one ultimate goal: effortlessly get weekday meals to the table.

Meal planning involves strategising what meals you’ll prepare throughout the week. It’s essentially creating a roadmap for your meals. Meal planning is equally, if not more, important than the actual meal prep!

On the other hand, meal prepping takes that plan and turns it into action by pre-cooking or prepping components of those meals in advance.

Together, they form a dynamic duo that streamlines weeknight dinners.

Why Meal Plan?

Meal prepping holds the power to transform not just how we eat but how we navigate our day-to-day lives.

1. Relieves Decision Fatigue: Decision fatigue is real! At the end of a workday, just trying to decide what to eat for dinner can be a challenge in itself. Meal prepping and meal planning for the week takes the stress out of deciding what to eat everyday.

2. You’ll Save Time: Nobody wants to spend 1 hour over the stove after returning from work. Meal prepping means less time spent cooking and cleaning. With just one or two cooking sessions a week, you can reduce kitchen time drastically.

3. You’ll Save Energy: We’re wired for convenience; that’s undeniable. In a busy life, having meals ready to go makes a world of difference. It frees up time for activities you cherish, be it hitting the gym, pursuing hobbies, or simply relaxing. With meal prepping, you get more hours in your day without sacrificing nutrition or quality meals.

4. You’ll Save Money: Eating out can be a considerable expense, even at seemingly affordable spots. In Singapore, we are blessed to have affordable hawker centre meals. Even then, purchasing meals everyday can add up.

Let’s do some quick maths! If you eat out every weekday, for just one meal, for a family of four:

The cheapest, basic chicken rice meal you can find = $5/serving

$5 x 4 pax = $20

$20 x 5 days = $100

$100 x 4 weeks = $400

At the most minimum, for a family of your, you will be spending $400 every month for one basic, cheap meal that is rarely nutritious for your family of four. You will very likely spend more than this because let’s be real, $5 meals are a rare breed these days.

5. Reduce Food Waste: By utilising ingredients efficiently, you’ll minimise the chances of food spoiling before you can use it.

6. Make Healthy Eating a Habit: Beyond the financial benefits, you can get far more nutritious meals. Placing nutritious meals at the forefront of your fridge makes choosing the healthier option the easier choice. Along the same lines, most people who start meal planning or meal prepping do so to follow a diet or weight management plan. Having prepackaged meals simplifies calorie tracking.

Essential Tools to Start Your Meal Plan Journey

1. Meal Planner

The most important tool you need is a planner! You don’t need anything fancy; to start off, use a notebook or note taking app that is the most easily accessible and visible to you to jot down your meal plan for the week.

When I first started meal planning, I used my daily notebook that was always on my desk.

It’s easier to have a digital copy on my phone, so I moved meal planning to my phone. I used the Notes app on my iPhone – it’s free, accessible at all times and easy to use.

If you’re a Mac user like me, then you’ll find the seamless syncing across desktop and phone super helpful – especially when you’re browsing recipes. I have an iPad with the Apple Pencil, sometimes I even like to digitally jot down my meal plan on the Notes app.

Once I started using Notion as my everyday planner, I created a weekly meal planner. With Notion, I could easily access my meal plan on my desktop and on my phone. The planner is simple, but effective and allowed me to have a more wholesome view of my meal plans.

The Notion app has been my favourite meal planner to date! You can easily create a weekly meal planner like I did on Notion, or grab my template FOR FREE by joining my mailing list!

There are also meal planning apps that you can download. I have not tried any since the Notes and Notion apps work great for me.

If you use meal planning apps, drop me your recommendations!

2. Quality Storage Containers

Invest in a variety of airtight, reusable containers to store prepped ingredients or fully cooked meals. Glass or BPA-free plastic containers that are stackable are excellent options.

If you’re not ready to invest in those just as yet, you can use reusable ziplock bags. They will not last as long, nor as environmentally-friendly, but they are easy to use and inexpensive.

Another alternative are silicone bags – personally, I do not like them. They are hard to properly wash, especially if you don’t have a dishwasher. They are also not as flexible as thin ziploc bags, and can take up quite a bit of space in your fridge.

3. Labelling Tools

Labelling your containers or ziplocks will make them easier to grab. If you are freezing them, be sure to include the date that the food was prepared.

To label, use masking tape and paste on the container. Write on the papered surface with a pen or marker.

If you’re a little bit extra (like me!) use a label printer that can print waterproof labels. It keeps things neat, fun to use, and peels off very easily.

4. Kitchen Tools

These are my essential kitchen tools to make meal planning and prepping efficient:

• A good chef’s knife: You just need ONE good, sharp knife for meal prepping.

• A large wooden cutting board: I like to use a large wooden cutting board so I can do all of my vegetable prep at one go, instead of having to clear the board each time.

• A plastic cutting board: Optional, but I prefer using a separate plastic cutting board for my protein prep. A plastic board is lower maintenance than a wooden board, so I can scrub it clean without worry.

• Measuring cups and spoons: When starting out, measuring cups and spoons will be useful to follow precise measurements on recipes. Even though I can now eyeball measurements for my go-to meals, I still whip these out since I experiment with new recipes all the time for content.

• Plastic Bowls: These are basic bowls to portion out and contain vegetables and proteins as you’re prepping. I like using plastic bowls, since they’re light, cheap and easy to clean.

Useful equipments that would make good investments to speed up your meal prepping include:

• Blender: to quickly blitz sauces and marinades

• Food Processor: finely mince onions and garlic and slice or julienne vegetables

• Microplane Grater: to grate ginger or garlic

• Rice Cooker: I consider this my daily essential!

For my meal plan recommendations, you can check out my Amazon shopfront!

How to Meal Plan for the Week

Hopefully by now I’ve you’re convinced to give meal planning a go!

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown on how I meal plan and meal prep for efficiency:

Step 1: Pick a Meal Planning Day

The first step seems the most obvious, but it’s going to be the catalyst to your meal plan journey. I recommend that you pick one day a week that is designated for meal planning and prepping to establish a routine. Any day of the week that fit your schedule will work, but I usually pick the day I grocery shop.

For most of us, me included, Sundays would be a typical day for this since it’s an off day, and you can get fresh meals on Monday.

When I meal prep, it’s only for the week. I like having fresh meals for the week, instead of relying on my freezer everyday. It also allows me some flexibility in what I want to eat every week, so I can have a bit of fun in variety here. The thing is even when you meal prep for the week, sometimes you have extra meal packs, that you can then freeze for those emergency meals.

Meal planning and prepping sounds like a lot of work, but essentially it takes just a couple of hours. Gradually, as you become more adept at meal planning and prepping, you can even dwindle the entire process to just one hour, leaving you the rest of the weekend to enjoy!

Step 2: Draft a Menu and Shopping List

Take out your meal planner and roughly plan your meals. You do not need to spend too much time on this – the following steps will cover why.

My easy method is to brain dump all of the dishes I would want to make, or that come to mind. Need meal ideas? Browse here!

Since we’re at work (or school) in the daytime, the only meal I would need to prepare throughout the week would be dinner.

Brain dump all of the dinner ideas that come to mind. Then shortlist this to just 5-7 meals, depending how many days you plan to cook.

Then shortlist this to just 5-7 dinner ideas. It is much easier to strike things off the list.

• Time Spent: 5 minutes

Step 3: Grocery Shopping

Next, we grocery shop!

Once you have your menu, formulate a grocery list based on that. Make sure you have a quick peek at your pantry or fridge first.

The grocery list that you prepared should always be seen as more of a suggestion than an obligation. I advocate getting to the grocery store and picking out items that are fresh, and look good. Have fun with it and be flexible.

For example, I might get some tomatoes if they are looking extra plump and juicy that day. If there’s a sale on fresh salmon, I would get it even though I do not have a salmon dish on the draft menu. Similarly, broccoli is always on my list, but the market won’t necessarily have beautiful bouquets each time I go – it’s ok to not get them.

If you are online grocery shopping, you can save even more time here. Personally I enjoy the process of a slow morning grabbing breakfast (or brunch) and then grocery shopping.

• Time Spent: 1 hour

Step 4: Menu Review

Now, depending on how far you’ve veered off your grocery list, you may need to review your meals for the week.

This is where the real meal planning begins. The good news is that it will be much easier at this stage since:

1. you already have a first draft of meals,
2. you simply need to replace ingredients, and
3. at most, you may just need to replace 1-2 recipes and meals. Refer to your brain-dump list if you’re stumped!

You can start to dedicate meals to days of the week at this stage. I like using the Notion weekly planner as well, since I get an overview of the week in a glance.

TIP! If you have Google calendar, or a calendar app that you refer to daily, you can pull it up and start plugging in which meal you’ll have on which day of the week.

• Time Spent: 10 minutes

Step 5: Meal Prep!

Meal prepping is the final step to easy breezy weeknight dinners. This is where you spend time batch cleaning, chopping, marinating and portioning your ingredients.

There are a couple of ways to meal prep. You can spend more time on that day cooking your meals to completion, and store in containers in the fridge.

The other way is to prepare the raw ingredients, and portioning them in containers. I prefer the second way since I like having freshly-cooked meals. To me, the process of preparing the ingredients and marinating takes up the most time and effort than the actual cooking, which I enjoy anyway.

To meal prep ingredients, I like to do this in 2 stages, vegetable prep and protein prep. You may also want to add a couple more stage: carb prep and sauce or marinade prep.

1: Vegetable Prep

This is a crucial step and often overlooked. That first step of cutting aromatics and vegetables can be the biggest decision maker in you having a home-cooked meal that day.

This is how I like to prep my vegetables:

The first step is to always clean and wash the vegetables.

I like to soak them in a simple salt water rinse to clean out impurities, especially any residual pesticides.

How to Salt Water Rinse: Rinse vegetables clean with water. Then fill a large bowl with water and add a couple tablespoons of salt. Give a quick stir to combine and place vegetables in the bowl. Let it sit for about 10 minutes. Then drain the vegetables and give another rinse in water to remove excess salt. A colander would be useful for this. If there are any excess water, especially with leafy vegetables, use a salad spinner. Pat dry with paper towels.

Then chop, cut and slice your vegetables. I always cut the vegetables the same way, and about the same size. For example, a piece of broccoli will be roughly similarly-sized as the cauliflower.

Prep the aromatics as well. Peel, slice, chop or mince onions, garlic, and ginger. Store these in an airtight container and keep in the fridge to retain flavour. If you are making any aromatic paste, now would be a great time for it too.

If you have fresh herbs, I do not recommend including them for meal prep since they wilt and bruise easily. Instead, give them a few gentle pats with paper towels to dry off any moisture and store them wrapped in new dry paper towels to keep them fresh.

• Time Spent: 30 minutes

2: Protein Prep

If you purchased your proteins fresh, store them in the fridge while you prep the vegetables. If you purchased them frozen, leave it out while you prep the vegetables. By the time you are ready for protein prep, the meat would have thawed just enough, to separate from each other, or for marinating.

Assuming you purchased your proteins fresh – now’s the best time to marinade your proteins, or chop and slice them to preference, according to what you’re making!

If you need some easy recipes:

• Top 5 Asian Chicken Marinades
• Top 5 Asian Salmon Marinades

• Time Spent: 30 minutes

3: Carb Prep (optional)

Rice:

We’re a rice household and I make a big batch of freshly cooked rice every couple of days. The balance gets stored in the fridge, and blitzed in the microwave to heat it up the next day! Bonus points: I have overnight rice at the ready every time I’m craving for some fried rice. I generally don’t make more than 3 cups of rice, but you can.

If you want to make enough for the entire week, you can. Do note that rice can dry out easily. To revive it, sprinkle on some water on the rice before microwaving.

Noodles:

Portion out dry noodles or pasta. For convenience, you can also place these in the fridge in containers near the ingredients that you’ll be cooking them with.

For fresh noodles, portion these out and place near accompanying ingredients. Do not wash or rinse fresh noodles – do this only when you are ready to cook.

• Time Spent: 10 minutes

4: Sauce Prep (optional)

I’m a sauce girl, and I love having a jar of homemade sambal in the fridge! I don’t do this every week; only when I run out, which can be every 2-3 weeks.

My favourite Malay dishes such as Ayam Masak Merah, Mee Goreng, and Paprik Stir Fry use sambal as a base, so having a jar ready to go skips the lengthy sambal cook-down time at the beginning. If you also want ready-to-go sambal, check out these recipes:

1. Basic, versatile Sambal
2. The ULTIMATE Sambal recipe

If you have stir fries in your meal plan, you can premix the sauces at this stage too.

Other sauces you can try include:

• Sambal Belacan / Sambal Terasi
• Sambal Kicap

Or browse the sauce and condiment recipes here for some inspiration!

In Conclusion

This is a comprehensive guide, but meal planning and meal prepping is truly a simple, straightforward process to make your weeknights that much easier.

These are the 5 steps to get started in a nutshell:

1. Pick a day to Meal Plan and Meal Prep
2. Brain dump a Weekly Menu
3. Write out Grocery List and Grocery Shopping
4. Menu Review
5. Meal Prep!

Ready to Get Started with Meal Planning?

Meal planning is a simple yet powerful strategy that transforms how you eat and manage your time.

With thoughtful planning, streamlined grocery shopping, and the right tools, you’ll not only save time and money but also enjoy healthier, homemade meals every day.

This entire meal planning and meal prepping process takes a total of 2.5 hours – that’s not even an entire morning – to get you delicious, homecooked meals over the week.

If you tried this, let me know! I’m constantly tweaking my meal planning and meal prepping process! If you have any tips, tricks and meal prep shortcuts, share them in the comments down below.