Meal Prep Like a PRO | 5 Different Meals in Less Than 1 Hour

Meal prepping is a great way to set yourself up for the week, you can easily customise the recipes to your own diet, tailor them to your budget and make the week’s worth of food in one cooking session. This saves you so much time in the kitchen over the week.

But there’s a problem, with most meal prep methods you’re eating the exact same meal 5 days in a row. This gets boring, really quickly and this potentially life-changing cooking method gets forgotten about.

So in this blog post, I’m going to show you how you can easily adapt your meal-prep method so you’ll have 5 different meals, with different flavours, textures and most importantly eating experiences, all done in less than 1 hour.

There’ll be no extra work, the usual amount of washing up. All I’ll do is change the way you think about and approach you’re meal prepping.

Now you’re probably asking yourself….. “How are you going to do this?” So let’s jump straight into the prep so I can show you.

CHICKEN PREP

For this recipe I’m using skinless chicken breasts, we’re going to prepare them for maximum flavour and tenderness. Secure you chopping board, grab your sharpest knife.

First up we’ll trim off any bits of fat, silverskin, bone or anything else you don’t like the look of. Then remove the fillet aka tender if it’s still attached, you can either cook these separately or just save them for something else.

Position the breast with the thickest part facing your knife, lightly press the chicken onto the chopping board and make a horizontal cut going from top to bottom, only go around 90% of the way through, so the breast opens on a hinge.

Think of it like slicing into a baguette or pita bread, juts with less of a sawing action and more of a slicing action.

For all of this chicken prep you want to use the dirty hand clean hand method. So your left hand is going to deal with all the pieces of chicken and your right hand will stay clean and deal with everything else (if you’re right handed that is!) like you knife handle, seasonings, oil bottles etc etc.

If you forward plan by having some sheets of paper towel ripped off ready, salt in a dish that you can use with one hand instead of a grinder and things like cooking oil out on the side instead of in the cupboard.

Set yourself up like this then you’ll only need to wash your hands once, if you don’t then you’ll be in the sink washing your hands 10 times over. It may not seem like it but this is a HUGE time saver.

If you have any smaller pieces of chicken, then you can leave the fillet on so it’s a similar size to the other breasts, it’s the same process just fold the fillet out of the way so you don’t accidentally slice it off. Once you have your breasts butterflied it’s time to give them some flavour.

CHICKEN MARINATION

Cover them with a little cooking oil, rub it all over the surface of the meat so it’s covering the breasts edge to edge.

Then flip them over and do the same on the other side. Next up, season them with finely ground salt on both sides, whatever you like to use, kosher salt, Himalayan rock salt or maybe sea salt.

The first of the key ingredients to make this meal prep 2.0 method work is ground spices, more specifically spice blends. Im using Indian food as my inspiration for these recipes today, so i’ve chosen 5 popular Indian spice blends that can be easily made by mixing everyday day ground spices together.

I’m using Tikka Masala (which is probably my favourite), Tandoori Spice which is Indian BBQ, Garam Masala, Chaat Masala and England’s favourite…. the Mild Curry Powder. Just season the breasts all over, one spice per piece, rub the them in a little so the chicken is evenly covered, flip it over and do the same on the other side.

Repeat that process for all the breasts and with a little forward thinking you’ll have 5 different flavoured pieces of chicken done in 10 minutes,

If you don’t have a lot of these spices or don’t want to commit to buying so many at first then you can still achieve the same level of variety just in a simpler way.

For example we could do one breast with just cracked black pepper, one with paprika, garlic powder, cayenne, lemon zest, dried herbs, chilli oil, chilli flakes, fresh garlic, coriander, cilantro, smoked salt.

The possibilities really are endless.

How ever you decide to season your chicken, leave it to marinade for 20 minutes up to 24 hours.

The Rice

Next up the rice, I’m making a cheat version of Jeera rice, I’m cheating because this version only uses one spice instead of the traditional 7 or 8. But this one spice takes the rice to at least level 8 in terms of flavour and it’s actually what the recipe is named after…. Jeera aka cumin seeds.

For an authentic Indian flavour, you’ll want to use basmati rice but other types of long-grain rice will work for this recipe. You’ll need just under 1/2 a cup per serving, so I’m cooking 2 full to the brim cups for 5 servings. If you want to be more accurate with your measurements then 80g of raw rice per portion is a good size.

The first step is to wash the rice, just rinse it 2 or 3 times in water, until the water looks less milky, then leave it to sit in a strainer until we need it.

Cooking The Rice

Next place a larger saucepan over a medium heat and add some high smoke point oil. Ghee would work great as well Let that heat for a moment and add 4 teaspoons of whole cumin seeds.

Toast them for a few minutes over a medium heat until they smell fragrant then add the rice and continue to toast that for a few more minutes. This step is adding flavour to the rice as well as making it more forgiving to cook, it has less chance of coming out mushy and overcooked if you do this step.

It will stick to the base of your pan, but don’t panic keep the heat on medium to low and regularly stir to unstick. If you’ve never fried raw rice before this won’t feel normal, the pan will feel to dry and there won’t seem likes there much going on.

But after a few minutes your rice will be looking more like this, lightly golden in areas with an incredible toasted smell.

Now, add 1.5 cups of water for every cup of rice that you have. I’m cooking 2 cups of rice so I need 3 cups of water. Along with around a teaspoon and a half of salt.

Turn the heat to high, place a lid on and bring the pan to a simmer. Once it’s simmering turn the heat to as low as it can go and leave it to cook for 10 to 15 minutes.

Veg Prep

Moving onto the veg, this part of the recipe is so adaptable, use whatever seasonal vegetables you can get where you live. I used a carrot, butternut squash, red onion, broccoli and cauliflower.

For all of these to cook in the same amount of time in the oven, we need to cut the harder veg smaller than the softer veg. So the carrot is the hardest it’s going to get cut the smallest and the cauliflower is the softest so it’ll get cut into larger pieces.

For the carrot I’ve literally just cut it in half lengthways, i haven’t peeled it or anything. The squash is cut slightly bigger than the carrot. The onion i cut into quarters and for the broccoli and cauliflower i just them cut a big wedge, this is around a 10th of the head of cauliflower and a quarter of the head of broccoli.

Marinade Veg & Roast

Next Im going to do an optional super simple marinade for the veg, with oil, chilli flakes, salt and some black pepper. Give everything a good mix to get the veg evenly coat in the oil and seasonings.

I would usually do this in a mixing bowl but because I’m meal prepping and cooking this recipe in the fastest way, I’m saving precious minutes on the washing up.

Space everything out on the tray this will help the veg to roast evenly and quickly. Load that into a preheated oven set at 200c 390f for 15-20 minutes.

Back To The Rice

At this point your rice should be about done, you’ll know it’s ready when you can’t see any more water in the bottom of the pan.

Now just turn the heat off and leave it to sit, no draining, no drama, no rice cooker needed, just leave it to sit, steam and finish slowly cooking with the lid on.

Cooking The Chicken

Time to cook this chicken, it’s had around half an hour of marinading. Place your biggest saute pan over a high heat and add a little high smoke point oil, you don’t need much just a little.

Let that get hot for a few minutes until you start to see some wisps of smoke coming from the pan, then add in the chicken, for most frying pans you’ll probably be able to fit 2 to 3 breasts in at a time. Don’t try and cram them all in.

If your pan is smaller don’t worry just cook in more batches, or another great option is under the grill aka broiler, this uses less oil and its a really great hands-off way to cook this recipe in one hit.

After a 2 or 3 minutes check your happy with the colour, flip the breasts over and cook for another minute or 2 on the other side. Butterflying chicken like this is a real game changer in terms of time saved when cooking and the end result is a much more enjoyable piece of meat.

Once your happy the chicken is cooked place it onto to something to rest, in total they only took 4 or 5 minutes.

For the remaining chicken just give your pan a little extra oil if it needs it and repeat the process.

By this point, the veg has had 20 minutes of roasting, everything is evenly cooked because of the forward-thinking about sizes and cooking times. We’ve got well-roasted carrots and squash alongside crispy broccoli, great-looking onions and caramelised cauliflower.

The 5 Indian Spice Blends I Used

All measurements are in teaspoons, just simply mix the spices together.

• Tikka Masala – 1 coriander, 1 paprika, 0.5 turmeric, 0.25 nutmeg, 0.25 ground cardamom, 0.25 cinnamon, 1 cumin, 0.5 black pepper
• Curry Powder – 1 turmeric, 0.5 ground coriander, 0.5 ground cumin, 0.5 ground ginger, 0.5 black pepper.
• Tandoori – 1 chilli powder, 0.5 turmeric, 0.5 coriander, 0.5 cumin, 0.25 black peppercorns, 0.25 green cardamom, 0.25 ginger, 0.25 cinnamon, 0.5-1 chilli powder.
• Garam Masala – 0.5 cinnamon, 0.5 coriander, 3 cumin, 0.25 nutmeg.
• Chaat Masala – 1.5 cumin, 1 coriander, 0.5 ginger, 0.5 black pepper, 1 chilli powder.