New Year's Resolution #1: Meal Prep

Who else falls into the "I had a long day, I don't want to cook, lets eat out" cycle? We do! And we usually don't pick healthy options and it also costs us way more money than if we just ate at home. So, to kick of the New Year right I did a healthy grocery haul complete with a meal plan and meal prep!

I have always been pretty good about meal planning. I have followed the Tone It Up  exercise and nutrition plan for a few years now. If you see on my instagram posts tagged like #tiuteam or #tiuapproved that is what I am referring to. There is a HUGE  Tone It Up community of supportive women out there in the social media world. Check out Tone It Up if you have time and I'll do a more extensive post on them in the future. I have a bit of an obsession :)  ANYWAY, I bring them up because most of my recipes from this week are theirs!

So to start off my week I always sit down and meal plan and make my list. I usually use the chart from this post by Eat Yourself Skinny. It allows me to include my workout plan (which Tone It Up posts every Sunday!) to make my "health schedule" visible at a glance.

Then I make my list and head to the grocery store and leave with a cart looking like this:

Love seeing it full of healthy colors!

When I get home I throw on my cute apron. It makes the food taste better. :)

Then I like to gather my ingredients per recipe in little piles. Of course some recipes will share ingredients, but this at least cuts time from constantly going back to the pantry.

Then I dig in! You can either start my chopping up everything you will need all at once and then going back into the recipes or you can work through one by one. I tend to work through each recipe one at a time.

After just a couple hours I had:

Tone It Up Black Bean Soup It is a crockpot recipe so I just went ahead and put it in the crock and into the fridge. Now I just have to pull it out and turn it on!

I also prepared their Hearty Mushroom Soup by chopping all my veggies and placing them in a gallon size freezer bag.

(It's snowing outside and apparently soups sounded delish to me when I planned!)

Here is a Baked Mexican Brown Rice side to go with either some tacos or a chicken breast later this week. I prepped all the way to the baking part. I will do that the night we want to eat it!

Shrimp tacos are so easy by tossing some raw shrimp with chili powder and olive oil in a freezer bag. I'll just throw them in a skillet and cook through. Then the toppings are really no prep if you just pull out some greek yogurt (my sub for sour cream) some lettuce, salsa, and avocado!

I got a whole chicken that will cook in the crockpot. I did all the veggie chopping (carrots, celery, onion) and lemon juicing now and put it in a freezer bag. Now I just dump it all into the crock with some veggie broth and go!

Finally I did some quinoa and veggie enchiladas. So much simpler to pull them out of the fridge and into the oven!

Even though this does take a couple hours in one shot I feel it saves me some stress and money later. Worth it in my opinion. I always like to make meals that make great leftovers too. Another money saver. You can do meal prepping with many recipes you have in your Pinterest boards! I know we all love that site :) Feel free to follow me! The Pinterest button in the side bar will take you straight there.

I hope this simple idea sparked some inspiration! I am sure there are a lot of busy bees out there. Let's try to make at least one part of our week easier on ourselves!  What are some of your favorite recipes??

xoxo,
Brittany