Winter Meal Prep Tips & Dinner Ideas | Meal Plan FREE DOWNLOAD

In today's video, I'm gonna show you how I take my weekly meal plan for my family and then how I prep all the ingredients ahead of time to save me lots of time in the kitchen throughout the week. Now, I have a winter-inspired menu with cozy, warm recipes that I know that you're gonna love. Now, if you're new around here, I'm Laura and I share fresh and family-friendly meals a few times a week on this channel. But today's weekly plan is gonna be available for you to download in a link below the video. So don't worry, you don't need to take notes while you're watching this video. You just watch, cook along, press pause, let's do this. My tips today are going to include how to prep your produce, how to minimize food waste, and how to store everything that you have got prepped in the fridge so you can whip up dinner and lunches in a fraction of the time. Now, this week's dinner menu is going to include a slow cooker minestrone soup, Korean chicken bowls, roasted vegetables topped with fried eggs, shrimp fried rice, and breakfast for dinner night. I'm also going to get ahead of lunches while everything is cooking by making some mini quiches. You're gonna see how all of those are going to get incorporated into lunches, into a meal plan, and then how I keep everything in my fridge. Sounds good? Let's get started. One quick tip before you get started with your weekly meal prep is to make sure you print out the recipes that you're gonna use for the week, or you at least have them on an iPad or an iPhone really close to you so you know what to do next. Now, something that I do and I include in my meal plans is the prep guide, so I already know from the recipes the prep that I need to do, so that's what you and I are gonna do today. The minestrone is really a great and simple recipe that you can whip up really quickly. I just coarsely chopped some carrots. I'm gonna put them in the slow cooker. I already chopped some onions, which you would chop right now. You can also use frozen onions and save yourself some time, so those are gonna go in the slow cooker. I have some green beans that you can use frozen, fresh, or canned, whatever you have available. My zucchini is also gonna go in the bowl. I also have beans that I've rinsed and drained. Now, something really helpful to make meal prep go quickly is to grab all of the ingredients for that particular recipe at a time and bring them onto your counter. So now that everything is in our slow cooker, I'm just going to mix all of my ingredients. Now, I know that this recipe is going to be ready for me to pull it out of my refrigerator first thing in the morning, let it cook all day long while I go to work, and then the minestrone soup is gonna be ready when I get home. All right, so everything is inside of the bowl of my slow cooker, and all I have to do is take some plastic wrap and cover my bowl. I'm going to literally just refrigerate it just like this in my fridge. Now, according to the recipe, all I have to do is add the pasta in the last 30 minutes before serving, so this whole recipe is ready. Up next, I am going to also cook my rice. I am having fried rice this week, so super easy way to save time and get that recipe started really quickly is to have the rice prepped and ready for you for when you need it. I'm just cooking my rice on the stovetop for 20 minutes while I do the rest of the prep, so that's one easy step that I can get out of the way. I'm also gonna make my salad dressing for the week is a quick vinaigrette recipe that I have on this channel. In a small lidded jar, I'm just going to add my olive oil, my balsamic vinaigrette, some Dijon mustard, salt, pepper, and honey, and just like this, my dressing for the week is ready to go. Up next, I am going to make the marinade for our Korean chicken. Now, it's super simple. I'm gonna put everything inside of this zip bag, and again, the ingredients and measurements are all gonna be right below this video, so make sure to grab them. So now that all of my ingredients are in the bag, I'm just going to swish them around to combine them, and then place my chicken breasts in the bag. By having the chicken sit in the marinade bag is going to taste so much better. It's gonna absorb all of those flavors, and most importantly, it's gonna be ready to go when I need it for dinner. You're gonna want to mix all the ingredients with your chicken, and after that, get all the air out and make it as small as possible so you can fit it in your fridge. So now that the chicken is marinated, the next thing I wanna do in my recipe to-do list is prep the slaw for that recipe. What's awesome about this is the more you can prep and chop a few days ahead of time, the more time you're going to save. Off-camera, I prepped my peppers, and I took a vegetable peeler and prepped my carrots. The slaw part is a red cabbage, which I'm gonna be using for two recipes this week. So I'm just going to slice off a big chunk of the cabbage and start chopping it. Into my slaw bowl, I'm going to add the dressing ingredients really quickly. Slaw, it's always better the next day or a day after that. Plus, it keeps in my fridge for up to three days. I'm just going to toss everything around. Now that my slaw is ready, I'm simply gonna cover it with a lid, or you could wrap it and then place it in my refrigerator, and that's one less thing to do. All right, guys, so now that our rice is ready, I am simply going to transfer my rice into a meal prep container, and I'm going to wait for it to cool down to room temperature before I place the lid on it and refrigerate it. It is true that day-old rice makes better fried rice, so while this cools down, I'm going to move on to my next recipe, which is my root vegetable hash. So I'm simply gonna finish chopping off these potatoes and the beets, put them on my roasting pan, and I have other videos on roasting beets and root vegetables as well, which I'll link below, but the idea is is that once your vegetables are cooked and roasted and they cool down to room temperature, you can also transfer them into a food prep container, put the lid, and refrigerate it for up to three days. The final two things that I want to get ahead of for the week are some mini quiches that I'm gonna show you how I whip these up really quickly and prep them in the fridge for lunches, and I also want to tell you that a great idea for lunch is to grab a rotisserie chicken from the store or roast your own, whatever you do at home, take the meat off, put it in a zip bag, and this is gonna be ready to make chicken salad or chicken wraps in just a few minutes in the morning, so having your protein ready is a really helpful and time-saving tip. For the mini quiches, I'm simply going to crack my eggs in a bowl. These are awesome because they're high in protein, they're a simple make-ahead lunch, or you can also have these for breakfast and warm them up in just a few minutes. I have quite a few other mini quiche recipes on this channel. I'll make sure to link them right below, and what I love is that I can make an entire batch and have either breakfast ready for a couple of days or lunches. Let me show you what we've prepped today with the weekly meal plan. Just by following the prep guide, today I was able to do the slaw and the rice and chicken for our Korean chicken bowls. The rice is also gonna be used for a fried rice recipe later in the week. Our root vegetables are going to be in a bowl with our fried eggs. For lunches, I did these mini quiches and the chicken and some sliced oranges for snacks or at lunchtime, and of course, the very first recipe, which is our ready-to-go slow cooker. Now, as you can see, by taking a few minutes to create a plan for the week and a thorough shopping list that I can take with me to the store once a week or order online, and then I can just prep all of this by following the prep sheet in about two hours at the beginning of the week or on Sunday afternoon, I can minimize food waste, meet my food budget, and get fresh and healthy meals on the table in a fraction of the time.