A few months ago, I started meal prepping a month’s worth of dinners for my mom. She has debilitating osteoarthritis and can’t cook anymore, so she was basically subsistenting on Hungry Man dinners and Stoffer’s mac & cheese. Unsurprisingly, her health was deteriorating rapidly!
Once I learned this was her situation, I bought a ton of containers and went about preparing her anti-inflammatory meals and providing her with healthy breakfasts and snacks. It isn’t helping with the pain as we hoped it might, but her blood work was so much better at her last doc visit and she’s also gaining weight, which she needed.
That said, it’s most of a day to shop for and prep ~30 dinners (4-5 servings each of 7 different meals), not including the planning and 200 mile round trip commute to take it to her. With chronic pain and fatigue, it’s a weekend I dread each month! But it’s important, so l’m doing it for the foreseeable future.
I mostly use simple recipes from cookbooks I bought or have checked out from the library (thus no links in captions, sorry! :/ ), but a couple recipes are more involved. Now that I’ve got a good sense of her likes and dislikes, I need to figure out how to make this whole process less overwhelming and more efficient.
Might you pros have any advice for this newbie?
by elle23nc
1 Comment
Do you have a crock pot and/or instant pot? You could put a big batch of soup in it while you cook more involved recipes. Look for “dump meals” they are typically easy to prep.
You could also prep a few meals throughout the month and freeze them rather than prep all at once, assuming you have the freezer space. Or double what you are cooking for yourself and freeze that.