5 Kitchen Must-Haves for Effective Meal Prepping

Ever want to start meal prepping, but don't know how to tackle the daunting task? Do you often wonder how people are managing to make so many meals in such a short amount of time? Well this blog post will highlight some must-haves in your kitchen that will make meal prepping a breeze.

1. Meal Prep Containers

This item is probably the most important one to have in your kitchen when meal prepping. One of the keys to successful meal prepping is having the meals packaged and ready to go. Not having your food already portioned out adds an extra step when you need to grab some food quickly.

There are many different types of meal containers. Your best bet would be to jump of Amazon to order them. The ones I use only have one compartment. They can be ordered here. If you prefer containers with more than one compartment, you can order them on Amazon as well. These meal prep containers are microwaveable and dishwasher safe.

2. Food Scale with Nutrition label

Portioning out food can be a nightmare. If your food comes with a nutrition label, perhaps you can manage portioning out your macros. But what if the food you want to portion out doesn't come with a label? Well this food scale is going to be your best friend.

This food scale offers nearly 3,000 food entries including custom entries you can input yourself. The scale will tell you what the physical weight of the food item is, as well as all the macronutrients it contains. This makes it very easy to portion out food using your macros.

3. Crockpot/Instant Pot

These two appliances are literally going to be your best friends when meal prepping. Meal prepping means you will be cooking food to last you at least 3 days if not more. This equates to a ton of food. To make it more manageable, cooking meals in the crockpot and/or instant pot is a time saver (literally).

I prefer the instant pot over the crockpot since it is a bit faster. However, throwing food in the crockpot and forgetting it for a few hours is also very convenient. If you have both appliances, you can totally have 2 meals going at once to make your meal prepping that much faster.

4. An Oven

This may seem silly, but much like the crockpot and instant pot, an oven can make meal prepping a breeze. There are a ton of recipes that can be done in the oven, and this is honestly my favorite way to cook. My favorite recipes to cook in the oven are "one pan" recipes. I have found many "one pan" recipes on Pinterest.

5. A Dishwasher

Again, this may seem silly, but after long hours slaving away in the kitchen, the last thing you want to do is slave away some more to clean up. Make sure all your tupperware is dishwasher safe, so you can throw them in and let the machine do the work. Of course you will still need to clean some things by hand, but putting what you can in the dishwasher will save you a ton of time.

I hope you found this helpful in your journey to meal prepping. Have you meal prepped before? What things have you found useful to help speed up the process?