Guidelines for prepping meals in advance?

[sstype]

I am going to get my diet in order and i understand the importance of preparing your meals ahead of time so that you dont get stuck w/o food and a trip to the vending machine or fast food joint.

One of my concerns is food spoilage. I do have a deep freezer but I do not know how to properly freeze and store meat. I also would like to know how safe is it to cook a meal and then refrigerate it for use maybe 3-5 days later. Ideally I would like to get all my cooking done on a Sunday and then just portion out my meals in tupperware so I can just grab and go during the week.

What do you guys do?

 

[RedPill]

I was doing this exact same thing for awhile, and ever since October my business has put all regular workouts and eating big on hiatus for awhile. It's killing me not to eat and lift big, but building the business is more important right now.

Sundays I made thick beef and chicken stews. These were some of the best things I ever tasted, full of tender meat and flavor, but eating stew like 4 times a day is bad for business. It's messy and a pain in the ass to heat up and eat quickly. In a couple months when I ramp up the eating again, I will return to the Sunday cooking marathons, so this is a good discussion topic.

Freeze anything that won't be consumed in the next 48 hours. Not because it's going to kill you to eat week old leftovers, but this way the food stays at maximal freshness, and you anything you can do to avoid getting sick of eating the same thing all week is a good thing. Variety is a good thing to, so long as all your meal creations are of similar quality. What I've found from cooking your weekly rations en masse is that you really have to consider how your body/mind will react to eating the same foods frequently. You don't want to make 3 different types of meal for the week, and find that one of them is by far better than the others, or you'll eat it right away and get bored quickly with the inferior tasting meals. Silly as it sounds, the trade-off for mass production is a lack of variety, and it's something to keep in mind when Sunday rolls around. I wish my life was simple enough that I could grill a new meat and play Iron Chef every day, but that's not the case.

Some other tips...

- Cut meat into bite size pieces before cooking. Some meat shears will make it easy.
- Moisture retention is very important, so make meals that are very moist to begin with.
- Use bold seasonings and flavors, because often they tend to diminish after storing.
- Cram as much food as you can into those little containers.
- Get really creative with your containers of vegetables, because if you're eating big you're going to want (and need) to eat a lot of them

 

[Create Reality]

Are you talking about storing cooked meat? If so I think it would be okay to lock it up in an airtight container, and just freeze it. To defrost it you should use the microwave. Meat thats gone bad has a very nasty smell and its pretty easy to tell when its gotten to that point.

Gravy or some kinda sauce will help you choke down food that has gone semi dry. Pick one you like and try to keep it low fat.

Storing food in the fridge is okay, AS LONG AS the container is AIRTIGHT and the temperature of the food never goes above 40ºF before it is reheated. Most food is very easy to tell if it's gone rancid, so just keep a lookout.

 

[Throttle]

freeze cooked stews, chili, veggies, etc. in a plastic airtight container.

freeze raw or cooked meat by wrapping first in plastic wrap and then aluminum foil. you can skip the plastic wrap if you like the taste of aluminum (yum!)

refrigerate any cooked meal in a plastic airtight container for up to a week. you generally don't want its taste affecting everything else. as said above, if meat is truly rancid, don't worry, you won't be able to choke it down.

warmed leftovers are always better if you add some sort of spice. if you're warming in a microwave, always add a bit of water (you'll have to experiment on more precise quantities), because microwaves work by bringing the moisture in food to a rapid boil. if it comes out steaming, it's surely lost some liquid.