Whole30 Week 4 Meal Plan and Prep

We made it! All the way through the Whole30. I’m so proud of us LOL!

This week we took much different approach than we had in the past, by prepping all of our meals for the whole week on Sunday evening.

Meal prepping is something I’ve been wanting to try doing for a while, but you know how it is: you do things one way your whole life, and it takes a bit of effort to get out of the rut.

So there were really two things that ended up being the catalyst for trying this meal prep thing:

• I was informed that I wasn’t eating enough protein, and in order to pick up the slack, I needed to do some serious planning.
• We wanted to spend as much time as possible up at the new house this week tearing things up, so I needed to cut down on time spent making meals.

So, instead of cooking at every meal this week, I spent all of Sunday afternoon in a crazy busy cooking session.

This particular meal plan is going to be terribly boring and repetitive, largely because I did it on a whim, but since it was food we liked, no big deal.

Don’t forget, if you enter your email address in the box below, you’ll get access to full, detailed instructions on how to have a meal prep sesh, with a detailed grocery list.

This week’s meals:

Breakfasts:

• Quiche with hash brown crust (recipe coming next Tuesday)
• Egg and sausage scramble, “apple pie,” sweet potato hash browns (recipe coming soon!)
• Eggs and sausage scramble with hash browns
• Egg and sausage quiche with a hash brown crust
• Egg and sausage scramble with sweet potato hash browns
• Egg and sausage scramble with hash browns

Repetitive, as you can see, but since the kids have decided they love scrambled eggs as long as there’s sausage involved, I’m happy with it.

Here’s the Breakfast prep plan:

• Shred potatoes and store them submerged in water.
• Shred Sweet potatoes and store them in a ziplock bag
• Make sausage out of 1/2-1 pound ground beef, brown, crumble, and store in the fridge.

Every morning, it took just a few minutes to put the ingredients together and cook them.

Even if I don’t stick with food prep for all our meals, I think prepping breakfast is going to be key to keeping us from going back to the ever-easy and quick oatmeal and grits routine.

Lunches:

• Chicken caesar salad

Yep, every day. I may have mentioned a few times that I’m a really big fan of salad, and this is a super easy way to make lunches to go – just grab a container, top it with salad dressing, and head out the door!

And btw, for us, chicken Caesar salad means green salad with chicken and other vegetables in it – we usually don’t use cheese, croutons, or even caesar dressing!

Lunch Prep Plan:

• Bake chicken
• Hard-boiled eggs
• Slice olives and cucumbers

For my lunches, I measured out 6 ounces of chicken for each meal and cut it into bite-sized pieces, added two sliced eggs, about a tablespoon of olives, and one cup of spinach, and then divided the cucumber between the six containers (I forgot about the bell peppers; otherwise I would have added those!)

For the kids, I just did chicken, spinach, and olives – they don’t care for boiled eggs or cucumber.

Dinners:

• Hamburgers
• Roasted Sweet Potatoes
• Mixed Vegetables

I went ahead and cooked the hamburgers for dinners – or at least, I started to, but it ended up taking more beef than I had thawed out (since, you know, I didn’t think to do the math). So I made most of the hamburgers since they’re pretty easy to reheat.

Dinner Prep Plan:

• Roast sweet potatoes (while the chicken is baking in the oven)
• Fry hamburgers in every available skillet and griddle
• Put broccoli and cauliflower in the instant pot

Since the instant pot only holds so many vegetables, and I was running out of containers to put everything in, I only made enough vegetables to last through Wednesday.

Snacks:

• Green Smoothies
• Almonds
• Apples with almond butter
• Freeze-dried strawberries
• Bananas

There were a couple of days that we didn’t go out to the house we were working on, so I did some extras with the kid’s lunches – we made tacos one day and fried potatoes to go with the chicken another day.

But that’s pretty much it!

In this week’s grocery list, I put the specific quantities of ingredients that we used. This list is for myself and the kids. Six ounces of chicken per lunch for me, and three ounces each for them, and the same with hamburgers.

A repetitive meal plan? Sure is! But it allowed me to spend more time at the construction site!