Robert H Myers

Routine is a superpower. No true greatness is achievable without it.

The easiest routine you can build for yourself will take a couple of hours a week, save you a ton of money, and help you be healthier. I’m talking about meal prep.

GOALS come before ACTION

There’s a reason monks shave their heads, wear togas, and take vows of silence. These aren’t affectations; they are logical actions driven by their goal. Their only goal in life is to achieve oneness with the universe. Anything that takes time away from that pursuit is time wasted.

Similarly, we need to think about what you want. For me, that was saving time during the week, avoiding the urge to get takeout or fast food, and saving money. Let’s take a wild leap and say you’ve got the same goals.

1. Save Time – by prepping ingredients on Sundays, we can quickly assemble meals during the week with minimal effort and clean up.
2. Avoid Eating Takeout – by investing in prep for a couple of hours each week, we’re far less likely to eat out due to our internal hatred for sunk costs.
3. Save Money – groceries are far cheaper than anything else. But we don’t have to eat like poor monks. Tasty options abound.

MODULARITY IS KING

I’ve got full-blown ADHD. Like bad. Like, oh, squirrel, where am I, bad. That necessitates variety. And variety is, after all, the spice of life. And this is about cooking. So…

The best way to get variety is to focus on the building blocks of meals rather than on thoroughly planned, cooked meals from the get-go. We want items that can be combined quickly, when we want, and how we want, without all the clean up during the week. This is the central tenet of the whole thing.

THINK about BREAKFAST/LUNCH/DINNER

I only prep for the work week. As Debbie Deb noted, Weekends were made for Fun. So we need to think about roughly fifteen meals. Easy peasy.

Breakfast – I go to the gym each morning and want eggs as my go-to for protein. Maybe straight up. Maybe an omelet. We’ll need eggs and some shredded cheese, light additions like diced veggies, and perhaps some bacon or sausage.

Lunch – For more than a decade, I had a salad almost every weekday. Good fiber, endlessly remixable, pair with different dressings and croutons, and you can’t get more variety while also adding something healthy. They also keep incredibly well for up to a week.

Dinner – This can be anything. But quality is better than quantity. Keep it tight, but tasty. Think first about proteins and then parings. If you go with steak, seafood, etc., you’ll want to eat them in the first couple of days. Chicken holds up better down the stretch. I avoid a massive casserole, since no one wants to eat it more than twice.

THINK INGREDIENTS

This week, I’m going with a general Mexican vibe and a few one-offs for dinner, salads for lunch, and omelets for breakfast. Here’s how I’ll make my shopping list.

BONUS TIP: Make your shopping list in the order you walk through your store. I go: Deli – Produce – Meat – Seafood – Cheese – Aisles – Eggs – Frozen. The top of my paper is for the stuff in the first third, and so on.

Deli – We want some sandwiches, so we’re getting a pound of Boar’s Head Honey Maple ham, sliced stupid thin. Like you should be able to watch the new Avatar movie through one of the slices. Some Publix white American cheese (1/2 lb) and some Italian bread from the bakery. This will yield about 8 good-sized sammies, no problem. My kids like them grilled on a pan.

Produce – We’re doing salads, so we want a bag of romaine hearts. We’ll slice each heart into quarters longwise and chop it into half-inch segments. Toss in a big ass bowl to mix, and then into five or six reusable containers.

We’ll need a couple of large tomatoes – one to dice completely for our Tex-Mex bowls/wraps/whatever, and one of half-slice for sammies, and the other half diced for eggs. Boom, into containers.

Massive sweet onion; half for salads, half for dinner or breakfast.

Green pepper – same as above. Massive. We might do two if there isn’t one the size of a human head.

Mushrooms, sliced – use for breakfast omelets or sautee with some onion for a steak add-on. Maybe pizza toppings.

Cilantro – my family likes the Chipotle rice, so I recreate it at home by dicing up fresh cilantro and adding some lime zest and the juice of a lime to the finished white rice.

Fruit – I found that my kids are more likely to eat fruit if I prep it ahead of time in tiny deli containers. I usually make 15-20 of them per week. Each is snack-size and good for a grab-and-go. I do a pint of strawberries, a pound of cotton-candy grapes, a container of blueberries, maybe a cored pineapple, and either some cubed marinated apples (cold water and lemon juice will keep them from oxidizing) and orange slices.

Proteins – We’re going to do steak and chicken for the Tex-Mex bowls, so let’s get two pounds of chicken and a pound of steak. Butterfly the chicken breasts down the middle and season the hell out of them. Kinder makes great seasoning blends, but even a basic seasoning salt is a solid option. Pan-fry these guys in a bit of oil over medium-high heat for about 4 minutes a side, give or take. Less for the steak. Let rest for 5-10 minutes before slicing on an angle. Containers, fridge, done.

We’re going to get a box of microwavable bacon (easy, cheap, fast, keeps forever) for breakfasts, and a package of breakfast sausage we’ll par-cook in the air fryer for five minutes. We’ll just do the last-minute in the microwave on mornings when we want a couple.

Cheese – we want some shredded sharp for eggs and some Mexican blend for our Tex-Mex bowls/whatever. Maybe a bag of mozzarella for a home-made pizza.

Pizza – My Publix has pre-made/pre-rolled pizza dough for about $4 – a steal. Get one of these, stretch it slightly to make a large pizza, top it with sauce, cheese, and your favorite toppings, and you’ve got a winner. The key here is HIGH heat. Needs to be like Bugs Bunny doing a high dive into a glass of water. Like 30 stories high. But in temperature. Take your oven to its limits, and then beyond them. Mine goes to 525, so I pre-heat there. Then, after 5-10 minutes, I tell it to go to 520 because the internal temp has already dropped 15-20 degrees. They just do that. Get it screaming hot. Nine minutes for a fully loaded pizza at 525. Dust the crust with garlic powder and a little olive oil before cooking. You’re an artist. Act like it. Get a pizza screen.

Aisles – We need rice, so let’s get a basic white rice for our Chipotle rip-off. We’re going to cook as directed, then immediately transfer it to a giant mixing bowl with a drizzle of oil, cilantro, lime juice, and a pinch of salt, and set it aside. We also want some taco sauce or sweet-chili sauce for the bowls.

Pasta – My kids like this protein pasta (gym), so we’re going to get a pound of that and cook it as directed. Add a little olive oil and garlic powder when done, and put it into the fridge. We’ll pair it with a little store-bought sauce as needed.

PREP

Now that we’re home, we’re going to prep it all. Do more than one thing at a time. If you have a partner at home, you can clean while you cook, and this will go pretty fast.

We’re going to bring a big pot of water to a boil for the pasta, and we’ll prep our rice water as well. If you season the rice water with salt, lime zest, and a drizzle of olive oil, it will speed up the process. Save the juice until you’re ready to mix in the cilantro.

Prep the meats, season them, and set them aside to reach room temperature before cooking.

Salads – we’re going to chop the lettuce, get it in containers, and then do our other toppings. This week, I want ham as the protein, so I’ll slice up some deli ham and toss it on top of each with a little shredded cheese. These go into a bag to take to work, so I don’t worry about forgetting them each day.

The Tex-Mex bowl prep works best when you can use a large, flat container that holds several smaller bowls. I’ll put in all the ingredients needed to make tacos, a bowl, or a burrito, and then you just need to remove one item from the fridge to assemble them as desired. But even in separate, smaller containers, this isn’t a problem.

The chicken and veggies will be available for a variety of uses throughout the week. We’re less likely to waste things since they aren’t single-use.

In a couple of hours, you’ve handled the vast majority of your meals for the week at minimal cost while retaining most of your freedom of choice. You can quickly assemble meals throughout the week to each person’s taste. My oldest likes grilled chicken, lots of sauce, and cheese in his pasta. Done. My youngest is the opposite. Done.

The Magic Bullet

Over 20 years ago, my wife and I watched this infomercial for a dumb blender called “The Magic Bullet” three times in a row one morning while nursing hangovers. A couple of months later, we found it in a Macy’s and decided to get it after my wife said she would do “so much cooking if I had this. All of the cooking! I swear! It’ll make it so easy!!!”

Cut to two months later, and she hadn’t made a thing. She bought all the ingredients in the recipe book, but hadn’t bothered to create one. When I asked about it, she offered to make me something, just name it! Ok, nachos. I love nachos. It was featured in the infomercial, make me those.

There was roughly forty-five minutes of banging and hammering, and I think I saw her use an arc-welder in there, but no nachos. Finally, she emerged like John Rambo returning from ‘Nam, with eyes that had seen some shit, and holding a plate of chips covered in chunks of cheddar cheese that had been partially melted. I asked where the toppings were. You know, onion, tomatoes, meat, sour cream, etc…?

She looked at me with utter defeat in her soul. The real magic in the Bullet blender was the marketing that made you think there was a shortcut.

There is no shortcut. There is only the work. And the life you want is on the other side of it.

It took me a bit to realize that the infomercial STARTS with everything prepped for the presenters. They’re regularly popping random things into it, and you think, Oh, how quick and convenient! But you’re missing the fact that someone had to prep all of that stuff! That’s what has to be done. There’s no escaping it.

Shoutouts and Final Thoughts

Big shout to our friend Hannah (aka Boca) for sending me a text this morning asking about my thoughts on meal prep, which were far too numerous to include in a text, so this post was born. Thanks!

If you want to make larger batches, freeze half of them! I made a ton of chili a month ago and just pulled a quart out for this week. Great way to save even more effort down the road.

I experiment all the time. I’ll Google a recipe for something like lobster bisque. I’ll read 4-5 of them and get a sense of what each is trying to do, and I’ll either pick one to make or take parts from all of them. This gets me moving in the right direction, and I can learn from the results.

Use the same cutting board for veggies. Ditto the same pan for meats and sauteeing veggies. Clean while you cook. I can’t stress this enough.

Routine doesn’t have to be boring. It does have to be consistent. It takes three weeks to form a new habit. Make yourself prep for the next three weeks, and you’ll be hooked. Start slow. Commit to 2 days’ worth of prep. Then 3, then 4, and so on. You’ve got this!