ORGANIZATION AND NUTRITION

Why You Should Start Meal-Prepping Every Week

Image: Ella Olsson

Are you trying to save money and time? Do you also want to eat healthier and make the process easier and smoother? Meal-prepping will help you achieve all these goals at the same time.

Meal prep is an increasingly common practice that consists of preparing key ingredients of a dish, or several dishes, in advance. Why? To plan meals ahead that will ultimately lead to faster, healthier, and stress-free eating.

To fully get you on board with meal prep we have brought five benefits of converting to this practice and five tips to become an expert.

Image: Josh Appel

If you are a bit skeptical on this point, you are welcome to implement this technique for two weeks and see how much money you can save for yourself.

How does it work? In general, when we improvise our meals, that is, when we don’t have a clear plan or vision, we cannot make smart choices at the grocery shop. As a consequence, when we decide what to eat on the spot, we will probably notice that we are lacking a certain ingredient and be forced to go to the local shop to get it.

That way, we end up spending more money than we could have spent planning our meals and getting all the ingredients (or at least most of them) at the wholesale supermarket, for example.

Image: Lukas Blazek

This goes without saying, if you have to go to the store every time before you start cooking, you will be losing time and energy you could have spent on the process of cooking itself. Losing time ultimately leads to less elaborate meals which, most times, means less quality ones.

On the other hand, preparing ingredients saves time during busy weekdays by reducing cooking and cleaning time daily. This allows you to spend more time actually enjoying a nutritious meal rather than just spending time preparing it.

Image: Ella Olsson

When you are planning a meal on the go your mind will probably go to the easiest and cheapest meals, the least elaborate ones. On a long-term basis, this could be quite detrimental to your health, not to mention to the kids’ health if there are any in the house.

The relationship between healthy meals and how elaborate they are is not as linear as one may think, but raising awareness on what you eat will lead you to make smarter choices in terms of health and nutrients. You will be in control over the ingredients, and the portion sizes, leading to healthier habits altogether.

Image: Del Barrett

If you plan your meals ahead of time and think about the portions you will have in a day, or better yet a week, food waste will definitely get to the bare minimum.

Food waste is not the same as leftovers which can be eaten at night or taken to work on the following day. But, let’s face it, would you save a pre-made meal you haven’t spent much time or money on? Probably not.

Image: Artem Beliaikin

In today’s fast-paced world, just thinking about what to eat can make your stress levels skyrocket, we know it happens to us. Meal planning takes that worry out of sight and out of mind.

When you take only one day (probably at the weekend) to plan your meals in advance and get as much as you can ready, you will feel lighter. Next Wednesday, when you come home worn out from work, you will just have to microwave your dish and enjoy it. A healthy and tasty meal in just a couple of minutes? Aren’t you drooling already?

Now, if you are already convinced and want to give meal prep a chance, these are our five tips for you:

Image: Maarten van den Heuvel

Of course, the first step is to sit down, think about ten or fifteen dishes you want to make, and get all the ingredients. The second step is actually getting those dishes ready if the recipe allows you, or at least most of them.

Batch cooking consists of cooking bigger amounts of just one ingredient, for example, rice, to use in four different dishes. Batch cooking can also include cutting and slicing all the vegetables as well. You will get one ingredient ready and that will complete as many dishes as you require.

Image: Hermes Rivera

Simple, in this case, means following straightforward recipes and cooking techniques to save time. Meal prep doesn’t account for dishes that involve a two-hour boiling or three different kinds of sauteing.

Use simple, but nutritious ingredients. If you have any doubts, consult your doctor about which particular nutrient you will benefit from. For example, if you work out every day, you will probably need more proteins, so boiling legumes would be part of meal-prepping.

Image: Tamara Malaniy

Labels will become your best friend. Keep track of freshness and easily identify the meals in your fridge.

When we cook in batches or meal prep some ingredients, especially if we stick to our routine, we tend to forget when we bought or got some things ready. So, label and write the dates on the containers you used to prevent food from going bad. Nobody wants a smelly fridge in the kitchen, let alone wasting food!

Image: Ello

We lied, labels are not your best friends, the freezer is! Get used to freezing whole dishes and even individual ingredients. Everything can be frozen and, in turn, defrosted. No, it doesn’t change the taste, in any case, it enhances it!

Again, there is nothing like coming home, taking a container from the freezer, microwaving it for ten minutes as you lay on the couch, and then enjoying a fully nutritious and homemade meal.

Once you have developed the habit of batch cooking and meal prepping you will never go back to impromptu cooking.

Ready, set, vocabulary!

Learn these 10 sport-related expressions and win hands down!

Image: Ben Hershey

Popular idioms appear in conversation all over the English-speaking world every minute of the day and we hardly ever stop to think about where they come from. Have you ever heard someone say "I'll have to start from scratch"? Have you wondered what "in the nick of time" means? What all these expressions have in common is that they originated in the world of sports. Want to know more? Get the upper hand and discover all those phrases you often say but didn’t know are related to games and sports!

Image: The Royal Danish Library

Down to the wire is an idiom used to describe a situation, sporting or otherwise, whose outcome is not decided until the very last minute. This expression comes from horse racing and experts suggest it originated in America in the late 19th century.

Before the days of televised sports, racetracks would string a wire across the finishing line above the riders’ heads. A steward would then be placed at a vantage point, looking down the line so that a winner could be more easily established during neck-and-neck finishes. The first written record of the phrase can be found in an 1889 article from Scribers Magazine and since then it has been widely used, even today.

Image: Pixabay

You’ve probably used this expression many times, but did you know it has a sport-related origin? The phrase can be easily traced back to the 19th century when sporting referees, who usually wore hats, would raise one into the air, alerting competitors to be ready. Then, they would drop it to signal the start of the event. The method was commonly used in boxing and horseracing, where the races or matches were considered started "at the drop of a hat".

Nowadays, the phrase is used to imply something would be carried out immediately, without delay. It is sometimes thought to be of American origin but the practice has long been used by English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic.

Image: light wizzi

To have the upper hand implies that a person has the advantage or control over someone or something in a particular situation. In sports, when a team goes first in a game we say they have the upper hand. But where exactly did this expression originate? Well, there are many theories and none are definitive.

Some suggest that this phrase dates back to the 15th century and is related to an obsolete pastime. In this game, the first player grips a shaft at the bottom end while the next places their hand just above it until the upper end of the shaft is reached. Finally, when the last person takes the last grip, it means they have the "upper hand".

Later, in the 20th century, this method of finding a random winner was often used in baseball and cricket when hands would be placed on a bat and the last to take a grip got to play the game first.

Image: Anastasiia Krutota

Have you ever embarked on a foolish and hopeless search for something unattainable? Then probably, even figuratively, you were involved in a wild goose chase. A wild goose chase is a fruitless pursuit with no hope of a successful outcome and was coined in England in the late 16th century.

Back in the 1500s, it was an expression used in relation to a kind of equestrian sport in which all the competitors had to follow accurately the course of the leader at definite intervals, like a flight of wild geese. The term was regularly applied to the sport but it appears to have been Shakespeare who altered the meaning to one of hopeless pursuit.

Image: Gonzalo Facello

Nowadays, to start from scratch is a saying we use to illustrate starting again from the beginning, regardless of how much we have already achieved of a task. However, in medieval times it had a more literal meaning.

Back then, in certain sports like cricket, horse racing, or boxing, a line or mark was "scratched" into the ground by either a sword or a javelin to indicate the point from which competitors had to start. If they cut corners, they would have to start again from this scratch.

Over the years this idiom has been shortened to from scratch and is also used to indicate that we are going to start something with no assistance, for example, a recipe that we make using every ingredient raw instead of processed foods.

Image: Jason Weingardt

When something gets done in the nick of time it has been done at the very last possible minute, before it was too late. Achieving things just at the critical moment can make us nervous, but when it comes to sports, scoring just before the clock determines the end of the game can change the mood of more than one fan.

In this case, nick is used in the sense of "the precise moment of an occurrence or an event." However, the literal form of the phrase dates from the late 16th century when a tallyman would keep the scores for team games. This person would carve a nick or dent in a piece of wood each time a team scored and if the winning nick was added during the last minute it was known as the "nick in time."

Image: Gustavo Fring

When someone has lost their bottle they have lost their nerve and their bravery. Contrary to what you may think, this expression has nothing to do with liquor courage. In fact, this phrase originates from the world of bare-knuckle prizefighting during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In a fighter’s corner, one of his seconds was known as "the bottle man" and his job was to supply water to a fighter between rounds. Without water, a fighter was unable to continue and sometimes it was known for cornermen to be asked to walk away and leave when a fighter was taking a beating, to provide an excuse for him to drop out. The phrase "lost his bottleman" was later shortened and popularly used to describe cowardly behavior.

Image: Raquel Elise de Moraes

This is a widely used expression in the world of sport but it has extended to all aspects of life. To win hands down suggests a very comfortable, easy victory. Its roots can be found not in poker but in horse racing. In the 19th century, winning hands down meant that a jockey was so certain of his victory in the closing stages of a race that he could lower his hands and relax his grip on the reins.

Even today, when a jockey is winning comfortably he can gallop down the finishing straight without using his whip to encourage the nag along. The shortened version hands down is a metaphor of ease extended beyond the domain of horse racing and is used today to convey "without a doubt, no question."

Image: gerhard crous

If someone's name, an idea, or a story are bandied about it means they are being discussed frequently by many people in a casual or informal way. What you probably didn't know is that this phrase originated in France and is related to the world of sports.

The game of Bander was an early form of tennis and involved hitting a ball to and fro. Later, in the 1600s, the Irish invented a team game, a hockey predecessor, that required a group of people bandying a ball between them. They called the sport Bande after the French game because of the similarities between the two ideas. Also, they used a crooked stick that later led to the term bandy-legged to refer to those with bow legs.

Image: Iván Hernández-Cuevas

Simply put, across the board means all-encompassing, wide-ranging, and applying to all. Like many of the idioms included in this article, this one also has roots in horse racing. In the U.S., this expression referred to a bet in which equal amounts were staked on the same horse to win, place, or show in a race.

In the 19th century, large boards would be used to display the odds on a horse to come first, second, or third in a given race. A popular bet was to place an even amount of money on just one horse for every possible outcome. This was known as an "across-the-board bet".

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