The One Kitchen Tool You Absolutely Need For Meal Prepping Like a Pro

Welcome to Hotline Rewind, the weekly series where we gather up your questions from the week (and pepper in some from the Hotline archives) about a specific culinary topic. This week we’re talking about meal prepping, which I promise you isn’t just for health nuts. It’s also great for busy parents, folks with limited lunch options near work, and lazy cooks, which I can often be when I’m at home. Regardless of why you meal prep, we wanted to help make the process a little painless by answering these top questions below:

What foods hold up best after a couple of days in the fridge?

We have a couple favorites, and our ideal meal prep has one from each of these categories:

Roasted Veg: Broccoli, squash, and asparagus

Whole Grains: Quinoa, farro, and brown rice

Tender Protein: Chicken thighs, salmon, and ground pork

Hearty Salad Greens: kale, cabbage, radicchio

Ideally, you’d store each component in its own container in your fridge and assemble each meal in your food storage containers that day you intend to eat it.

What is fried rice syndrome and can I reuse rice?

It’s a type of food poisoning called Bacillus cereus, which stems from a spore that can develop on starchy foods when they’re left out for two or more hours at room temp. It is heat resistant and hard to kill by cooking, like other bacteria. To avoid this, you should immediately refrigerate or freeze rice once it reaches room temperature. Reheat to 165ºF when you want to eat it later in the week.

Breakfast meal prep recipes, please!

Our go to? Baked Eggs! A frittata is an efficient way to cook a ton of eggs and veg all at once, then slice and freeze in individual portions. You could even make them in a muffin tin to make egg muffin cups.

How to best reheat fish?

Low, slow, and steam. Wrap your leftover fish in parchment paper to make a little parcel, and place in a 325ºF oven or toaster oven for 10 to 15 minutes. What’s nice about cooking “en papillote” as the French call this technique, is that you can toss in the rest of your meal prep components to reheat as well. Whatever you do, avoid the microwave. Fish needs gentle cooking, and the microwave is too intense for the flaky protein. Plus if you’re in an office, it can stink up the place. Heating it up in the toaster oven can be gentle and avoid odors, especially if you stuff your little paper packs with other veg.

Favorite meal prepping tool?

A true blue meal prepper should always have a scale handy. Portioning by weight ensures each meal will have your exact, desired amount of protein, starch, and veg. This is doubly important if you want to track macros or other nutritional data.

Do you have any good shortcuts?

Two words:
bottled sauces. Store-bought dressings, marinades, and sauces made with whole ingredients can allow things like ground turkey
to adapt to all types of cuisines and dishes from Thai coconut curry to spicy arrabbiata.

Are there any foods that I shouldn’t meal prep?

The toughest to make
last for a week is pasta. The cell structures in starches like spaghetti break down far more quickly than other foods. And, reheating usually leads to a gummy mess.

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