INSPIRATION Perfectly packaged: meals are divided into portions and refrigerated in airtight containers. Skilful food preparation With our often stressful everyday lives, freshly preparing meals each and every day can be a real challenge. But by carefully planning our grocery shopping and pre-emptively cooking certain dishes or ingredients in advance, we can still enjoy healthy and delicious meals. Every day. You may well have heard of meal prep and batch cooking. Both of these pre-cooking concepts are designed to make everyday healthy eating as simple and stress-free as possible. With meal preparation (‘meal prep’ for short), ready-to-eat dishes are fully prepared in larger quantities then portioned up and vacuum sealed or packaged in suitable airtight containers and placed in the refrigerator to be eaten within the next few days or stored in the freezer for even longer. If necessary, meals such as soups or stews can even be gently defrosted and heated up after several weeks. Batch cooking is a sub-form of meal preparation. This refers to the trend of pre-cooking and portioning up basic ingredients like vegetables, meat or plant-based protein sources, such as legumes or pseudo-cereals like quinoa, ready for further use. At a later date, the basic ingredients can then be combined to form different dishes. This promotes a varied diet, enables maximum flexibility and saves time in two respects: during the preparation stage, as cooking utensils only have to be cleaned once, and during the subsequent cooking stage, as the usually time-consuming prep work, i.e. chopping, has already been done. Whether you opt for one of these methods or combine the two primarily depends on how much spare time you have during your everyday life and how important the cooking experience is to you. If your main aim is to serve up wholesome meals as quickly as possible without having to think about them, we recommend trying meal prep. If, on the other hand, you want to save time when making meals by having the ingredients ready to go, batch cooking is a great solution. Whichever option you ultimately choose, you’ll certainly benefit from planning ahead. 10 BORA MAGAZINE BORA MAGAZINE 11
