The Easy 5-Ingredient Meal Prep Cookbook: Meal Plans and Recipes to Save Time

This book is fantastic, it has delicious recipes! The shopping list is already listed out for you which is so amazing, it makes shopping so much easier. The one piece of advice I will give is to keep in mind these are recipes for only one person, so if you’re feeding more than one person you’ll have to multiply the ingredients.

This was not what I thought it was going to be.

This book is very informative and helpful. I really like this book

Though I certainly wouldn't dare to call myself a professional quality chef, I've been a reasonably accomplished home chef for a number of years. What I have not been particularly good at, though, is weekly meal prep. My usual cooking involves scouring farmers' markets and ethnic grocers for exotic ingredients and then preparing a large feast. When I need to have quick meals ready to go when I'm busy with other commitments, the restaurants are typically my go-to solution.That's not the approach presented in this book. The structure of the plan presented here is to spend one day per week cooking multiple servings of five dishes and storing them to eat throughout the week. The book contains 12 weeks' worth of complete plans, including shopping lists, a complete description of how to prepare and store each dish (including an overall guide for the week, to help you multitask and prepare all five dishes at once), and an example calendar of which dishes you might have for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack on each day.This approach is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Because everything is completely planned out for you, you know in advance that you'll be able to get everything done and that the results will complement each other reasonably well (in fact, I commend the author for her attention to varying flavors between dishes within each week's plan). On the other hand, I don't think I've ever followed a recipe in my life without changing some things around, so those of you who like to put your own creative spin on your dishes will need to be extra careful to make sure you're not throwing off the entire week's plan.Admittedly, calling these five-ingredient recipes is a bit of a stretch. In fact, few of the recipes actually use only five ingredients. It is true, however, that they use only five ingredients in addition to what the author calls "the 5-ingredient pantry," consisting of staple ingredients that you're assumed to always have on hand in your kitchen. With that in mind, and recognizing that the ingredients needed for each week are all easy to source at any supermarket or grocery store, it's easy enough to justify saying the recipes are "five-ish" ingredient recipes. However, you should be aware that this doesn't mean you'll only have to buy five items to complete the meal prep. While each individual recipe uses only five ingredients (plus the staple ingredients), the weekly meal plan as a whole uses considerably more. There is some planned overlap in ingredients within each week and the flavors do pair well together, but if you think you need to only buy five ingredients and then use those in varying combinations for all of the week's recipes, you have been misled.Personally, though, while I recognize that the title might be somewhat confusing, I'm actually grateful that each week in the plan isn't limited to only five ingredients. These recipes might be quicker and easier than the ones I usually prepare when I'm making one of my feasts, but they're actually good, fully-formed recipes that you'll be happy to eat, and I'm not convinced that you'd get to that point with further limitations on ingredients. Certainly, you'd at least have to sacrifice a lot of the variety that the author has built in to each week's plan.Indeed, since you're already going to be planning to eat each dish multiple times (some as many as five times throughout the week), repetition may be a cause for concern for some readers. If you like more variety in your meals, you'll be less likely to follow the plans exactly as written. That having been said, you can still benefit from some of the recipes.Perhaps the biggest advantage in this book is that it truly spells out everything you need to know. Right at the beginning, it tells you what cookware and tools you'll need. It tells you what storage containers you'll need. It even provides some useful charts concerning which ingredients can be refrigerated or frozen, and for how long. Each week's plan is accompanied by a complete shopping list. The author has gone to great lengths to make things as easy as possible, making this perhaps a perfect guide for either the beginning chef or even the experienced chef who's trying to save some time.

I'm older now and live alone so making up meals ahead would be a good thing for me. I have recently gotten a yogurt machine and every 3-4 days make another batch of yogurt as well as mixing up a batch of granola from scratch so that I have a quick and easy breakfast. That sort of goes with the ideas in this book - having food prepared so that you reach in the refrigerator and already have something there, ready to eat. Now, for the ideas/recipes in this book, I love that they are made with simple ingredients and substitutions are encouraged if you already have something similar on hand. Like the fact that I almost always have different lentils on hand - red and black at the moment - because they store well and are easy to cook up. Same with rice. I almost always have quick rice, brown rice and a mixed rice (usually with wild rice in it) because rice goes with just about anything else I might have in the freezer. I did not look at every week's recipes, but found that the variety was wide and would make for interesting changes throughout the weeks. My daughter was a vegan for a few years and then went to vegetarian so I am used to meatless meals and have no problem doing without meat. One thing I didn't see was any recipes with tofu and I do like tofu - have made tofu from scratch that we cooked in tahini sauce. It's a good source of protein and would have been great added to a few recipes in this book - meaning I may do that myself! Maybe it's me, but I prefer food I make over restaurant food - not just the cost-savings which is substantial, but you can never know not only exactly what's in the food that's made, but WHO made it...with e-coli and meningitis and other communicable outbreaks that have happened in recent years at restaurants, that's one thing I can pass on if I've made Week 8's recipes and they are ready for me in my own refrigerator!