Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

This event was on Tuesday, January 31, 2023 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.

Recorded

Question:

How can someone who has a busy life working and studying and needs to eat healthy can easily get used to food prep at the minimum and gradually progress so that it does not seem to be a burden?

— Errol Fredericks

Answer:

Alright also, that's a very common question, especially. People just kind of getting used to eating in a lifestyle this way or just you know used to not ordering or eating out all the time. And that is something that you're going to have to practice over time to be able to perfect. It's not something that's going to come instantly. I don't know which class you're registered in at the moment, but for a couple of our classes, we have a couple ways to be able to look at those and those are meal meal prep. So on our plant-based Pro, there's actually a live event that I did. You can actually also look that up in our Live Events to be able to do meal prepping. And if you are in the beat class or the there's another one from Forks Over Knives. There's a couple materials in there too. And there's actually a sidebar over those on where I spent basically an entire hour showing you how to break things down. the long and the short of it is basically to take one day a week and do most of your prep on that day. So it makes the rest of the week easier. So what I personally do is I'll go shopping on one day of the week could be a Friday. It could be a Sunday. Just depending on what your schedule is and I'll go out to the store and when I get home, I'll put everything away in the freezer and everything away in the pantry, but then I'll get a cutting board out and start chopping up my vegetables and my you know, tofu or tempehs and proteins stuff like that and I'll chop them up into the usable size pieces that I need for the week. I've already got a list of all the menu the menu items that I want. for the weekend my family and I know pretty much kind of at least I know what every dinner is going to be and I kind of know what every lunch is going to be and breakfasts are pretty much standard the same almost not every day. But like we switch like every two or three days for what they are. And so what I'll do is I'll prep all my ingredients ahead of time that way when it comes to dinner time. When I get out of work, I can literally just go into the kitchen and start prepping my meal by just starting to cook it all because all of the ingredients have been cooked. My tofu has been marinated everything that you know has to be done ahead of time when it takes a lot of the time from cooking. It's already been taking up the process. So that's definitely one of my best pieces of advice to be able to give is to be able to prep everything ahead of time now on the beat course and the Forks Over Knives meal prep courses, we kind of show that how to do that and break it up into you know weeks basically on ways to be able to make that happen so you can do all the prep for one week. Lay it out for yourself. And you know repeat some of the dishes a couple times, right? So and then some of the ingredients that you're going to be using are going to be used in multiple meals, right? So if you have the opportunity to dice all your onions, you can dice them all up for like five different meals instead of just one meal and we have to dice, you know that the whole every single night. So some of those are some of the best ways to be able to kind of start some of that meal prep and really the it'll take you less time the more you do it, right? So the first time it's gonna seem really hard. It's gonna seem like oh man, I'm taking way too much time on this one day, but the more you get used to it, you'll start to get a rhythm of it. And then just get containers that fit in your fridge really well, so you can literally just pick and choose when you get to your fridge and when you get there, you can even if you want to go off menu, you can say what country they want to go to tonight and you know, make a meal kind of to fit the flavor profile that you're looking for for that night. So hope that helps helps a little bit Harold, you know, it's basically just a little bit of forward prep time. It's gonna help you in the long run.
Dan Marek

Dan Marek

Director of Plant-Based Culinary & Dev

rouxbe.com