Meal-prep recipes
Make-ahead recipes that keep well, using this week’s in-season produce.
4365 recipes
Recipes that make enough to eat more than once, or that are explicitly designed to be made ahead. Cooking once and eating three times is the single most effective way to bring down both the cost and the effort of eating well, and it works best with dishes that improve or at least hold overnight.
We identify these from the recipe title and the yield rather than from cooking instructions, so the list includes both recipes that say make-ahead and main dishes that simply serve six or more. That is a rough proxy, and it is more generous than a hand-curated list would be.
Batch cooking also changes the shopping maths. Larger quantities of the same ingredient are usually cheaper per unit, which is why this collection and a week of low produce prices go well together.
- Cucumber lime jalapeno granita for oystersRecipe by RecipeTin Eats~$0.10 / serving 3 in-season
- Aioli Recipe (Garlic Aioli)Recipe by The Mediterranean Dish~$0.18 / serving 2 in-season
- Caramelized OnionsRecipe by Love & Lemons~$0.20 / serving 1 in-season
- Fruit Infused Water RecipeRecipe by A Couple Cooks~$0.20 / serving 2 in-season
- French Toast RecipeRecipe by Spend With Pennies~$0.23 / serving 0 in-season
- Perfect Popovers with Cranberry ButterRecipe by Half Baked Harvest~$0.26 / serving 0 in-season
- The BEST Cornbread RecipeRecipe by Foodie Crush~$0.27 / serving 0 in-season
- BriocheRecipe by RecipeTin Eats~$0.30 / serving 0 in-season
See all 4365 recipes in this collection →Filter by diet, time, budget, and macros.
The recipes that work for prep have a specific property: they are as good or better on day three. Braises, stews, curries, grain salads, and anything with beans improve as the flavours settle. Anything that depends on a crisp texture — fried food, dressed leaves, roasted vegetables meant to stay firm — does not, and reheating will not bring it back.
The most useful habit is to prep the component rather than the meal. A pot of beans, a tray of roasted vegetables, and a pot of grains are not dinner, but they are most of four different dinners, and the assembly changing is what stops it feeling like leftovers by Wednesday. Cooking one complete meal five times is the version of prep that most people abandon.
Store components separately and dress at the last moment. A grain salad assembled on Sunday is soggy by Tuesday; the same grains, vegetables, and dressing in three containers are fine all week and take a minute to combine.
Cooling matters for safety as well as quality. Get cooked food into the fridge within two hours, in shallow containers rather than one deep pot, so it passes quickly through the temperature range where bacteria multiply fastest.
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