Weekly Food Prep for Paleo (Part 1 of 2)

In this post, I wanted to tell you about my weekly food prep routine for my Paleo lifestyle. When folks ask me about my Paleo diet, I first tell them about what I eat. The next thing they ALWAYS say is "that sounds too hard" or "it's way too hard to prepare and cook food everyday"! I agree, it is too hard to prepare and cook food everyday. The trick is to prepare the food ahead of time and keep the recipes easy enough to prepare in minutes.

Let me start off by saying the number one hindrance for me with eating healthy is that it is NOT CONVENIENT. Not in any way. It is deathly expensive, requires a lot of shopping to keep things fresh, takes work to prepare and time to cook. That's a fact! Don't let anyone tell you different. Look, we all know that we have to eat healthy or end up in hospitals on operating tables. I'd much rather give my money to food that will make me healthier than to doctors. So how do I cope with the lifestyle?


The answer is to come up with ways to make it all more tolerable and even fun. Over the years, I've restructured my kitchen, streamlined my food shopping and budget and come up with easy recipes that work for my family to keep us healthy. All of that is what I want to share with you. So, in thinking about my weekly food prep routine, I've made a list of things I do and divided it up into two a part 1 post and part 2 post.

Part 1: List of Weekly Food Prep Tasks

This list takes me about 2 hours a week to do but the food lasts all week. (7 days) So, there is a great return on my time investment.

1) Make a fresh green salad (see my recipe for Healthy Green Salad) - I actually do this every 4-5 days. I've found that storing it in an aluminum bowl with double saran wrap does the trick. Also and very important...don't put salad dressing on it. This will cause the salad's leaves to wilt.

2) Prepare olives - I use olives to balance the acids in my stomach so I need to have these. I bring out a fresh can of olives from the pantry and leave them in a container. Tip: Rinse them in water to get the salty coating off of them. I put these in my salad. Delicious!

3) Prepare herbal teas - I like infusing water with herbal tea for variety. This keeps us off of the sugary sodas. I have a big tea maker that sits on my kitchen counter. It makes about 2 quarts of tea at a time. You put the tea bags in the top and fill it with a Brita filtered jug of water. I have the 10-cup Brita. My favorite tea blends to make are Green tea with Peppermint, Green tea with Red Zinger, Green tea with Echinachea Wellness Blend, Green tea with Lemon Honey, Green tea anything, really. I use a 2:1 ratio of the Green tea with the other tea. Watch drinking the herbal teas if you have high blood pressure because they can actually drive your pressure up a bit. On occasion (like for a Super bowl party), I will mix the Green tea mixture with Gatorade for a nice fruit punch. My guests always comment "Wow, where did you get this punch".

Herbal Tea Sampler from Celestial

If you are not that familiar with herbal tea, you can try the herbal tea sampler by Celestial Seasonings. This 18-pack is reasonably priced and has the ones that I mentioned above. This is  good way to get started with herbal teas if you've never had them before. For stronger flavor, steep your tea longer which involves leaving the tea bags in hot water longer.




4) Chop up celery and baby carrots - For afternoon snacks, I prepare a mixture of celery stalks and sliced baby carrots for the fridge. This is great with hummus and actually holds up all week. You can also have these with a "protein" salad. It's much better than having junk food. Although, I like to have it with some kind of protein to get a fulfilling snack in before dinner.

5) Prepare a "protein" salad - I LOVE to keep a cold meat salad in the fridge for afternoon snacks. We use it to dip celery and baby carrots into. I make a chicken salad, imitation crab meat salad, or cold canned salmon salad. You can also make a tuna salad although I stopped eating a lot of tuna to keep the mercury levels in my body down. I make all of the salads with a low fat mayo (my local store brand), chopped celery (use the stalks already prepared in #4), onions (red or white) and spices like parsley and chives. Delicious!

6) Prepare a "leftover" soup - For any veggies that have wilted, I toss these into my slow cooker and make a leftover veggie soup. The soups I make are based from chicken stock, beef stock, veggie stock, or tomato stock. I throw in a meat like chicken breast, turkey meatballs, a chopped steak, or beans for a vegetarian style. I have to watch putting in a lot of beans because of my stomach problems so I load up with a great deal of veggies like spinach, kale, carrots, onions, mushrooms, etc. A cup of soup works great and is cost effective in that it uses food that would be thrown out.

My oval slow cooker

Also, the soup can be eaten for any meal or snack, is portable, nutritious and tasty. You can't beat that. For the slow cooker, I use the 6-quart one by Crock-Pot. It smells up the house and is just great.








I continue this list in Part 2 of this post.