In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations on Food, Life, Weight and Mindset, Martha McKinnon and Peter Morrison discuss the concept of component meal prep as a flexible and efficient approach to meal planning. They explore the importance of planning ahead to avoid unhealthy eating habits, share insights on overcoming the fear of not being ready, and emphasize the value of mixing and matching ingredients to create diverse meals.
The conversation highlights the benefits of simplifying meal prep to reduce food waste and enhance the cooking experience, ultimately encouraging listeners to find a meal prep strategy that resonates with their lifestyle.
Key Takeaways
- Component meal prep allows for flexibility and variety in meals.
- Planning ahead is crucial to avoid unhealthy eating choices.
- Insights from conversations can lead to life-changing realizations.
- The concept of ‘someday’ is often just an excuse for inaction.
- You don’t need to be an expert to share valuable insights.
- Mixing and matching ingredients can make meals more exciting.
- Simplifying meal planning can reduce decision fatigue.
- Cooking for one or two can be made easier with component prep.
- Less food waste can result from a component cooking approach.
- Keep experimenting with meal prep strategies to find what works for you.
Component Meal Prep Podcast
Video Transcript
Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Hi, welcome to Simple Shifts, conversations to fuel your body, mind and soul. I’m Martha McKinnon from the blog website, Simple Nourished Living, and this is my brother and partner, Peter Morrison.
Peter Morrison (00:25)
Hi everyone.
Martha McKinnon (00:30)
Hello, hello. How are you?
Peter Morrison (00:36)
Hi, I’m doing good. Another beautiful day in Southern California. How are you doing?
Martha McKinnon (00:43)
I’m doing really well. So today our topic is going to be component meal prep or ingredient meal prep as opposed to more traditional meal prep. But before we dive into that, what’s exciting in your world?
Peter Morrison (1:00)
I’m happy to report we are on podcast number 19.
Martha McKinnon (1:09)
Okay, so we haven’t quit yet. We’re hanging in there. We’re continuing to chip away, explore, learn, find our rhythm. And it’s fun, I think it’s fun, because I think this is just a nice adjunct, I think, to what we do on the website where we provide a lot of recipes that are low calorie, that are easy, healthy, Weight Watchers friendly. And we get a lot of questions, we put out emails several times a week, where we also try to, I also try to provide some food for thought and encouragement and inspiration beyond just food.
And now this is just another avenue, another way to sort of take a different look at some of those aspects that are kind of integral to the whole journey, the whole weight loss, weight management, healthy eating, healthy living journey. So I’m finding it fun, are you?
Peter Morrison (2:27)
I am, I am. It’s different, yeah, having a conversation versus just writing about something.
Martha McKinnon (2:34)
Good. Good. Yeah, and I think there’s a lot, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had through the years, if I think back on my life, I’ve had like insights through conversation with people, you know, things that, that got through in a way that they didn’t get through in other forms, other media.
Peter Morrison (2:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Or you’ll hear something that will maybe not even in the moment mean anything, but a day or two later, something will cause you to think differently.
Martha McKinnon (3:00)
Right. Yeah, it’s really an interesting phenomenon. The more you think about thinking, you know, and change and behavior and how it all works. And so you’re right. I know sometimes you’ll hear something and maybe it doesn’t even register like you’re saying until a day or two later, where you suddenly reprocess it and you see something in a new light.
Peter Morrison (3:16)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (3:35)
And that’s happened many times for me in ways that have been just so, so helpful and really life-changing. I think it’s interesting to realize that, you know, you can be going along forever and ever and ever and just get a new insight, a new thought and, you know, everything in that, everything after that shifts, you know, when you get just this slightly different way of seeing something. So, I think that that’s cool because I’m continuing to learn.
Peter Morrison (3:56)
Mm-hmm.
Martha Mckinnon (4:14)
Another fundamental belief that I have is that we kind of share and I like sharing and talking about things that I’m learning but also things that I feel like I need to know. And I think the more you talk about it, the more you learn and discover. The more progress you make on your journey. So that’s pretty cool. So thank you for these conversations?
Peter Morrison (4:30)
Yeah, it’s good. I’m glad we took the plunge and decided to go for it.
Martha McKinnon (4:33)
Right, exactly. And we didn’t wait till we were ready. That was a new insight that I had recently. I’m reading voraciously right now. And one concept that really just sort of shook me was this whole concept of someday – it is just really, that’s just a thought. That’s just a concept. Often we’ll tell ourselves, you know, I’ll do that someday. And it’s like, you’re only ever gonna do anything in the now, you know, in the moment. You know, someday – it’s either now or it’s never really.
Peter Morrison (5:14)
Do you think that’s just an excuse we tell ourselves?
Martha McKinnon (5:17)
I don’t even think it’s an excuse. I sometimes don’t even think we think about it. I think we sometimes just say, well, someday I’ll get to that. And I think we use excuses that we don’t have time, we don’t have money, or I’m not experienced enough. When I get my next degree, when I take my next course, I think I do a lot of comparison about and I see a world of very, very smart, capable and talented people.
And I think there’s real danger in, you know, comparing yourself and saying, well, and so I think I’ve done that a lot to myself, you know, when I’m feeling like I’m an expert or that I have something that’s really valuable to say. And I think that that’s the danger to, you’re always putting it out there because there’s one more course, there’s one more book,
there’s one more experience before you feel ready.
But if you flip it and say, well maybe I’m one step ahead on my journey of somebody else, or maybe I have one little insight to share. I don’t have to know everything. Maybe I just have to know one thing that could be helpful, and to let yourself off the hook and say, I’ll just share the one thing that I’ve learned. And if that helps somebody else, that’s a good thing. I think that that’s been huge for me, just to have that awareness, to give myself permission to do the best I can and let that be good enough.
Peter Morrison (6:59)
So was that hard for you when we decided to start this?
Martha McKinnon (7:04)
No, no, because I think that I’d already started to have these awarenesses. I mean, I think there have been some huge shifts for me based on some reading I’ve been doing and some principles and philosophy that I’ve discovered within this past year. And so when you offered it up, I think I was just in that perfect space, you know, to say, okay, let’s try it. You know, I think the Martha of a few years ago would have been like, wait, there’s one more course, there’s one more certification, there’s one more thing. I think I’m in a really different space based on these new insights and understandings, so I think the timing was right.
Peter Morrison (7:46)
Hmm. Excellent.
Martha McKinnon (7:48)
Cool. So we’re going to talk about component cooking today or component meal prep. Because meal prep is something that comes up a lot when you’re trying to eat better, or when you’re trying to lose weight. Planning and prepping can be really, really important. Would you agree with that? That like having a plan, doing some pre-work, if you just leave it to like the last minute to when you’re hungry without a plan we are going to default to what’s easy, right?
Martha McKinnon (8:15)
In our world, what’s easy tends to be running out to the restaurant, right? Grabbing takeout, you know, stopping at the drive through so that, you know, planning ahead, doing a little prep, I think is really important. It’s been really important for me to do that pre-planning. Because when you wait till you’re hungry, it’s game on.
Peter Morrison (8:45)
Right, well, any nutrition book or diet book, they have their protocols and their process, but usually you’re cleaning out your cupboards, you’re grocery shopping, you’re sort of planning and prepping for whatever they tell you to do.
Martha McKinnon (8:59)
Right. But I think that has to be balanced with real life, right, and a gradual approach because I do believe that it’s slow, small changes based on my decades of, you know, experience, that it’s really the realistic approach. So I’m always looking for ways to make things easier, more realistic. And there’s no one way either.
Peter Morrison (9:25)
Right.
Martha McKinnon (9:26)
So I like to offer up lots of different ways so that we can find something that resonates with the widest variety of folks as possible.
Peter Morrison (9:30)
Yep. No, no, I just meant the planning, the prepping part of it.
Martha McKinnon (9:32)
Yeah, for sure. I think it’s critical. I think anybody will tell you when you’re wanting to change, you got to do some planning and prepping. You got to be doing some pre-thinking, for sure. So a lot of the approaches, so there’s lots of different ways you can approach meal planning, meal prepping. And we’ve been providing meal plans, weekly sort of Weight Watchers friendly meal plans now for several years. And so we have a huge archive out there which I would say take the more traditional approach where you think ahead to the meals that you want to make, you do your grocery shopping, and maybe you do a little prepping ahead. And that would be, I would say, a more traditional approach to meal planning.
And then I would say the meal prep, meal prepping, that you’ll see put forth is making some type of meal and then separating it out into individual containers. So for example you might make a healthy stir-fry and cook it up and then put it in the individual containers and then you’ve got your weeks worth of meals for lunch and or dinner. So that’s a more, a very traditional approach to meal prep that works for lot of people. So you cook once or twice, portion everything out and then you’re ready to go. You can just warm up your meals. And that works well for a lot of people.
Peter Morrison (10:43)
Hmm.
Martha McKinnon (10:58)
But for some people, if you don’t like leftovers, if you like variety, if you want to be mixing things up, then that sounds very boring to a lot of people. And I know a lot of people who just say, I don’t like leftovers. And so there’s an alternate approach that I think really reflects where I’ve come to in my life right now, which I do more often.
And I would call it sort of component meal prep or ingredient meal prep. You prep
individual ingredients that you can then use to mix and match to make a variety of different meals. And sometimes I think I kind of use a sort of a hybrid of both of these so that I might make a soup for example and that would be more traditional and then I might make some components so I might use my my rice cooker (affiliate link) to cook off quinoa or rice and I’d have that in the fridge. And then I might take a tray, a sheet pan and roast a bunch of vegetables and have that all cooked.
I might then grab a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store or cook a rotisserie chicken in the air fryer. And what I typically tend to do is then like debone the chicken right away just because I feel like it’s easier to debone it when it’s warm and then put all of the chicken meat in the fridge. And then maybe if I’m really ambitious, some of your salad, veggies, pre-washed, pre-chopped and in containers in the fridge. And when you do that, now you’ve got all of these foods that you can mix and match in a variety of ways with different sauces, with different garnishes to really mix things up and you can get a meal put together really quickly.
Is that something that you’ve ever tried or does that resonate with you? That whole just cook up some ingredients and then put them together in various ways?
Peter Morrison (13:05)
I’ve never done it that way. The closest I’ve come is, and I think we’ve touched on this in previous podcasts, but if I was gonna make a soup or a stir-fry, sometimes I would do it
very lightly spiced or like no spice, just maybe salt and pepper so that future iterations or leftovers could be easily varied with different spices and different sauces. So that’s probably the closest I’ve come. But I haven’t prepared a bunch of different components ahead of time. Not yet.
Martha McKinnon (13:36)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (13:50)
And sometimes it could be just as much as like having a little bit of, I was thinking about this and talking with with Brenda and I think this kind of component approach or never really starting from scratch was the way that if we looked back at how our grandmothers and great grandmothers cooked, I think there was that that kind of approach to cooking where like there would be like a big Sunday meal with a big hunk of meat, you know, in all these various sides from which there would be leftovers. Where the leftovers from that roast could then be combined with some of the leftover vegetables and could be turned into another meal. Or maybe you add a salad in. So there was always, like you were always starting, you weren’t starting from scratch every night. You were always kind of starting with some leftovers on which you could then build your meals, which I think makes cooking and the whole process of getting dinner on the table every night a lot easier if you’ve got some things to start with
Peter Morrison (14:39)
Mmm.
Martha McKinnon (14:47)
I know, for example, with what I described, I will often do that. And so then you’re just, you know, at dinner time, maybe you turn some of the chicken into a chicken salad and put it in lettuce wraps or make a sandwich or make a wrap out of it. Maybe you take some of the chicken – I have a recipe that I love that’s really, really simple where you take chicken broth, salsa, chopped up rotisserie chicken and white beans and you stir that together and you let that bubble up you know for 10 or 15 minutes and it’s a very nice soup.
You know the bowls have become really big. We eat a lot in bowls. You take your grain and your vegetables and your chicken and then there’s so many different sauces now that you can drizzle it with barbecue sauce or some type of tahini sauce or a peanut sauce or you can take it in an Asian direction or you know add some marinara and take it in an Italian direction and suddenly you just have lots of different flavors.
And so you’re eating the same meat but you’re mixing them and matching them in ways that just don’t feel as boring. You don’t really feel like you’re eating the same thing every night. So I just wanted to offer this up as an alternative to like the more traditional approach. Or maybe you play with some type of hybrid approach to this.
And this really sort of plays into our last podcast episode where we’re talking about girl dinner. You know, if you have all these foods in the fridge, you can just sort of mix them, match them, put them on a plate, maybe add a dip. And suddenly dinner just becomes, especially if you’re cooking for yourself, which a lot of our readers are. There are a lot of readers who are, they live alone or they’re, you know, they’re families of one or two.
And this can just be just a new way of thinking about feeding yourself that’s just, I think, more conducive to when you’re cooking for one or two.
Peter Morrison (16:55)
And it seems like it potentially could result in less waste.
Martha McKinnon (17:01)
Yeah.
Peter Morrison (17:04)
Because I know sometimes you buy all these ingredients to make a certain meal or something and it’s like, well, now what am I going to do with, you know, three quarters of something that you had leftover when you only needed a little bit.
Martha Mckinnon (17:21)
Yeah. That’s a good awareness, you’re right, because especially, I found that that I really found that the traditional meal planning approach for me never worked because I’ve only ever been a family of one or two. I’ve never had a big family. So often you do a lot of planning, like you’re saying, you do a lot of shopping with this intention that you’re going to cook three or four or five times in the week and then life gets in the way. The recipe makes more than you realize. And so you have a lot more leftover. Or somebody invites you out to dinner, and suddenly you have all these ingredients that don’t get used in a timely manner, you and end up, you end up wasting a lot of ingredients.
Peter Morrison (17:47)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (17:50)
So you’re right. I mean, I have found that that’s something that I notice about my refrigerator. It seems like when I compare my refrigerator to other people’s refrigerators, it doesn’t really seem like it’s not as stuffed. It doesn’t seem as though there’s as much in it.
Peter Morrison (18:02)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (18:17)
But it is food that can be readily used and mixed and matched. It seems like whenever I open the fridge, there’s always something to eat, even though there’s free space in there too. There’s always like, you know, food that I always open it up and say, you know, I can mix this and that and have a nice lunch. So you’re right. I mean, the waste is a good point that it does, I believe, lead to less waste as well.
Peter Morrison (18:31)
Mm. Very good.
Martha McKinnon (18:54)
Does it make sense? You think it is something you might try? You have a pretty, I think when we’ve talked about the way that you’re approached to eating, mean, you’ve created a really nice approach, I think, in that you have certain foods that are sort of traditions that you make on certain days of the week, right? I mean, you pretty much cook, like you grill salmon pretty much every Sunday, is that right?
Peter Morrison (19:19)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (19:19)
That’s kind of cool, right? And then do you always eat it in the same exact way or do you have different sides with it?
Peter Morrison (19:29)
It sometimes varies by season, but it’s usually with a salad. Sometimes it’s a homemade salad, sometimes it’s a bagged salad that you just sort of add something to. And sometimes if you’re tired of salad, I will air fry some vegetables, like broccoli, cauliflower or carrots just to sort of change things up.
Martha McKinnon (19:51)
Mm-hmm.
Peter Morrison (19:56)
Sometimes, yeah, sometimes there’s sweet potatoes involved. Sometimes there’s quinoa. So yes it does vary.
Martha McKinnon (20:05)
So it’s kind of neat though, and I think it’s a great approach to simplification. I think another great approach to meal planning, meal prep, if you just start to think. Because I think we lose a lot of time, do, with just thinking about what to do instead of just knowing what you’re going to do. I think knowing what you’re going to do is like 90% of the battle.
So if you know that Sunday is salmon, and maybe Monday is meatless and Tuesday is tacos and Wednesday is pasta and you know Thursday’s leftovers – I think life gets a lot easier because there’s a lot of time we lose in trying to think what to have. I know I think too much, so overthinking or trying to decide it’s like the similar phenomenon as people who’ve just come up with their uniform for work.
Peter Morrison (20:41)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (21:03)
You know the whole Steve Jobs jeans, sneakers, black-turtle-neck approach, where it’s like, when you have lots of decisions to make in your life, you want to figure out ways to minimize decisions in other areas of your life, just to make life nicer. And I think that’s another thing we can do for ourselves in the world of food, especially is just figure it out, come up with a routine that works, come up with a plan, and we take just a lot of pressure off ourselves, and it becomes easy.
Martha McKinnon (21:29)
I think this plays a lot into the whole concept of habits and behavior change. If you can find new ways to be and new ways to make things easier, then you’re just going to be more successful.
Peter Morrison (21:47)
And I love those days when the meal is already, because you sort of know what you’re having. You might not know a hundred percent. And it just gives you so much more time and more mental space. Yeah, yeah.
Martha McKinnon (21:54)
Right.
Martha Mckinnon (22:03)
Mental space, right? I think that that’s what we’re suffering a lot from just, well, overload, right? Overload in so many different ways. lLike overload in just decisions that need to be made, right? And like you’re saying, once the decisions made it is easier because we lose so much time in the process of trying to decide.
Peter Morrison (22:27)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (22:32)
They’re not life threatening decision, but like what we’re going to have for dinner. If we can just start figuring that out and figuring out a system to make it easier, it just frees up this tremendous amount of mental space that you have for other things. It’s fascinating. And I think maybe that’s why this approach really works. It works because if you’ve got a bunch of food in the fridge, you can just figure out some way to put it together. Or if you know salmon is on Sundays and you’re going to do pasta on Wednesdays, your life just gets easier.
Peter Morrison (23:01)
Mm-hmm.
Peter Morrison (23:12)
Mm hmm. And it doesn’t have to be exactly the same, know. You could you could easily change it up. And if you’re if you’re someone like me, the whole paradox of choice, which was a really good book, it’s you know, I’m I’m after reading that book, I’m a maximizer. It’s like if there’s something to research and 20 variations to sort of filter through in your brain, I’m going to I’m going to go through all of them before I decide.
Martha McKinnon (23:33)
Mm-hmm.
Peter Morrison (23:41)
My goodness it just takes way too much time and energy.
Martha McKinnon (23:47)
I think that that phenomenon exists in the diet world, quite honestly. Because there are so many different approaches to weight management. And I think a lot of people just spend their whole lives trying to decide which approach to take. I’ve even heard seen that when people walk into Weight Watchers for the first time. I need to lose some weight but I’m confused. Do I do low carb? Do I do Mediterranean? Do I do vegetarian?
Peter Morrison (23:58)
Hmm.
Martha McKinnon (24:17)
You can just lose your life, right? Assessing, trying to maximize which approach is the best approach and never actually take a step towards changing. And I think it’s a real phenomenon in our world just because o like information overload. So when we recognize that about ourselves, like whatever we can do to make life easier and better for ourselves, to minimize our decisions is, you know, it’s a kind thing to do.
Peter Morrison (24:29)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Peter Morrison (24:49)
Mm-hmm. Well, I like the idea of component building meals that have components.
Martha McKinnon (24:50)
All right.
Martha McKinnon (24:55)
Yeah, and I hope this resonates with others. I mean, we’d love to get your feedback, for people who are tuning into this, to get your comments and your thoughts if you have an approach to meal planning and or meal prepping that you’ve found works for you. And I think like any of this, you just got to keep trying, you know, trying different approaches to you find what works for you. And if you try something for a while and it’s not working, know that there’s lots of alternatives and there’s lots of different ways to get to your destination. You just got to keep trying, keep plugging along, plodding along, and then you’ll find what resonates with you.
Peter Morrison (25:35)
Mm-hmm.
Martha McKinnon (25:37)
All right, we’re going to sign off here and be back again soon. Have a good one.
Peter Morrison (25:39)
Thank you very much. Have a good one everyone, take care.
