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alisarae 's review for:
Prep and Rally: Turn One Hour of Prep Into a Week of Enticing, Family-Friendly Meals
by Dini Klein, Dini Klein
This might be my favorite food prep book so far. You have to be on board with following the method in order for this book to be usable, though.
The method is this: 1 hour of fully cooking everything on Sunday for 4 reheated weekday meals.
The book is organized into 10 weekly meal plans + a couple extra chapters. Each weekly plan starts with a list of everything you will need that week (literally everything) so you can grocery shop, then all the recipes (including for like... white rice), and then the dinner menus. The dinner menus include components that you pre-cooked as well as other day-of elements like canned beans or sliced avocado. The shopping list is super-well organized, with recipe numbers next to each item so you know to skip it if you are not using that recipe. Since there are 10 weekly meal plans, this book will get you about 2 months of meals before you repeat anything.
Recipes: Flavorful and straightforward, with a contemporary American cuisine profile. Reminds me a lot of Hello Fresh menus https://www.hellofresh.com/recipes.
Storing food: Super light on instructions for this, since food doesn't usually go bad within 4 days of cooking it and the expectation is that you will be doing exactly that. No instructions on best methods for freezing + reheating, for example.
Adapting recipes: A+ in this department. Each menu includes suggestions for making it more kid-friendly, vegetarian, gluten free or swapping out ingredients. It's helpful that this is listed at the very beginning of each chapter, before the shopping list.
I appreciated the leftovers guide - a kind of spitball list of what you could make with leftovers, organized by the category of what you need to use up (chicken, rice, etc) and a list of ideas to tuck ingredients into something else ("stuff some vegetables... put it in a taco shell").
As far as teaching you to meal-plan independently, there is a a free template download here: https://prepandrally.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/DIY-prep-rally-color.pdf
In the template, it is clear that the meal building strategy is protein+carb+veg+sauce. This is more subtle in the book, but the elements are all there. For example, with "chicken meatloaf sandwiches": chicken, bread, tomatoes & lettuce, and honey mustard sauce.
Overall I am curious to give this a go for a couple weeks. I am trying to be more systematic about my meal prepping, with pre-cooking things on the weekend and then freeing up more time during the week. But following such an exact weekly plan is more rigid than I am used to (Maybe I'm not looking at this fairly: it is only 4 days of planned meals, so that would leave 3 days of spontaneity, plus you can choose which order to eat your meals in). The true value of this book is that it totally takes the guesswork out of the weekly planning, so you can outsource that part of the mental load.
The method is this: 1 hour of fully cooking everything on Sunday for 4 reheated weekday meals.
The book is organized into 10 weekly meal plans + a couple extra chapters. Each weekly plan starts with a list of everything you will need that week (literally everything) so you can grocery shop, then all the recipes (including for like... white rice), and then the dinner menus. The dinner menus include components that you pre-cooked as well as other day-of elements like canned beans or sliced avocado. The shopping list is super-well organized, with recipe numbers next to each item so you know to skip it if you are not using that recipe. Since there are 10 weekly meal plans, this book will get you about 2 months of meals before you repeat anything.
Recipes: Flavorful and straightforward, with a contemporary American cuisine profile. Reminds me a lot of Hello Fresh menus https://www.hellofresh.com/recipes.
Storing food: Super light on instructions for this, since food doesn't usually go bad within 4 days of cooking it and the expectation is that you will be doing exactly that. No instructions on best methods for freezing + reheating, for example.
Adapting recipes: A+ in this department. Each menu includes suggestions for making it more kid-friendly, vegetarian, gluten free or swapping out ingredients. It's helpful that this is listed at the very beginning of each chapter, before the shopping list.
I appreciated the leftovers guide - a kind of spitball list of what you could make with leftovers, organized by the category of what you need to use up (chicken, rice, etc) and a list of ideas to tuck ingredients into something else ("stuff some vegetables... put it in a taco shell").
As far as teaching you to meal-plan independently, there is a a free template download here: https://prepandrally.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/DIY-prep-rally-color.pdf
In the template, it is clear that the meal building strategy is protein+carb+veg+sauce. This is more subtle in the book, but the elements are all there. For example, with "chicken meatloaf sandwiches": chicken, bread, tomatoes & lettuce, and honey mustard sauce.
Overall I am curious to give this a go for a couple weeks. I am trying to be more systematic about my meal prepping, with pre-cooking things on the weekend and then freeing up more time during the week. But following such an exact weekly plan is more rigid than I am used to (Maybe I'm not looking at this fairly: it is only 4 days of planned meals, so that would leave 3 days of spontaneity, plus you can choose which order to eat your meals in). The true value of this book is that it totally takes the guesswork out of the weekly planning, so you can outsource that part of the mental load.