I have friends who spend Sunday afternoon batch-cooking a week’s worth of meals and whole food snacks. I genuinely want to be like them. I want to have their habits. I’ve tried time and again to be that person, but unfortunately I’ve just never gotten there.

What I’ve figured out instead is a version of meal prep that takes maybe 30 minutes, doesn’t require a color-coded system, and actually makes the week easier.

Here’s what works for a family that wants the benefit of meal prep without the project.

1. Prep ingredients, not complete meals

The pressure of meal prep usually comes from trying to cook everything in advance. Instead, prep the components. Wash and cut the fruit. Cook a big batch of rice or pasta. Chop the vegetables. Hard boil some eggs. You’re not committing to specific meals — you’re just making the raw material available so that putting something together at 6pm takes ten minutes instead of forty.

2. Make more than you need at dinner

The easiest meal prep happens inside the dinner you’re already cooking. Roasting a chicken? Roast two. Making pasta? Double the batch. The leftovers become tomorrow’s lunch or the base of tomorrow’s dinner with almost no extra effort. This is the lowest-lift version of meal prep and it works.

3. Have a container system that makes storing easy

This is the part nobody talks about but it’s where meal prep actually breaks down. If storing food is annoying — hunting for a lid, hand-washing, figuring out what goes where — you won’t do it consistently.

We use SoftShells for almost everything. The attached lid means I’m never looking for the matching piece, they go straight in the dishwasher, and they stack in the fridge without sliding around. When storing food is easy, you actually do it.

4. Keep a “grab and go” shelf in the fridge

Designate one shelf or bin in your fridge as the ready-to-eat zone. Prepped fruit, portioned snacks, leftovers that are lunch tomorrow — all in one place. Kids can help themselves without dismantling the fridge, and you can see at a glance what needs to be replenished. It’s less of a system and more of a habit, but it changes how the week flows.

5. Do the 10-minute Sunday reset

You don’t need a full prep session. Ten minutes on Sunday to wash fruit, portion out snacks, and check what you have is enough to take the chaos down several notches. I do it while I’m doing something else — listening to a podcast, half-watching something with Marlo. It’s not a production. It’s just a reset.

If you want a container that makes the storing part easier, the SoftShell is what we use. The four-pack means you can actually set the whole week up at once.