Component Prep
Prep once, eat differently all week
If you don’t like spending hours on a Sunday meal prepping just to eat the same thing every day… same. As someone who needs a lot of variety in my meals to actually want to eat them (and not let them slowly die in the back corner of my fridge), I’ve spent years figuring out how to make meal prep work for real life. I know I eat better when I have food ready to go, but don’t really want to spend my entire Sunday in the kitchen.
The solution? Component prep.
Over the years, component prep has become my favorite way to meal prep. Instead of making a bunch of fully finished meals, I prep a few key things — usually a protein, a carb, a breakfast, a dressing or sauce, and use those as shortcuts to build meals throughout the week. It gives me way more flexibility, keeps things from getting boring, and makes it so much easier to throw together meals without overthinking it.
And you know the best part?! You can scale it up or down depending on how much time you have. On a super busy weekend, maybe I just make my Yogurt Drink and call it a day — breakfasts for the week done in under 10 minutes. Other weeks, if I know life is going to be chaotic but I have a little more time to prep, I’ll do a 1–2 hour reset with breakfast, a ready-to-go lunch, and a few dinner components like proteins, grains, and sauces. If you have my ebook, you already know this as my 3-2-1 method — basically a way to think about prep based on how much time and energy you have that week!
What This Actually Looks Like:
Cooking in components instead of full meals gives you more freedom to build what you’re actually in the mood for. For example, at the beginning of the week I might make:
Shawarma-spiced chicken
Turmeric rice
A tangy yogurt dressing or sumac lemon dressing
That prep might take less than an hour, but throughout the week it turns into a bunch of different meals:
Chicken and rice bowls with cucumber tomato salad and yogurt dressing
A chicken pita wrap
A crispy rice salad with herbs, cucumbers, tomatoes, and lemon dressing
Naan flatbread pizzas with leftover chicken and zhoug made from extra herbs
Same few components, four totally different meals.
Sometimes these component prep weeks will have a clear theme — like a “we have Chipotle at home” situation where everything mixes and matches in one flavor lane (coming soon!). Other times, it may be a little more practical: maybe tuna salad for lunch, honey garlic chicken for dinner, and rice prepped to save me those precious 30 minutes when I’m too hungry to even think. Or it might look like using the same core ingredients in different ways — so your grocery list stays simple, but your meals don’t get boring. The point isn’t that every prep has to match perfectly — it’s that everything makes your week easier.
What You’ll Get Each Week:
Going forward, I’ll be sharing these Component Prep posts as ideas to help structure your meal planning— always on Fridays, so you have time to grocery shop, make a plan, and prep before the week starts. Each one will be designed to be flexible, so you can choose just one recipe, a few components, or go all in depending on your schedule.
They’ll usually include something like:
one prepped breakfast
a protein
a carb
a sauce or dressing
And sometimes, bonus components too, like:
a snack (usually a yogurt-based dip, cut veggies, fruit, or something easy like energy bites)
a fully prepped lunch for extra busy weeks, like tuna salad, soup, chicken salad, or jar salads
Each post will give you a simple prep plan and a handful of mix-and-match meal ideas to help you answer the ongoing question about what the he** to eat every day.
These posts will be exclusive to paid subscribers, so come join the clurb if you haven’t already!
And drumroll please… our first Component Prep post is: We Have Chipotle at Home — dropping this Friday!! Trust me, you’re going to want this one.
Vote below for what you want the next Component Prep to be, and let me know how many people you typically cook for too — that’ll help me shape serving sizes moving forward!
As always, happy cooking and I’ll see y’all back here for episode 1!
xoxo,
Rocky