My easy meal prep ideas make planning everyday Indian meals easier. These planning and prep work tips will help you eat home-cooked meals daily, save money, and reduce stress throughout the week.
How To Plan Everyday Indian Meal
If you have ever drooled over the elaborate Indian thali meals on my Instagram feed, then I must share a secret. Meal Prep is the key to eating a delicious home-cooked meal every day.
Following easy meal prep ideas, you can make various Indian food recipes throughout the week despite being busy.
- Think and plan the menu for the week (follow my 30 Everyday meal calendar)
- Write down meal prep notes for each meal
- Prepare your grocery shopping list
- Finish your grocery shopping over the weekend
At first, you might feel like it’s a lot to do, but once you get going and see how effortless it is, you don’t have to worry about dinner/lunchbox/breakfast throughout the week.
How To Start Meal Prep
Take Baby Steps: Start with one meal that pains you the most. It could be either breakfast, dinner or packing a lunchbox (check out lunchbox ideas for adults). Later, slowly move to plan all the meals of the week.
Set Reminder: During the first week of meal prep, you must set a few reminders to get it into your routine. Like, if you are starting with breakfast, set a reminder for Sunday night to do prep work for the weekly breakfast.
Handpick Recipes: First, pick Indian food recipes that are easy to follow and execute on weekdays. Over a period, you can select more elaborate recipes and plan their execution like an expert.
My favourite meal prep tools, I hope you also find them useful:
Glass Box Set: They are fantastic for storing anything from boiled lentils, salad, and chopped vegetables to fruits. Mason Jars: They are perfect for storing salads, fruits, overnight oats or anything you want to grab and go.
Free Weekly Meal Plan: Download a free printable weekly planner.
Ziplock Bags: They are the lifesaver when storing chopped onion, garlic, and fruits for smoothies or green vegetables.
30 Everyday Indian Meal Ideas: Use these meal ideas to plan a weekly menu for breakfast/lunch/dinner.
Meal Prep Ideas for Indian kitchen
1) Freezer-Friendly Indian Curry Paste: Making an excellent Indian curry after a long working day is a sort of challenge. It requires hours of labour if you start from scratch. Hence, with meal prep-friendly DIY Indian curry pastes in the fridge, you can make your favourite Indian curry in 30 minutes.
You can make them over the weekend, and they remain fresh for up to a week. These curry pastes are one of my favourite easy meal prep ideas for an Indian kitchen.
You can get my debut cookbook for The 100 Best Indian Curry Recipes to use these curry pastes in a hundred creative ways.
2) Cutting & Preparing Ingredients: For making any Indian meal, we require a lot of chopped onion, tomato, vegetables, and greens.
- Chop a small batch of onion, ginger, and tomato. Store them in the refrigerator.
- Peel and chop vegetables like bottle gourd, pumpkin, carrot, cauliflower required for the first few days of the week.
- Clean green leafy vegetables like fenugreek, spinach, kale, lettuce, mint, and coriander. Store them in ziplock bags.
- Cut and freeze fresh fruits like mangoes, bananas, strawberries, kiwi for smoothies or milkshakes.
These small meal prep steps expedite the cooking process during the weekdays. You can use a food processor or a handy chopper for the purpose.
3) Cook & Store: A few cooked ingredients and side dishes can help you sail through the week.
- Boil a big batch of potatoes. Keep them handy to make Indian breakfast, curry, sandwiches, and snacks.
- Boil and store lentils and legumes like chickpeas (chana), red kidney beans, and brown chickpeas (kala chana) for making salads and Indian main course dishes.
- You can always cook and store side dishes like matar pulao, jeera rice, or plain rice to serve with dal and gravy dishes.
- Make a little extra serving of dishes like dal fry or Rajasthani Kadhi to reheat and eat during busy weekdays.
- Make spinach puree and store it in the refrigerator. Use it for making poori, paratha, or spinach egg curry.
- Marinate proteins like paneer, tofu, chicken, cauliflower, and prawns to make quick stir fry or tikka during the week.
- And, of course, you can always boil and store noodles, pasta, couscous, quinoa, or brown rice to make a variety of multi-cuisine dishes.
- Prepare whole wheat dough for chapati or paratha and store it.
- Similarly, you can make dosa batter, dal chilla or besan chilla batter and store them for a week in the refrigerator.
4) Takeaway Salad Jars: On Sunday night, layer up all the salad ingredients in a mason jar, pack the dressing separately and keep them in the fridge. Each morning pick a salad jar and rush to the office or eat them for lunch.
This way, you can save a lot of time cooking an office lunchbox and eat healthy homemade lunch even on a busy day. Not only salads, but you can also pack smoothies, milkshakes, overnight oats, wholesome soups or just anything in a jar and keep them handy for a takeaway.
5) Ready To Use Indian Condiments: We use a lot of herbs, spices, and chutney in an Indian kitchen. To save time,
- Keep a container full of peeled garlic, ginger, and washed green chilli in the fridge.
- Clean, wash and pat dry fresh coriander leaves. You can use a salad spinner to drain all the water from the coriander. Store in a ziplock bag or an airtight container lined with a paper towel. While cooking, you can chop and add it in an instant.
- Prepare and store a few condiments like green chutney, coconut chutney, tomato chutney, pickled onions (sirkey wala pyaaz) to serve with snacks and breakfast. Or make multi-purpose dips like hummus, salsa, and store them.
- Make a big batch of multi-purpose ginger-garlic paste and store it.
- Homemade condiments like garam masala or chai masala add a lot of flavour to the dishes and save money.
These easy meal prep ideas save a lot of time in the kitchen and help me cook wholesome, nourishing meals in no time.
6) Recycle Leftovers: There are zillion creative ways to use leftovers; they are the best way to check on food wastage and reduce your grocery bill.
- Leftover plain rice can be easily transformed into a delicious bowl of fried rice, coconut rice, or lemon rice.
- If you have roasted or grilled chicken in the fridge, use it to make sandwiches, salads, or biryani.
- Use leftover idli from breakfast to make chilli idli fry or idli manchurian.
- Similarly, leftover paneer tikka can make a colourful tawa paneer pulao.
- Use all those leftover vegetables in the refrigerator to make vegetable stock.
- Use leftover yellow dal to make Punjabi dal paratha or missa paratha.
Use Meal Prep Resources
How To Organize Indian Kitchen Cabinet
30 Everyday Indian Meal Calendar
20+ Indian Chinese Fusion Recipes
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Sudha Venkat says
Your ideas are excellent. But it is not advisable to cut onions and store them for future use; because cut raw onions tend to absorb the germs present in the air outside. Even if you refrigerate or freeze, they can still attract the germs. So it is always advisable to saute the onions before storing.
Hina Gujral says
Thank you for your feedback. But I don’t think cut onion, packed in a clean ziplock bag, stored in a fridge overnight is infectious. Yes, onion sliced or any other vegetable cut and left in open is definitely prone to germs.
Shipika says
Ideas are good, but its too unhealthy to have refrigerated cooked masalas after a long time. Similarly, one should not keep chopped vegetables for long. Food is always healthy when fresh. After few hours of cooking, it looses its nutritional value.
Hina Gujral says
For many of us who are working 8 – 10 hours in a day cooking from scratch every day is a luxury. So little planning, meal prep work is so much better than binging on restaurant takeaways. Cut vegetables, prepared curry paste are absolutely fine if stored properly. These meal prep techniques are used worldwide by many food experts and the results are not at all harmful.
Yes, if you can cook every day, three meals a day for your family from scratch nothing like it. That’s what our moms did.
Tejal shah says
I fully agree with u
Sahely says
This is a life saver! When you don’t get time to cook and have to eat bread straight for breakfast, lunch and dinner – Meal Prepping saves our life! 🙂
Hina Gujral says
Totally agree with you. Meal Prep helps a lot to cook at home on busy weekdays.
Surabhi says
WHY u look at meal prep if u dont want anything cut/ prepared in advance
akanksha says
Meal prep is a lifesaver!
All of these are such amazing tips!
I am always looking for ways to make my life in the kitchen easier.
Keep Sharing 🙂
Hina Gujral says
I am so glad Akanksha you find them useful. Thank you!
Yashika says
Planning on what to eat the next day is always a headache , planning meals in advance surely helps. The meal plan is so cute , I am downloading it right away. I have seen my mom preparing the ginger garlic paste and refrigerating it. Now a days for working women chopping and storing the vegetables to be used in the next few days is a time saving hack. Useful hacks .!!
Hina Gujral says
Very well said. And I agree with you totally on this makes things super easy for working women 🙂
Sumayya says
Hi hina.. your ideas are awesome.. can you add some kid friendly recipes too..also the recipes for the 4 types of curry masala please..
Hina Gujral says
Thank You. Curry Masala Paste link is added in this paste or you can search it on my website.
Rushika says
Life is so much easier with meal planning. I think it’s really awesome to be able to save time because you have ingredients ready to go! These are great tips!
Hina Gujral says
I am so happy you find these tips useful.
Kalpana says
Hi hina..thank you for your tips …will follow them for sure
Hina Gujral says
Glad to know that 🙂
Juhi says
One of my favorite aspects to your meal prep ideas is that you use affordable and accessible ingredients. Healthy food does NOT have to cost a fortune! Thank you for sharing these ideas.
Could you also suggest some good storage containers to buy?
TEJAL SHAH says
Hiii
It would be easier for working women
Hina Gujral says
I agree with you 🙂
Veena Rathi says
Hi Hina, thanks for sharing time saving tips!
Will share them with my newly wedded daughter!
Bless you!
Hina Gujral says
Awww…..you made my day! Thank you so much
Humera says
Hina thanks for sharing these useful tips,not only for working women but also for us, home makers.
There are times when some guest may arrive or we might be stuck in some other household chores. These tips will surely be helpful for many of us.
One more tip that I would like to add is to fry onions and refrigerate or one can grind them as well before storing,as it’s time consuming. Making gravies will be easier…
Hina Gujral says
I am so glad that you find these tips very useful.
Anshu says
Hi Hina, I love every tip you have given. I don’t think onions would spoil or should not be kept in the fridge. As long as we fully wash the vegetables and fruits and dry them thoroughly, even those with peels such as onions, they will not spoil, in fact ready made masala for gravy can be stored into Ice cube trays.This can make cooking a cinch when you are busy. So carry on foodies
Hina Gujral says
Thank you for sharing great tips and your thoughts with us. Loads of love!
Shereen jain says
Hi Hina, these are some amazing tips., perfect for someone who is working/studying. I do this on Wednesdays and Sundays. Keeps the food fresh and also saves me so much time,
Hina Gujral says
I am so happy that you find them useful. Thank YOU!
Mansi says
Hey Hina, I loved your ideas here for meal preparation. Can you tell us what recipes were you trying to prepare in advance for the ones in the pictures? Baked corns, sliced onions, cubed carrots and green beans. I wanted to know the recipes you were preparing for.
Hina Gujral says
Baked or roasted corns are for Mexican Corn Salsa or Mixed Beans Salad. Sliced onion is used for mushroom or chicken pulao. Cubed carrots and beans are for fried rice or any Indo-Chinese Dish. Hope this helps.
Vartika Garg says
I learnt the process of “Meal Prep” from you. Took me really a long time to fully adapt it, but its a life saver. Specially when there are guests over during the weekdays. Kitchen work is most time consuming work and becomes a headache with office work and guests around. Thats why Meal Prep is my one of the fav activity over the weekend (it gives me hope of some free time over the week 🙂 ) Keep sharing more and more such tips and tricks and also some week or 2weeks plan including all three meals 🙂 Looking forward !!
I do have couple of questions:
1) When you boil large batches of lentils, chole or rajma – how do you store that? for me it does not stay good for more than a day or two.
2) Salad jars that you have mentioned in your post, do you prepare for a week and store? does it stay good for that long, doesn’t it get spoiled because of the water content in the salad veggies?
Hina Gujral says
1) When you boil large batches of lentils, chole or rajma – how do you store that? for me it does not stay good for more than a day or two.
Answer 1: I usually boil them for 24 hours to 48 hours prior. Cool them completely at room temperature. Transfer to an airtight container. Store in the refrigerator for 2 days. But make sure to use them within 2 days. And not to leave them at room temperature after boiling for a long time.
2) Salad jars that you have mentioned in your post, do you prepare for a week and store? does it stay good for that long, doesn’t it get spoiled because of the water content in the salad veggies?
Answer 2: It is best to make them for 3 days only. As salad leaves and veggies wilt inside the jar. I usually make them on Sunday night around dinner time for the next two days only.
Vartika Garg says
Thanks for the explanation 🙂