This weekend my mom and I tried to be organized about preparing food ahead of time for lunches and dinners so that we would eat healthier, waste less food and save some money. (Buying lunch every day can be expensive!) So we cooked and prepped: fruit, vegetables, and a bunch of protein-based dishes. We used up some ingredients we already had (cooked rice, a jar of tomato sauce, for example) and bought some additional items. Below is a photo of some of the food we bought on Saturday:

From these ingredients, we ended up making ground turkey and rice (for dinner and lunch), grilled chicken for sandwiches or to eat with tomato sauce, loaded baked potatoes (for lunch), steamed broccoli to go on the potatoes as well as a side for lunch and dinner–and of course eggs!

One of the easiest things to make is hard-boiled eggs: you can eat them plain as a snack, add a little mayo for an egg salad sandwich, or slice and add to a green salad to give it some protein.

I’m sure you don’t need instructions on how to boil eggs, but two tips on getting their shells off are 1) immediately plunge them into ice water once they are done cooking and 2) take the shell off in the water. The water helps loosen the eggshell.

To make the ground turkey, I chopped up half an onion that we had left over, sauteed it, and then added the ground turkey and cooked until it was no longer pink. Then I added 3 tablespoons of water, 1 teaspoon of cumin, and salt and pepper and brought it to a boil. (This both makes sure the turkey is cooked through and helps the cumin taste spread throughout the turkey). We ate this with leftover rice and broccoli (and mom took some to lunch). (No photos of the grilled chicken, but we grilled it with a little olive oil and salt and pepper and then used it in sandwiches or mixed with tomato sauce for a quick dinner.)

One of my favorite sustainable hacks is to buy a whole pineapple instead of pre-cut pineapple. It seems like we end up throwing away at least 1/3 of the pre-cut pineapple because it’s too hard to eat. And it doesn’t seem to stay fresh. It definitely takes a bit more time to cut up a whole pineapple but it’s definitely worth it.

Once you’ve done it a couple of times, it’s pretty easy. First, you chop off the top spiky leaves and the bottom green stuff. Make sure the bottom of the pineapple is level and then slice off the green skins from top to bottom (with a sharp knife). There will probably be a few brown seeds you need to slice off as well. Then slice the cylinder into quarters vertically, and each quarter in half one more time. Then it’s easy to remove the core from each of those eight pieces and chop the pineapple into bite-size pieces.

The food we made was delicious — the only problem is that we probably should have made more. We had eaten everything by Tuesday night!