6 Easy Meal Prep Ideas For Indian Kitchen

These 6 easy meal prep ideas make planning everyday Indian meals so much simpler, especially during the busy weekdays. A little planning and prep work on the weekend will set you up to eat healthy daily, save money, and reduce your stress through 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 eat a home-cooked delicious meal every day.

By following these easy meal prep ideas like me, you can make a variety of Indian food recipes throughout the week despite being busy.

Think and plan the menu for the week in advance, prepare your grocery shopping list, and write down meal prep notes for each dish. At first, you might feel like it’s a chore, but I’m betting once you get going, and you see how effortless it is not to worry about dinner/lunchbox/breakfast during the week, you’ll look forward to it!

Tips for getting started with meal prep:

Take Baby Steps: Start with one meal that pains you the most. It could be either breakfast or packing lunchbox (check out lunchbox ideas for adults). Later, slowly move to plan all the meals of the day. 

Set Reminder: During the first week of meal prep you need to set a lot of reminders to get it into your routine. Like, if you are starting with breakfast set a reminder for Sunday night or mid-week to do prep work for breakfast. 

Handpick Recipes: Make sure initially you pick Indian food recipes that are easy to follow. Over a period, you can select more elaborate recipes and plan their execution like an expert.

Plan Small: Try not to meal prep for the entire week in a single day. That’ll be too much work. Start by planning for the first three days of the week and then on Wednesday night, do the prep work for the rest of the weekday meals. 

Here are 6 easy 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 labor if you start from scratch. Hence, with these gorgeously good DIY Indian curry paste sitting in the fridge, you can make your favorite Indian curry in 30 minutes.

This is exactly how I plan my dinner throughout the week. These curry paste can be quickly prepared over the weekend and stays fresh in the fridge for up to a week. These curry paste are one of my ideal easy meal prep ideas for an Indian kitchen. 

Here are my 4 everyday Indian curry paste that is naturally gluten-free and utterly simple to prepare. 

2) Chop Fruits & Vegetables: For making any Indian meal, we require a lot of chopped onion, tomato, vegetables, and greens. It is always best to chop a small batch of onion, tomato, and store in the fridge. Or peel and chop vegetables required for the first few days of the week and store them in ziplock bags. This really expedites the cooking process during the weekdays.

Similarly, I dice mangoes, banana, strawberries or other fruits for the milkshakes and stash them in the freezer. Whenever required, bring out your favorite fruit and prepare a creamy milkshake. Or if chopping is too much, use a fabulous food processor to do the job for you.

3) Cook Big Batches & Store: It always not bad to cook big batches of dishes and enjoy throughout the week. I always boil a large batch of potatoes and keep them handy to make a variety of Indian breakfast (see 21 best Indian breakfast ideas).

Or never hesitate to boil lentils, beans, and legumes in large quantities and season them with different tempering each day. The big batches of Indian desserts are a huge hit in my family.

4) Takeaway Salad Jars: They are the best when it comes to eating salad, fruits or drink smoothies while on the go. 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.

This way you can save a lot of time cooking office lunchbox and eat healthy homemade lunch even on a busy day. Not only salads, but you can also pack milkshakes, overnight oats, wholesome soups or just anything in a jar and keep them handy for a takeaway. 

5) Ready To Use Condiments: We use a lot of herbs, spices, and chutney in an Indian kitchen. To save time I keep a bag full of peeled garlic, ginger, green chili, washed and cleaned coriander leaves in my fridge. And not to forget the multi-purpose ginger-garlic paste. These easy meal prep ideas save a lot of time in the kitchen and help me cook even fantastic meals in no time.

On the first Sunday of every month, I make big batches of homemade spice powders such as garam masala, coriander powder, curry powder, etc. Mostly, they last more than a month, add so much flavor to the dishes, and save a lot of money as well. 

6) Use leftovers:  Who says leftovers are always bad? Like leftover steamed rice can be easily transformed into a delicious pot of fried rice or lemon rice. If you have roasted chicken sitting in the fridge, then use it to make sandwich stuffing or salad.

There are zillion creative ways to use leftovers plus they are the best way to put a check on food wastage. One more thing I learned from using leftovers is they make meal prep work reduced to half and add so much variety to the table. 

Leftover Recipes: Chicken Biryani, Tawa Pulao, Chilli Idli Fry