Your Grocery Store Salad Bar Is The Key To Easy And Effective Meal Prepping

Preparing dinner on a busy weeknight or planning a week's worth of meals can be daunting. Chopping vegetables, defrosting meat, and even finding the right ingredients can take time, unless someone else does much of it for you. Easy and effective meal prepping is as close as the grocery store salad bar.

Pre-prepped meal services offer to send all necessary ingredients ready-to-go, and restaurant delivery services will drop any menu item at the door, but home cooks can use the salad bar as their personal sous-chef instead (and avoid those pesky delivery fees). Today's market salad bars have far more variety than a few greens, chopped tomatoes, and black olives — you can find ready-made items ranging from roasted vegetables to cooked meats and sides.

For home-cooked meals, the grocery store salad bar and your home pantry can work together. The key is having pantry essentials to combine with fresh ingredients. Celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson recommend keeping shelf-stable ingredients like dry pasta, canned tomatoes and fish, soup broths, and a range of sauces, vinegars, and spices on hand at all times. Having the same pantry items available makes it easy to plan a meal from the store salad bar. 

The now-standard salad bar grilled chicken can be the base of two winning dinners. Make sizzling fajitas from salad-bar chicken breast, onions, and peppers, using salsa and tortillas from the fridge. The family-favorite teriyaki comes together quickly with chicken and broccoli from the salad bar and rice and teriyaki sauce from the pantry.

Finding already-made mise-en-place at the supermarket salad bar keeps the kitchen clean, saves money, and gives you time back in your day. Supermarkets like Whole Foods employ their own chefs, so let them do the difficult prep work, keeping your counter, cutting board, and knife squeaky clean. You can find beets already peeled, cubed, and roasted, preventing the mess from ever reaching your kitchen. The fiddly steps of any recipe, like slivered almonds or a fresh chiffonade of herbs, can adorn any plate because someone else found, prepped, and prepared them for you.

Instead of buying a long list of items for a recipe and having half-used jars and bottles leftover, pick up just what you need. The salad bar allows you to choose a little or a lot of any item, rather than having to buy a whole eggplant or multiple types of lettuce and cabbage. Even the dressings at the salad bar provide a veritable cornucopia of options for marinades and sauces. The dressing from your salmon Caesar salad can be transformed into a sauce for creamed spinach another night. Soy sesame dressing drizzles beautifully on a salad one day and can tenderize steak the next. Meal-time inspiration no longer depends on what time you are driving home because the supermarket salad bar made sure the time-consuming prep was already done.