With our hectic schedules, taking the time to cook healthy meals can fall pretty far down on the overflowing to-do list. We want to feed our family nutritious foods, but we struggle to find the time to fit it in. It can be tempting to turn to pre-packaged meals or to eat out, but perhaps we need to rethink our meal prep strategy.

What do you love most about leftovers? For the majority of us, the big appeal of leftovers is that they are easy to heat and eat. It takes minimal time and dirtying of dishes to put together a delicious leftover meal.

Have you ever considered applying that same approach to all of your meals? If you look at your schedule and dedicate one day or evening a week to meal prep, you can cook the bulk of your meals for the entire week.

Setting time aside frees you from the nightly grind of deciding what to make for dinner. You can meal plan, do grocery shopping, cook, and clean up the kitchen all at one time.

Once the meals are prepped, store the first 2-3 days’ worth of meals in the refrigerator and the rest in the freezer with the date and contents labeled.

Now all you will have to do is heat and eat for the entire week. No more coming home from a long day at work and having to cook dinner. You will free up time to enjoy fun activities like bowling with your kids.

Get started by putting together a collection of healthy freezer-friendly dishes.

Chili is hearty, satisfying, and easily customizable. It is also one of a select handful of amazing dishes that tastes even better reheated than it did fresh.

Healthy Tip: To make your chili healthier, avoid red meat and replace the ground beef with turkey, extra lentils, or even veggies like pumpkin.

Homemade soups and stews are so much healthier and taste infinitely better than the store-bought versions. When you make it yourself, you can control the amount of salt and the quality of the spices.

Healthy Tip: Consider using a low sodium broth and adding only as much sea salt as you need for taste. The flavor can be enhanced using other spices like ground black pepper.

Stir fries provide a delicious opportunity to incorporate all kinds of veggies into our diets. Introduce your kids to bok choy, sugar snap peas and more.

Healthy Tip: To up the health factor, use liquid aminos in place of soy sauce and wild rice instead of white rice.

Pre-made burger patties freeze perfectly with wax paper in between them. Ground beef may be the most popular burger meat, but you can branch out into other choices as well.

Healthy Tip: Taste test healthier options like bison, turkey, veggie, black bean, rice, and quinoa.

Think beyond dinners when it comes to prepping meals. Some strategically staged homemade breakfast sandwiches or pancakes can brighten the morning. It’s even better when they need to be reheated.

Healthy Tip: Use whole grains for both the sandwich bread and the pancakes. Sprinkle a bit of ground flax seed into the pancake batter to up the nutritional content. If possible use real maple syrup instead of a high fructose corn syrup imitation.