I know how it is with a full schedule and a busy work week. The last thing you want to do is prep lunch every single day before you have to head out. So sometimes putting in a little bit of extra effort on a Sunday to get some things knocked out and stashed in the fridge is a really great way to go.
The following recipes are meant to be prepped on the weekend, will last you all week long, and give you several healthy homemade options for lunch instead of having to go out or rely on just snacks or nothing at all.
1) Lemon Herb Chicken
This is chicken thighs that have been roasted with garlic, oregano, and lemon, and sweet potato cubes. Cut your sweet potatoes on the smaller side, like a cube or dice, and season them with the chicken thighs before you roast them in the oven. Then cut your chicken thighs up about the same size. Everything will eat a lot better that way.
If I was going to add arugula to this, I would probably heat everything up first and then add fresh arugula to it. I don’t really love wilted arugula. Throw some parmesan cheese in this for a little bit of extra protein in your meal.
2) Turkey Taco Bowls
These are bowls that have ground turkey with your typical taco seasonings, served over cilantro lime rice, with beans and corn for a little bit of extra filling and salsa on the side. Ground turkey can be pretty lean, so when you’re cooking it in the pan with your taco seasoning, don’t drain the fat off.
If you wanted to add onions or peppers or beans or corn, I would just do it right in with the turkey once it’s cooked and kind of make more of a filling to top your rice with. This one would be pretty good with some tortillas on the side.
3) Sesame Ginger Tofu Bowl
This is tofu cubes with a honey ginger soy sauce and broccoli. When you’re pressing the tofu, sometimes it works a little better if you cut it up first and squeeze a little bit more water out of it. Just be careful not to press too hard or you’ll break it.
Make plenty of sauce, because the broccoli and the tofu will soak up a lot of it, and the tofu doesn’t have a lot of flavor to begin with. If you’re using brown sugar instead of honey in your sauce, make sure to mix it ahead of time, especially the soy and the brown sugar together. This will help the sugar dissolve.
Fry your tofu cubes hard in the pan in oil first. This is the only way to get some color on them before you add the sauce and the broccoli.
4) Greek Chicken Salad
This is seasoned chicken served over orzo with lemon oil, cucumber, feta, and olives. It’s meant to be eaten cold. I like to season my chicken breasts with oregano, lemon, thyme, olive oil, and garlic, and then sear them hard in the pan before finishing them in the oven.
Make your orzo with a little bit of chicken stock to give it a little extra flavor, and once it’s cooked and cooled off, you can even mix the feta right in there with it to make it a little bit more creamy. If you’re adding cucumbers, just seed them first before you cut them up so they don’t make everything soggy sitting in the containers.
5) Sheet Pan Sausage
This is peppers and onions and sliced up sausage cooked on a sheet pan in the oven until golden brown, with the option to serve with either pasta or rice or a roll. If you’re going to have the sausage cut up with your peppers and onions, it’s probably best with pasta or rice on the side. Just keep it in a separate container.
If you wanted to do a roll or a hot dog bun, just either cut your sausages in half or into four or five inch long pieces. I find that I get a better flavor from red bell pepper as opposed to green bell pepper. I’d serve this with spicy mustard.
6) Salmon With Yogurt Sauce
This is salmon that has been seasoned and baked in the oven, served with a Greek yogurt dill sauce with lemon and salt, and steamed green beans on the side. A sheet pan is great for salmon. You can just bake it skin side down without any parchment paper, and then when you take the salmon out of the oven and it’s cooled off, you can use a spatula to separate the fish right from the skin, leaving the skin behind.
I like to add a little bit of minced or mashed garlic to my yogurt sauce too, and especially if it’s sitting in the fridge for a couple days, it really takes on a lot of flavor.
Green beans go really well with bacon and onion. If you dice up some raw bacon and saute it in a pan, then dice up an onion and cook it in the bacon fat, and then add your green beans to that with a little bit of butter and water and salt and pepper, they turn out great.
7) Beef And Broccoli
This is thin slices of beef with a ginger soy garlic sauce and broccoli. If you’re struggling to cut your beef thin, throw it in the freezer for a little bit to make it harder. This will make it easier to slice.
I like to cut the broccoli small for this, making sure there’s no big pieces of stem, because those take a little bit longer to cook and then the beef gets pretty chewy by the time the broccoli’s done. If you’re storing this in containers in the fridge for a long time, don’t drown it in sauce. Just add a little bit and maybe set some on the side to bring with you.
8) Chickpea Salad Sandwich
This is like egg salad, but made with mashed chickpeas, mayo, celery, lemon, salt, and pepper, served on bread or crackers or pita, with the option for cucumber on the side. If you’re taking the time to prep this one, I would probably warm up the chickpeas a little bit first and maybe season them to give them a little bit more flavor before I mash them and mix them in with the rest of my cold salad ingredients.
I would add maybe a little bit of curry powder or some sweet relish to this, and probably lots of leaf lettuce or romaine lettuce leaves on here too for a nice crunch with your salad.
9) Pesto Pasta Salad
This is pasta tossed with pesto and cherry tomatoes and mini mozzarella balls. I always like to add finely chopped bell peppers to pasta salad, especially red and orange or yellow. It gives you a really nice extra color.
Cut your cherry tomatoes in half for this one too. That’ll make it much easier to eat and a little bit closer to the size of the mini mozzarella. Sometimes pesto can be kind of thick and it’s hard to get all the pasta coated, so you can just add a little bit of olive oil or water to it.
10) Chicken Shawarma Bowls
This is chicken shawarma, which is a Lebanese spiced chicken, served with rice and a cucumber tomato salad, with a yogurt lemon garlic sauce on the side. I like to cut up all the chicken raw in even sized pieces that are going to be easy to eat with a fork, and then season them heavily, cooking them in the pan on a pretty high heat to get some nice char on them. Make sure you don’t put too many in the pan at once or they’ll just kind of steam and not char.
Make your rice with vegetable stock instead of water, and when it’s done, add lots of salted butter and slivered almonds, not whole. I like to make tabbouleh for a side dish with anything Lebanese. Lots of parsley, tomatoes, cucumbers, and either bulgur wheat or even quinoa works.
11) Egg Roll Bowl
This is the ingredients of an egg roll, just in a bowl. So ground pork or turkey, garlic, ginger, carrots, shredded cabbage, soy sauce, and toasted sesame seeds, or other Asian condiments like sriracha, soy sauce, chili crisp, things like that.
For the ground pork or turkey, I would cook all that and season it pretty heavily, or even add a little hoisin sauce or sweet soy sauce to it, with the garlic and the ginger and everything. But keep that separate from the shredded cabbage and carrot, because sitting for a couple days in the fridge, cabbage can leak a lot of water, and that might make your sauce really watery and kind of unappetizing.
Crispy fried lo mein noodles that you can buy from the store in the little containers are great for this, because they can replace the crunch that you would typically get from the egg roll wrapper.
12) Caprese Chicken
This is chicken that has been baked with mozzarella and tomato on top, fresh basil, and balsamic glaze, with quinoa underneath. Quinoa, orzo, or rice would be really great grains to put under this dish when you’re panning them up for your little Tupperware containers.
If it’s going to be sitting in the fridge for a while, I would maybe add the fresh tomato to the container daily, as opposed to putting it in there before you melt the mozzarella and letting it sit all week. Use the broiler once you add the mozzarella to get some really nice color on it, instead of waiting for the oven to do it on the bake setting.
13) Curry Chicken Wraps
This is a chicken salad made with shredded chicken, yogurt or mayo, celery, curry powder, and grapes. It can be served in lettuce wraps, or I would do a tortilla or maybe just some crackers. I would probably use apple in place of the grapes, because I feel like it would hold up better over the course of a week sitting in the fridge.
Mix your yogurt and your mayo with your curry powder first, then you can really get dialed in on how much curry flavor you want before you mix it in with your chicken. A little bit of diced red bell pepper or onion would be pretty good in this too.
14) Lentil Dal
This is a cooked lentil dish with soft, creamy lentils that have been cooked with onion, garlic, ginger, cumin, and turmeric. It’s definitely better after sitting in the fridge for a day, and it’s typically served with yogurt on top.
Warm up all your seasonings and your spices in a little bit of oil in the bottom of your pan first before you add the onions and the garlic, and then the lentils with a little bit of broth, and let them cook to really soften up. Add some lemon juice for a nice punch of acidity, and serve it with hot sauce on the side if you like the spice.
This would also be great with some rice cooked in chicken stock, or veggie stock if you’re a vegetarian. I’m not sure if it’s authentic, but I would probably add finely chopped carrots to this too, so when they cook down they get really soft.
15) Baked Meatballs
These are meatballs that have been baked and then added to marinara, with polenta on the side. I would roast some garlic and mix it into my polenta and then add lots of parmesan cheese, so it has lots of flavor while you’re eating it later.
Line your sheet pan with parchment paper when you’re baking your meatballs, and then every ten to fifteen minutes, I like to just grab the corners of the sheet pan and move it left to right. This rolls all the meatballs around a little so you can get more even browning without having to individually flip them with tongs.
16) Shrimp Fajita Bowls
These are seasoned shrimp along with peppers and onions that have been sauteed, served with either rice or cauliflower rice. Shrimp don’t take that long to cook at all, so if you’ve got them thawed and ready to go and seasoned, have your pan nice and hot, cook your shrimp maybe for one or two minutes, and then set them aside. Then do your peppers and onions, and once everything’s cooled off, you can mix it together and portion it up.
Plenty of lime and cilantro and avocado would be great to go with this. If you want a quick Mexican rice hack for this, just make normal rice, but instead of just the liquid, add some salsa and some chicken broth or tomato stock. Mix a little bit of sour cream with a little bit of mayo, some lime, and garlic powder for a really nice creamy sauce for the side.
17) Quinoa Crunch Bowls
These are chickpeas that have been roasted, served with quinoa, raw vegetables, and a lemon tahini dressing. These aren’t going to stay crispy for too long, so maybe plan to eat these in the first couple days after you make them. For your raw veg, try to choose stuff on the softer side, or at least cut it decently small so it’s easier to eat.
Heavily season your chickpeas with curry powder, turmeric, salt, pepper, garlic, really whatever you like, even chili powder, and toss them in a little bit of oil and then blast them in the oven to get a good roast on them. Because quinoa has such a bland, mild flavor, I always like to cook it with a little bit of broth as opposed to just plain water.
18) BBQ Chicken Bowls
This is barbecued chicken that has been shredded up, with slaw and corn. If you want to do a great barbecued chicken bowl, you could serve it on top of mashed potatoes, or even make plenty of tater tots and portion those out. Those will go really well together with your corn and your barbecue sauce.
If you want slaw, I would definitely keep it in a separate container, and even go so far as to save the dressing until you’re sitting down to eat lunch. Otherwise it gets really watery pretty fast. I like to stick with chicken breast if I’m trying to shred chicken. I feel like chicken thighs don’t quite shred up or eat as well. They’re kind of better diced up.
If you want to beef this one up and add some more ingredients to your bowl, you could definitely saute some peppers and onions and the corn, then mix your shredded chicken in and serve it over the mashed potatoes like I mentioned. Pickles would be good on the side too.
19) Peanut Noodle Salad
These are soba noodles or rice noodles, or even spaghetti, in a peanut sauce with cabbage, carrots, sliced pepper, and green onion mixed in, and chicken if you want the protein. I would even just go for a rotisserie chicken and shred it up. Mix that in with the noodles and the sauce, and maybe add the cabbage, the green onions, and things like that at the end, or keep them separate.
Make sure to cook your noodles on the al dente side, so if you’re heating them back up or they sit for a long time, they don’t get too soft. Mix your peanut sauce separately first and make sure you taste it before you mix it in. I like to do lots of lime and cilantro and ginger and garlic and soy sauce in my peanut sauce, and always use creamy peanut butter instead of chunky.
20) Chicken Caesar Wrap
This is a wrap that you’re building during lunchtime, consisting of a large tortilla, romaine, Caesar dressing, parmesan cheese, and shredded chicken, with separate croutons on the side. If you have time, you can probably get away with making this in the morning too instead of having to do it at lunch, because I don’t think the Caesar dressing tossed on the lettuce and the chicken will make it too soft by the time you eat it.
You can also just prep these with the chicken and the lettuce and the cheese inside and the dressing on the side, and then just pour your dressing in the open end of the wrap as you eat it. Some crushed up potato chips can go a long way too, kind of replacing the croutons that you’re missing.
21) Miso Ginger Chicken
This is glazed chicken and snap peas. The glaze consists of miso, honey, rice vinegar, garlic, and ginger. Miso can be pretty strong, so go ahead and make your sauce first and taste it before you glaze your chicken.
Start cooking your chicken first in the pan and get a good color on it, and then start adding your glaze. Because it’s got so much sugar and soy in it, if you start with it on there right away, it will most likely burn and the flavor won’t be quite so good.
I would make jasmine rice and have it on the side for this, or even some sort of noodle like a rice noodle, and then plenty of the sauce on the side to serve with it. Probably chicken breast cut up into smaller cubes for this too.
22) Cottage Cheese Boxes
This is cottage cheese with toppings like cherry tomato, cucumber, salt, and pepper, kind of whatever you’d like. I personally like my cottage cheese with French dressing on top, and I always have since I was a kid. Not too much, but just a little bit mixed in.
Make sure to have crackers or pretzels or something with a little bit of crunch and texture to it, because you might get sick of just the cottage cheese and the soft tomatoes and soft cucumbers. You could even have carrot sticks or celery sticks for dipping in this too. Cut your cherry tomatoes in half too to make it easier to eat, and make sure your cucumber is cut up decently small.
23) Roast Beef Lunch
This is leftover roast beef or deli sliced roast beef alongside roasted potatoes with a horseradish yogurt or sour cream sauce. When I make horseradish sauce, I like to do mostly sour cream with a little bit of mayo, horseradish, Worcestershire, salt, pepper, garlic, and a little bit of lemon juice.
Make sure to cook your potatoes all the way for this, but on the steak or roast beef end, cook it towards the medium rare side, because when you heat it back up, you still want it to be tender. Pickles or pickled onion would be really great on this, or a crusty roll or some bread. If you can keep from eating it, this one will last a long time in the fridge. Just keep the sauce on the side or separate.
24) Vegetarian Chili
This is a chili of beans and tomatoes, onion, garlic, chili powder, and seasoning. This lasts for a long time and freezes well. I was a vegetarian for ten years, so I made many a batch of vegetarian chili.
I like to do lots of peppers and onions and even mushrooms, just making sure that you cut them small and cook them down really hard before you add things like corn, lots of different types of beans, and canned diced tomatoes, and then veggie stock, lots of chili powder, cumin, and Mexican oregano.
When you’re not eating meat, you’re trying really hard to add extra protein to your diet, so sharper cheeses like sharp cheddar, which tend to have higher protein, are a really great option on the side, along with sour cream, or even Greek yogurt if you want to swap that out for a healthier choice. I love tortilla chips and hot sauce and plenty of toppings for my chili. Cornbread’s a great addition too, because if you make cornbread muffins, you can have those last you the week too. Just bring a couple in a Ziploc bag.
25) Chicken Fried Rice
This is diced chicken and frozen vegetables with day old rice, soy sauce, and egg, with chili or spicy stuff on the side. If you’re trying to get a little more oomph out of your fried rice and you want it to stretch all week, just double the eggs in there, because you’re going to scramble them up really small and then they get pretty much lost in the rice when you’re mixing it up. Diced chicken’s great, but shredded rotisserie chicken’s excellent too.
You want your rice to be cold when you’re frying it, because otherwise it gets soft and kind of squishy, and you want it to retain the shape of the rice grains and get a nice crisp to it. I feel like they make small bottles of chili crisp just for this reason, so you can bring one with you for every day of the week.
26) Turkey Burgers
These are burgers made with ground turkey that have spinach and feta mixed into the patty, with cucumber salad on the side. Turkey on its own can be kind of dry, so the feta mixed in is a great addition. You can also add a little bit of goat cheese for a little more creaminess.
If you want to add spinach to these, I would cook it down first all the way. Mince a little garlic and fry it in butter until it’s just starting to turn golden brown, and then add all of your spinach. Cook it down until all the water’s gone, and then chop it up, and it’ll fold into the turkey burgers way better and they’ll be much easier to eat.
Keep the bun on the side, and once you heat up the burger, put it on a new bun every day, as opposed to storing them all week with the bun on. This would be really good with a quick garlic mayo. If you just roast some garlic and blend it up in the food processor with some mayonnaise, or even just use garlic powder and salt and pepper, it can be a pretty nice dressed up condiment for your burger.
27) Teriyaki Chicken Bowls
This is a homemade teriyaki sauce of soy, ginger, garlic, and sugar with pan fried chicken, steamed broccoli, and pineapple. This one would be really great served with rice or even fried rice. Just keep it separate, heat up your chicken and your rice separately, and then mix them together or just serve it on top.
It can be tricky to get the thickening right when you’re making a sauce and thickening it with cornstarch, so just keep an eye on it and don’t walk away from it, because it goes from too thin to almost too thick fast. If you do find it’s too thick, just add a little bit of water, or even the pineapple juice from the canned pineapple.
Cut your broccoli just a little bit bigger than your chicken pieces so everything eats evenly. You could even add some frozen peas and carrots to this one to take your rice a little bit further.
28) Tuna Bean Salad
This is like tuna salad, but it has white beans, oil, lemon, and red onion. White beans are great. Go with a cannellini bean or a great northern bean. They won’t be too starchy and they eat really well cold. Just make sure you rinse them off and drain them really well after you take them out of the can.
Red onion can have quite a punch to it, so make sure you’re cutting it really small. Capers would be really great in this too, along with the oil and the lemon and maybe some minced garlic, plus plenty of fresh herbs. I always love to put a little dash of Old Bay seasoning in my tuna salad just to give it a more overall rounded seafood flavor. This one would be really good on crackers, but actually it’s especially good with tortilla chips.
29) Veggie Hummus Wraps
This is sauteed vegetables like onions and peppers and even zucchini, served in a wrap with hummus on a tortilla. You want to keep everything separate for this and maybe build it at lunch, so you’ll have your hummus in a container, your veggies in a container, and your tortillas separate. Pickles are always really good with hummus in a wrap too, along with feta cheese and lettuce.
If you’re going to add the zucchini to the onions and peppers, cook the onions and peppers first. They take a lot longer and there’s a lot more caramelization that can happen, and then you’re going to want to add your zucchini in at the end. The zucchini will cook most of the moisture out and also help deglaze the pan, and that’s when you’ll know they’re done.
30) Baked Ziti Cups
This is a baked ziti dish made in a baking dish in the oven, and then it’s left to cool, and you can cut it up into little squares. It reheats really easily and cuts up really well when it’s cold.
For something like this, I like to fortify the marinara by cooking whatever veggies I have, onions, mushrooms, peppers, even broccoli, and then add your marinara to the pan once you get a good color on your veggies. Let it cook for a while, then mix your pasta in with plenty of cheese, and then load it all in the pan.
Keep the pasta on the al dente side for this one too. With anything that’s going to be boiled and then baked and then cooled off and probably warmed up again, it’s best to just err on the side of caution with your cooking.
31) Egg Muffins Lunch
These are little cups made in a muffin tin with eggs and chopped veggies and cheese, kind of what you would see in an omelet, with the option for roasted potatoes if you want something more filling. I would even go so far as to cook some hash browns and mix them into the little muffin tins as opposed to the potatoes, then you’ve got them right there with you.
Use lots of cheese, and make sure you’ve got mostly egg with a little bit of filling mixed into it, otherwise they might fall apart. Don’t rely on the muffin tin to cook all of your vegetables. Cook your filling ahead of time, like your onions, your peppers, your mushrooms, ham, whatever you feel like, then let it cool off and mix it into your liquid raw eggs before you pour it into the muffin tin.
Otherwise, if you put something like raw vegetables in there, they’re never going to cook all the way like you want them to, and they’ll probably sweat out a bunch of water, and it’ll be kind of a gloopy mess as opposed to a bite-sized egg bite.
32) Chicken Noodle Soup
This is a classic. Carrots, onions, celery, herbs, chicken broth, and chicken that’s either cubed or shredded, typically served with noodles. I always like to have oyster crackers or saltine crackers with my chicken noodle soup. It probably just reminds me of being a kid.
If you’re using a rotisserie chicken and you want to get lots of extra flavor into your soup, a little trick I like to do is take the skin off the chicken, cut it up as small as I can, and then fry that in the bottom of the pan before I add my vegetables. This gives you a great roasted chicken flavor without all the extra work.
Keep your noodles packaged separately so they don’t just turn into mush in the soup. You probably don’t even have to heat them up. Just heat up your soup and add the cold noodles to it, and the soup will be hot enough to bring the noodles to the right temp. This one is great kept in jars, just make sure you take the metal lid off before you microwave it. I find that shredded chicken, as opposed to diced chicken, helps to thicken up any soup that it’s in.
