Meal Prep Diary: tempeh, kale, and sweet potato

One thing that I’ve been doing consistently every week for the past few months is meal prepping! I know that some of my friends have expressed interest in meal prepping to save money and eat healthier, so I thought I’d turn my meal preps into blog posts to help people out with recipe inspirations. (Also, one of the reasons I started blogging again was so that I could have a place to post all of my meal prep photos instead of spamming it all over Instagram and Facebook ?)

For today’s meal prep, I decided to make smoky tempeh, a sweet potato hash (I used red onion instead of yellow), and steamed kale.

Here are the ingredients that I bought for today’s meal prep, all of it was purchased at Trader Joe’s:
Tempeh: $1.99
Sweet potato: $0.69
Red bell pepper: $0.99
Red onion: $0.99
Kale: $2.79
Total: $7.45*
$1.86 per serving

*This doesn’t include any of the ingredients I used to make the sauce for the smoky tempeh, so if you don’t have any of those ingredients at home already, your total will come out to be a bit higher.

Zero-waste tip: Reuse your produce bags for composting! We put all our compost in the bag and store it in the freezer until we have time to drop it off at a compost site.

Here, I’m using a steamer insert that I got from IKEA. It’s handy since it can easily fit into different pot sizes due to the way it folds up. If you don’t have a steamer, you can also just splash some water in a pan with your kale and cover it with a lid for a similar effect.

I only steamed the kale for one minute to make sure it didn’t overcook.

I’m using my Field Company cast iron skillet to cook the sweet potato hash. I love my cast iron skillet and it’s by far one of my most used pans.

Reused the pan again to cook my tempeh to minimize dishwashing later.

And here is the finished product, four colorful and very healthy lunches for the week! We don’t have many matching containers, but these do the trick. The top two are from IKEA from a few years ago and they stopped selling those. The bottom left is from Pyrex and the bottom right is also from IKEA.

Would I make this again? Yes! The smoky tempeh recipe is one of my favorite recipes and I’ve made it several times before. I love the clean taste of steamed kale and I liked using the sweet potato hash as the carbs for this dish (but it could also be substituted with brown rice or quinoa). This was a pretty light meal and it didn’t give me food coma. I did need to eat snacks a few hours later since I was feeling hungry, but I can probably resolve this issue by making more tempeh next time.