By: Trent Soares

Life with a toddler is amazing. The thing that I am enjoying most right now is her vocabulary growth. Out of nowhere in the backseat driving home from daycare I will hear “Baa Baa black sheep, have you any wool? yes Dad, yes Dad”. On the other end, life with a toddler can be pretty challenging. Dinner time gets hectic every now and then. With an accumulation of dinner, bath, one show, one bed time story, bottle, and then night night, all done in the span of two hours, time is of the essence. As Ben Bergeron mentions in his book “Chasing Excellence” the Soares Family “maximizes every minute”.

In doing so my amazingly smart and beautiful wife Kylie has implemented an online program called Prep Dish into our household. Kind of a mix between meal prep and meal delivery services. The way it works is they craft a week’s worth of meals that feature seasonal ingredients to make the most of your budget, save you time and surprise your taste buds. Along with a weekly menu, you’ll get a printable grocery list and instructions for prep day. We use Sunday as our prep day, and on this day, we spend close to 2 hours prepping the dinners for 4 nights which have been lasting us all week long with the size of leftovers. On the dish day (dinner) it takes us 5-15 minutes to prepare a dinner for 3-4. This has been our savior lately especially for me individually when my wife works being that she is a nurse and goes 7AM-7:30PM.

We have been doing this for about a month now and I have definitely noticed some positives from it.

TIME   
The stress about getting dinner ready in time has dismissed as well as the stress to the dreaded question – What do you feel like for dinner?  *Insert meme*

RANGE
The prep dish program has many options like paleo and gluten free. Unfortunately, Mahina is allergic to soy, dairy, sugar, melon, and nitrates which makes it tough. But Prep Dish has an option to avoid these as well in the meal prep.

CLEAN UP
Granted prep day is a disaster, but the week night clean-up is fairly easy because on the “dish day” it only requires one pan on the stove or one pan in the oven.

TASTE
Prep Dish rarely, if ever uses the microwave warm-up. So far, each meal has been delicious and also forced us to step outside our comfort zone. I mean now I eat breakfast frittatas every morning.

I don’t receive any benefits from this company but they have a 1-week free trial going on right now if you want to test it out. If you have any easy meal prep dishes that I can try out in the mean time I am always open to new recipes. Send them my way [email protected].