A 'Hero Meal' Is The 2023 Food Prep Hack You've Been Waiting For

After having a small life crisis upon realizing you've been having Eggos for dinner at least three times a week, you may finally decide that food prepping doesn't sound like such a terrible idea. An ongoing social media trend that's health benefits are supported by real doctors, we don't have to explain that the finspo (i.e., fit inspo) art of food prep has been a hot topic for years. But ever since people first started Googling the term in 2013, you may have been among the many who report that they're not exactly ga-ga for the idea of spending countless precious weekend hours on getting lunch together for the work week. However, 20 years later, one hack has appeared with a cape and a mask that may just save the meal prep day — and help you get something other than frozen waffles into your stomach.

You may not have heard of Kevin Curry, but you likely have seen his Instagram reels. One of many fitness influencers who lives and dies by meal prep, Curry is known for urging his followers to veer away from chicken and rice and, as Guide Posts reports, "have fun" with planning and preparing meals for the week. And this very Instagrammer is also the one who gallantly revealed to NPR a life-changing trick for painless meal prep.

Meal prep usually involves being in the kitchen every weekend carefully crafting just enough portions to last for the next five days. But Kevin Curry told NPR it doesn't have to be this way. According to Curry, meal preppers can keep things simple by cooking what he likes to call "the hero meal" — a supersized dish that you can eat the same time you make it and freeze the leftovers to chow down on later. That way, you'll be able to have meals prepped for weeks to come.

And we mean that. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports frozen food pretty much has no expiration date — though a meal's flavor will generally go out the window around month three. In fact, while Curry has given this type of mass-made meal a name, he's far from the only influencer cooking up giant dinners to save for later. In the world of meal prep, you can find many people under the Instagram tag #sheetpandinner cooking up several suppers worth of food in one go. So by making a hero meal, Curry suggests large casserole dishes, like lasagna, you'll minimize the amount of time you have to spend in the kitchen on Saturdays and still have a quality, pre-made dinner waiting for you when you get off work on Monday.

Using the "hero meal" hack is just the first of many ways you can make meal prep (and next week's lunch plans) a painless process. According to WebMD – and, quite frankly, just about every person you ask — the most important rule of easy food prep is to focus on making simple recipes. The more complicated your meal, the more time you'll spend in the kitchen wishing you'd just made salmon and broccoli. And when choosing what recipes to create for next week's dinner, you can design meals that utilize many of the same ingredients; that way, you have the ability to cut down on the cost and complication of prepping several respective batches of totally different meals.

And then there's the part of meal prep most people overlook — the clean-up. Use freezer bags and tinfoil to ensure you don't spend as much time washing pots and bowls while food prepping. You can layer tinfoil on your baking sheet so you won't have to clean it between cooking different recipes and skip out on covering your mixing bowls in seasonings and dressings by shaking up your toppings and food in a freezer bag. So yeah, thanks to the advice of those who came before you, 2023 is a good year to be a meal prepper.