The fall semester is coming to an end, meaning that winter break is around the corner. Along with the start of the holiday season comes the end of classes, and with it, the inevitable: finals. Finding time in your day-to-day activities to study for several finals can be taxing, with little time for relaxation. An essential part of staying energized during the hustle and bustle of finals season is eating, but it can be hard to find time to prepare healthy and hearty meals. Here are five easy and affordable meal prep options to get you ready for finals season.
- Pasta
-
A simple meal to make at home is pasta. With so many ways to serve it, pasta makes a great staple meal. High-protein pastas also provide extra nutrition, keeping you fuller and energized longer. To meal-prep pasta, pick your pasta brand and shape, and prepare the servings needed for your week. You can meal-prep pasta for lunches, dinners, or both if you’re a serious pasta lover like me. After cooking your pasta, separate your servings into refrigerable containers. A great way to keep your food organized is to label it. You can add dates to the containers if you want to organize them even more.
Alex Frank / Spoon Since pasta is a simple base food, it’s easy to customize it to your preferences. These preferences can include adding sauces, proteins, or vegetables. One of my favorite pasta recipes is pasta with three cheese sauce, red bell peppers, and chicken. Several grocery stores sell precooked proteins, such as chicken and meatballs, which can also be added to your pasta.
Pasta noodles can cost as little as 98 cents per box, with one box containing approximately eight servings. Pasta sauces can also be affordable, with one jar costing as little as $1.67. Prices of pre-packaged meats can vary depending on where they are purchased, so if these additions are out of budget, you’ll still have several filling meals prepped. - Rice Bowls
-
Another simple-to-make meal is rice bowls. Rice bowls are incredibly versatile, as the ingredients can be tailored to your preferences. Personally, I like making rice bowls with red bell peppers, broccoli, and precooked chicken. The ingredients in the wrap are based on your personal preferences; ingredient prices can fluctuate.
A way to keep this meal budget-friendly is to purchase ingredients on sale or buy one, get one free. Several local grocery stores offer weekly ads highlighting their sales and BOGO items. Planning a grocery list ahead of time and comparing prices between grocery stores can help you find the ingredients you need at the cheapest cost. Ingredients such as rice and pre-cooked chicken are often BOGO items, so make sure to take advantage of those deals. These ingredients come with several servings that can be used for multiple meals.
To prep this meal, you’ll first begin by cooking your rice. Then, separate your rice into containers and begin adding portions of your additional ingredients to each one. Once all the ingredients have been split between the meals, they’re ready to be refrigerated and reheated when needed.
- Wraps
-
Similar to bowls, a simple meal prep is wraps. Wraps also feature the same versatility as bowls, but with a twist. A cheaper alternative to buying meat is to buy a rotisserie chicken. While a rotisserie chicken for one can seem like too much food, chicken is incredibly versatile and can be spread out across multiple meals. A potential wrap base can be a tortilla and shredded rotisserie chicken, paired with any vegetables or sauces that you enjoy.
To make a wrap, lay out your tortilla and begin layering ingredients in. Once you’ve layered in your ingredients, you can either cut the wrap in half and use the two halves as separate meals or keep the full wrap as one meal. Again, the amount of food you prep is based on your needs, so don’t feel as though you need to prep an abundance of food. Prep what you can based on your resources!
- Overnight Oats with Yogurt
-
Not every meal prep needs to be for lunch or dinner. A vital meal to jumpstart your day is breakfast, which college students (myself included) commonly ignore. Between forcing myself to get up and start my day and trying to get out the door in time for class, breakfast often falls to the bottom of my priority list. One easy-to-make, straightforward breakfast option is overnight oats with yogurt, which uses as few as six ingredients and takes less than ten minutes to prep. The recipe I follow uses yogurt, but some overnight oats recipes omit yogurt and replace it with chia seeds.
Christin Urso / Spoon For overnight oats, the ingredients are milk, oatmeal, and a yogurt flavor of your choosing. Other ingredients can include vanilla, cinnamon, and honey for some healthy sweeteners. A recipe published by JoyFoodSunshine outlines the process for making the oats. To make overnight oats, combine all your wet ingredients. Then, add in your dry ingredients and mix. Separate your batch of overnight oats into individual containers and refrigerate. The next morning, they’ll be ready to eat straight out of the fridge. The recipe also provides substitutes for those who do not consume dairy, including alternative ingredients.
- Salad
-
A healthy, easy-to-prep light meal is salad. Salads are incredibly versatile, so from taco salads to the classic Caesar, the options are endless. While salads can be nutritional, they may not always be the most fulfilling, so pairing them with pita chips is a great way to round out the meal.
Buying ingredients to make a salad of your choice can seem steep, with produce prices fluctuating regularly. Meal prepping doesn’t mean that you have to hand-cut a head of lettuce and shred carrots. Several grocery stores sell pre-made salad packs that can be sectioned into two servings. These pre-made salad packs come in a variety and tend to be BOGO items, lowering the price even more.
To keep the salad fresh, it’s best to eat it within a few days of purchasing and opening the pack. If you keep the pre-made salads in their original packaging for as-needed use, that’s a great option! If you’d like to section off your salads to make them easy to grab on the go, combine all the ingredients from the pack and divide the mixture among containers. Once the salad is separated into containers, place it in the fridge and grab it whenever you’d like to eat it.
While these meal preps are budget-friendly, they might not be friendly for all budgets. Alongside the government shutdown, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits have been cut in half. For some students, this can mean a tighter food budget than before. No student should have to go hungry, which is why I’d also like to highlight Knights Pantry, a service run out of the Student Union.
Knights Helping Knights Pantry is open to students with a valid UCF ID to check out five food items per day at no cost. These food items include fresh produce, non-perishables, refrigerated items, freezer items, and food items for students with dietary restrictions. Food is donated to Knights Pantry by community donors and funded by UCF’s Student Government Association.
If you’re ever in need of food, toiletries, school supplies, or other essential living items, Knights Pantry is open to all students. If you come across non-perishable food items, unused school supplies, or old textbooks you no longer need, you can also help by donating them to Knights Pantry. Donations can be dropped off at the Pantry in Ferrell Commons or in donation boxes around campus. Knights Pantry’s website also includes a ‘high-demand’ list for items needed in a surplus, along with an Amazon Wishlist of other items students need for success.
One thing that students should never have to worry about is where their next meal will come from. With all the other daily tasks, students have enough to stress about. Prepping meals over the weekend or whenever you have a bit of downtime, you can further ensure that you’re prepared to take on finals confidently.