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Have You Discovered the Beauty of a Meal Swap?

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Have you discovered the beauty of a meal swap?

The other day on my Periscope broadcast, I was sharing five tips to avoid eating out. One of these tips, the meal swap, really resonated with people so I wanted to make sure that I share it with all of you, too!

meal swap

What is a meal swap?

A meal swap is when you gather some friends, decide on some dishes to make, assign one dish to each person, prepare the meals on the designated day, then meet to swap all the dishes. Sound complicated? It’s not. Let me show you.

Gather your friends.

Find some friends who want to stock their freezer with meals that are ready to finish off, just like you do. Your group can be as little as three people or involve a much larger group. Eight seems to be a really nice number to shoot for. Be sure to discuss any dietary needs with each other.

Each participating friend selects a dish to make that can be put in the freezer.

Once everyone has selected a dish to prepare, collaborate to make sure that you’re not ending up with repeats. When the dishes meet everyone’s approval, you are ready for the next step.

Decide when the dishes are to be made based on when you want to meet for the swap.

Sunday nights work really nice. That way, everyone can choose when on the weekend to make their dishes.

Everyone prepares their dish.

So, here’s the nuts and bolts of how this works. If there are eight people participating, each person then prepares their same dish eight times. It is so much easier, and cheaper, to only buy ingredients for one dish in bulk than it would be to buy everything needed for all eight dishes that are being prepared.

Think about it. If you are making chicken enchiladas for instance, you are just preparing a bunch of chicken, making a bunch of sauce, adding a few other ingredients depending on your recipe, and then assembling everything. Each dish gets put into those tin foil pans from the dollar store, and you’ve got an assembly line of eight pans of chicken enchilada going on in your kitchen. You can push all those through in no time.

Everything gets prepared to the point of it needing to go into the oven, and then instructions on how to complete the preparation gets taped onto each dish.

Finally, meet for the swap!

This can double as a quick evening out if you meet at a coffee house for some coffee, for example. Each person leaves their house with their eight chicken enchiladas (minus the one they are keeping) and comes home with seven different dishes to put in their freezer.

Voila! Stocking your freezer with eight different freezer meals couldn’t be easier!

Have you done this before? If not, does it sound like something you’d like to try?

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