While at the Harvest Celebration in Guangzhou, our editorial team will host a panel on pre-prepared meals and local produce at 10:30 on Sunday, 3 December. One of our guests, Doudou, is a kitchen enthusiast renowned for her homemade pre-prepared dishes. She shared her journey and a meticulous, step-by-step guide to making them at home. If you missed out, be sure to RSVP for tomorrow’s live stream or catch the replay on Foodthink’s video channel. Readers in Guangzhou are especially welcome to bring their own cutlery and head over to Gongmei Port, opposite Huangpu Village, to join the Harvest Celebration.
Although pre-prepared dishes like burgers, fried chicken, frozen dumplings, and braised pork instant noodles have long encroached on most people’s daily meals, this year has seen an unprecedented surge in attention towards them. One reason could be the “gap between expectation and reality”. After all, picture this: you’ve been hooked by a social media recommendation, visited the restaurant, queued for a ticket, and endured a long wait (patrons leave continuously, but it’s never your number). You finally take a seat, only to be served a table full of pre-prepared meals. Frustration hits a peak: Are they mocking me for not owning a microwave?!
A colleague once shared a meticulously logical, almost scientific method for avoiding pre-prepared meals on food delivery apps, but even that approach occasionally goes awry. Despite feeling she had flawlessly sidestepped every trap, she’d still sometimes receive a pre-packaged meal, leaving her, as she put it, “teetering on the edge of a complete meltdown”.
While friends around me tend to recoil at the thought of getting pre-prepared food via delivery or at restaurants, they’re surprisingly supportive of my home-cooking version. They frequently forward articles about the topic to me, saying, “This reminded me of your homemade pre-prepped meals.”
Indeed, if you can’t beat them, join them – it’s hardly a bad coping strategy. With so many friends asking, I might as well share my approach and step-by-step guide to homemade pre-prepared meals.
Part One: A Pre-Prepared Meal Journey That Began with Cat Food
In truth, my journey into pre-prepared meals began with cooking food for my cats. By late 2021, with the pandemic rolling in successive waves, simply stockpiling cat food was no longer enough to calm my nerves as an anxious owner of three cats. My reasoning at the time was straightforward: as long as I was able to stay indoors, there would be no shortage of food for humans, but cat food supplies were far from guaranteed. If the cats could eat home-cooked meals—essentially a healthy, pro-version of tinned cat food—I could always set aside a portion from my own supplies for them, ensuring they wouldn’t go hungry.
That fresh vegetables later became impossible to find across Shanghai and other regions, and that even freezers were snapped up, is merely another story of uncanny timing.
At first, it was simply a matter of making cat food: combining different meats in the right ratios, chopping them up, and steaming them. But doing this daily turned out to be more labour-intensive than feeding myself. So I would usually wait for major online shopping sales to buy meat in bulk (peaking at 25 kg), spend a day cutting, portioning, and freezing it all at once, and then simply take out a portion each day to steam.
After a few goes, I gradually realised the benefits of batch-processing ingredients: it cuts down on repetitive tasks and saves considerable time and energy.
This naturally opened up a new line of thinking: if I could prepare meals for the cats, why not do the same for myself? I’d be saving double the time and effort!
I started with bread, since slicing and freezing it straight after baking means it can be reheated directly before eating, bouncing back to nearly its freshly baked state without compromising the texture.
Previously, making bread would take up my entire day, with most of the time spent waiting for it to rise and keeping an eye on the dough.
For me, this was a rare moment when my brain could actually stop racing. Kneading required focus on gluten development, while proofing let my mind wander to the yeast gorging itself and letting out little burps. It kept my thoughts occupied yet entirely at ease. Not only did my mind slip into a flow state, but pressing my fingers into the dough felt deeply therapeutic, much like the appeal of squishy stress toys.
● Wholemeal toast and muffins.● Sliced country loaf, ready to be portioned and frozen.However, it is an undeniable fact that baking bread, both before and after, takes up a considerable amount of time. Yet, once you apply the logic of pre-prepared meals to bread baking, this time-consuming drawback disappears: the time spent making one loaf is roughly the same as making three. When the time cost is averaged out, homemade bread becomes highly time-efficient.
Later, I expanded my experiment with pre-prepared meals to cover three meals a day. Without exaggeration, after nearly two years of practice, I can now pull ready-to-eat meals from the fridge at any time—enough for breakfast, lunch, and dinner across five workdays, totalling fifteen meals.
Many people around me feel that giving up takeaways is incredibly difficult, and they often wonder how I manage to “stick with” cooking and packing my own meals without ordering out.
In truth, I don’t even feel like I’m “powering through” it. The word “persist” implies overcoming hardship, but in the process of experimenting with homemade pre-prepared meals, I’ve found a strong sense of fulfilment, even enjoying both the process and the results.
So, I’ve decided to outline the many benefits of making your own pre-prepared meals, hoping to inspire more friends to give it a try, cut down on dining out and takeaways, and avoid accidentally “coming across” commercial pre-prepared meals.
1. Reduce repetitive labour and save time
When I did Maths Olympiad at primary school, my favourite type of question was always about optimisation and scheduling. Take this classic example from Year 4.
When boiling water to make tea, washing the kettle takes 1 minute, boiling the water takes 10 minutes, washing the teapot takes 2 minutes, washing the teacups takes 2 minutes, and getting out the tea leaves takes 1 minute. How should you arrange these tasks to drink your tea as soon as possible?
【Explanation】First, wash the kettle, then put the water on to boil. While the water is heating, wash the teapot, wash the teacups, and prepare the tea leaves. This takes a total of 1 + 10 = 11 minutes.
When I was younger and tackling these kinds of problems, I’d think: brilliant, ticking off several tasks at once—what a time-saver! Now, when I cook, I subconsciously apply that same logic, mentally running through every step beforehand. If the water filter dispenses at a snail’s pace, I start catching the water while the bones are blanching. While the vegetables soak in a baking soda solution to draw out pesticide residues, the rice is put on to cook. I always prep the veg before the meat, sparing me an extra wash of the chopping board. In short, I draw the line at standing idle by the stove, just watching a soup pot bubble away.
This logic applies perfectly to bigger, more labour-intensive projects. Baking bread, braising meats, or making dumplings: preparing enough for one meal or ten takes roughly the same time and effort. Divide it out, and it practically rounds down to costing you no time at all.
● Braising 2 kg of beef shank takes three hours and yields enough for well over a dozen meals.
Then again, given the unusual circumstances of recent years, I’ve grown uneasy about the sheer volume of rubbish I generate daily, worrying about how to dispose of it if I were suddenly confined indoors. Should the city grind to a halt, waste collection would be a major headache. Since 2020, I’ve been composting plant-based kitchen scraps at home to cut down on household waste (motivated more by public health concerns than environmentalism). Composting does require a fair bit of labour, and dealing with it daily on top of cooking is, at least for me, far from effortless. But by batching my prep work and making my own pre-prepared meals, I also consolidate when the kitchen waste is produced, further squeezing down the time spent on household chores.
Ultimately, cutting down on repetitive labour and saving time are my primary motivations.
●The fat skimmed from braised beef shank is another kitchen by-product that can be repurposed to make household cleaning soap.
2 Reduce Unnecessary Decision-Making
As an anxiety-prone, pessimistic doer, there are actually quite a few things weighing on me each day. But a person’s mental bandwidth is strictly limited. Apart from essential work, study, and socialising, managing life’s daily choices also draws heavily on that bandwidth.
Bandwidth refers to the mind’s capacity, encompassing two faculties: cognitive processing and executive control. Scarcity diminishes this overall capacity, leaving us lacking in insight and foresight, while also weakening our executive control.
—— *Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much*
It is no wonder that full-time mums so often feel perpetually rushed. Unlike me, who only needs to look after myself, a “good” full-time mum typically juggles the roles of nanny, tutor, cleaner, cook, accountant, cashier, and private butler. Just listing these jobs exhausts me.
My job demands heavy mental labour every day. If I also have to deliberate over what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, it will continue to drain my mental bandwidth, and my brain simply won’t cope. When the mind has no headroom left, constant tension only accelerates mental fatigue. It becomes much like an overheating CPU, making a complete crash all too likely.
● I specifically tallied up the little decisions you have to make before cooking. This is the streamlined version, too—some of these choices have to be made repeatedly.So, by making one decision, you can secure meals for several days, drastically reducing the toll on your mental bandwidth going forward.What relieves mental drain isn’t the story of Second Uncle, but making your own pre-prepared meals!
Could ordering takeout solve this? The decision-making labour is hardly any lighter. The truth is, budget-friendly takeout that’s both tasty and healthy is hard to come by, especially if you want to steer clear of industrially pre-made meals where the sauces, ingredients, additives, and hygiene standards are all up in the air. But if you’re already gasping under the weight of financial pressures, work deadlines, and social obligations—or just enduring the grind of a 996 schedule—your brain simply doesn’t have the spare energy for that long list of choices above. At that point, your brain hands the reins over to habit and routine. Ordering takeout might be an act of self-preservation, not laziness.
3 Takeout falls short of your dietary needs
Being from Guangdong, I’m an incredibly fussy eater. It’s not that I have a long list of dietary restrictions, but rather that I’m rather fastidious—often unreasonably so—about ingredient pairings and cooking methods. For instance, I simply won’t touch garlic chive fillings, I draw the line at stir-frying broccoli with meat, and I dislike greens stir-fried in heavy oil. I’m generally put off by most wheat-based noodles, though I’m quite fond of bamboo-beaten noodles. I enjoy rice noodles, but only the fine varieties—nothing thick or flat.
● For these homemade char siu buns, I used a wholemeal European-style bread dough. I’m keen on the char siu filling, but I don’t fancy sweet buns made with vegetable margarine.● Steamed pork ribs with fermented black beans and preserved Chinese olives. Black bean ribs are easy enough to come by, but hunting down the preserved olives is a real task. The portions on the baking tray are for eating now; those in the meal prep containers are for the freezer.Later on, after getting involved with nutrition, my need for ingredient variety grew, and my tolerance for ultra-processed foods dropped. It became very hard to find takeaways that actually appealed to me. Besides, I think I’m one of those people with a particularly sensitive gut–brain axis. If a meal doesn’t agree with me, my mood plummets straight away; back in my childhood, I’d burst into tears over a bad meal. If you find your mood dipping when you’re not eating well, it’s absolutely not because you’re being overly sensitive. It’s completely normal. Treat yourself to something decent.
*The gut–brain axis refers to the bidirectional communication between the gut and the brain, involving complex interactions between the gastrointestinal tract, the nervous system, and the immune system, playing a crucial role in both physical and mental health.
4. Choose freedom, resist control
When formulating their products, the single most important question these companies ask themselves is: what level of salt, sugar, and fat will maximise the product’s allure?
In fact, some experts argue that Wall Street is actually one of the primary drivers of the obesity epidemic. ‘…They ramp up product sizes, ensure their goods are omnipresent in supermarkets of all sizes, package them for ultimate convenience, and even cultivate a sense of validation—the idea that you can eat them all day long, anywhere, and it’s perfectly fine no matter how much you consume.’
—*Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us*
My initial refusal of ultra-processed foods was a stand for the freedom to choose what I eat. But soon, I realised my body was actively rejecting them: they were too sweet, too salty, too greasy. Having (partially) reclaimed my dietary sovereignty, I came to understand that capital’s manipulation of our taste buds far exceeded my imagination.
It is a shackle forged from nested layers of constraint: The food industry produces cheap, quick sustenance by exploiting workers, the environment, and culinary traditions; excessive salt, sugar, and fat domesticate our taste buds, conditioning us to crave heavily processed foods and even become addicted; crushing workloads (draining physical energy and mental bandwidth) leave us psychologically dependent on takeaways and instant meals, funneling our money straight back into the food industry. No one is held accountable for the natural environment, personal health, or others’ labour, creating a vicious cycle of control.
One way to break free might be to reclaim our food sovereignty, cook for ourselves, and shatter that cycle of control.
Part Three: A Comprehensive, Step-by-Step Guide to Homemade Pre-prepared Meals
If you’re interested in giving ‘homemade pre-prepared meals’ a try, please find the following tips below.
1. Adapt the principles of industrial pre-prepared meals
Rather than resisting the trend, we can adapt their methods to our advantage. While the home environment isn’t an ideal setting for frozen ready meals, if you’re keen to give it a go, consider minimally processed frozen ingredients or ambient-temperature convenience foods. The most common options include frozen diced vegetables, frozen prawns, and no-cook corn cobs, which have grown increasingly popular recently.
I rather enjoy browsing the supermarket’s frozen cabinets; the finished meals inside offer excellent reference points. Established frozen products have already stood the test of the market and are generally far from unpalatable. We can use them as blueprints for home replication, paying close attention to their level of preparation. Take steamed scallops with garlic and glass noodles, pizza, or glutinous rice parcels: buy them, take them apart, and determine whether the components are frozen raw, partially cooked, or fully cooked. Replicating this process at home will considerably reduce the risk of kitchen mishaps and cut down on trial-and-error costs.
The pre-made meal companies have already shouldered these learning costs on our behalf.
● Homemade siu mai, inspired by the supermarket’s frozen cabinet.● A traditional pre-made dish I prepared late last year — Cantonese Chinese sausage!
2 Try to keep meat and vegetables separate
Plant fibres, starches, and proteins react differently to freezing and heating. Their freezing curves vary, and so do their cooking requirements. If combined, the mismatched rates of ice crystal formation during freezing will degrade the texture, leaving the dish unpalatable once thawed and reheated.
● First steps in homemade meal prep: frozen rice.
Vegetables needn’t be fully cooked or thawed
Vegetables such as spring onions, ginger, garlic, corn kernels, peas, carrots and celery can all be diced or chopped into small pieces and frozen (think of how they’re stored in the supermarket frozen vegetable aisle). Keep them ready to use straight from the freezer. This is a great way to quickly use up ingredients you’ve bought in bulk, cut down on waste, and save on prep time when cooking.
For vegetables that do require some cooking beforehand, avoid cooking them all the way through. A quick blanch until just partially done and slightly softened is all that’s needed. This step helps draw out excess moisture, minimises ice crystal formation, preserves texture, and leaves room for reheating later.
When you’re ready to cook, there’s no need to thaw frozen vegetables either. You can simply let them sit in the fridge for a short while to take the chill off, or boil or stir-fry them straight away.
Thaw meat dishes before reheating
By ‘meat dishes’ here, I mean purely meat-based recipes, like braised pork belly. Unlike plant fibres, meat doesn’t suffer much in texture when frozen, provided you thaw it properly. Ideally, move the meat from the freezer to the fridge the night before for a slow defrost. This rule also applies to raw meat: slow-thawing prevents excess bloody juices from weeping out, sparing you the unappetising, chewy texture of improperly frozen meat.
Stews freeze well, stir-fries don’t
This isn’t to say you can’t prepare meal-prep dishes with both meat and vegetables; it’s just that most combinations don’t hold up well, and there are few hard-and-fast rules—you’ll need to build up your own experience through regular cooking. What is fairly certain, though, is that dishes requiring long, slow simmering are highly likely to tolerate mixed ingredients. Prime examples include curries, braised dishes in rich sauces, and various meat-based soups and stews. You could also experiment with Western or South-East Asian options, like bacon and cream pumpkin soup or bak kut teh. Conversely, leafy greens that demand high heat and quick cooking are generally poor candidates for freezing. Again, a trip to the supermarket’s frozen food aisle can offer plenty of inspiration and ideas.
Stews also belong to the small group of dishes that don’t require advance thawing; you can just take them out and heat them straight away, sparing you the mental load of planning meals the night before.
3 Minimise bacterial growth and contamination
Store promptly, don’t leave food out
Once you’ve finished a pot of braised pork, resist the urge to stand by the pot and scarf down a bowl of rice. The bacteria in your saliva will multiply rapidly, releasing unpleasant odours, significantly diminishing the dish’s flavour, and gobbling up the umami compounds within the food.
If you’re packing lunch for tomorrow, portion out tomorrow’s meal before you sit down to eat. Leftovers tasting off isn’t an illusion; the saliva on your chopsticks and prolonged room-temperature storage are both to blame.
● Perilla dry-pot chicken: the portion with green peppers on the left was for dinner that day, while the meat-only remainder is heading to the freezer as a pre-prepared meal. Remember: portion first, fill up second.
Low temperature, low oxygen, low bacteria
Once your pre-prepared meals are cooked, do not wait for them to cool. Instead, pack them immediately into clean (ideally heat-sterilised) airtight containers and put them straight into the fridge. If you can vacuum seal them, go for it. This follows the logic of industrial food processing: low temperatures, low oxygen, and sterilisation do the most to preserve flavour and extend shelf life.
Frozen food can still go off, and before it actually spoils, it will taste bad first.
You can apply the same principles to storing fresh ingredients, especially plant-based ones. A cool, dry, low-oxygen environment slows down plant respiration, thereby extending their shelf life. Wrapping leafy greens in kitchen paper, sealing them in a bag, and refrigerating them will easily keep them fresh for half a month; a month is not out of the question. P.S. The kitchen paper can be dried out and reused.
IV. “Home-cooked meals” should not be a luxury
Ultimately, I hope these tips from my own experience will serve as a reference for anyone looking to cook at home, helping to ease the pressure, save time, and avoid unnecessary detours.
I also understand that eating “home-cooked meals” or making your own pre-prepared dishes is, to some extent, a privilege.Spare time, mental bandwidth, a fitting interest, a touch of knack, or having family members who can invest these resources—under today’s high-pressure, fast-paced conditions, these are all virtually luxuries.
While everything is difficult at the start, our actions themselves cast votes for the world around us. Turning down takeout could well mark the beginning of “the turning of fate’s gears”.
Finally, if you’ve read this far and are still planning to order in, I can only share the colleague’s tips from the beginning of the article on how to sidestep takeout that’s actually pre-prepared meals. Though, in practice, they are somewhat hit-and-miss:
1. Avoid places that are too cheap.
2.Check the restaurant’s actual photos. It should not be a takeout-only shop and must have a dining area.
3.Avoid places that sell every type of cuisine.
4.Steer clear of heavily seasoned dishes like Sichuan cuisine, BBQ, or pickled cabbage fish.
Foodthink Author
DoudouA practitioner of sustainable living with a passion for exploring non-consumerist lifestyles.
