Sunday Batch: 4 Lunches, One 90-Minute Session
The order matters more than any individual recipe here: rice on first, oven second, stovetop third, fritters last. Once you've run this sequence twice you'll stop needing the timings written down. The actual skill this template teaches is running two heat sources at once instead of cooking everything in series, which is where the real time saving comes from.
What you'll make: four different lunches from one session, so week two doesn't feel like a repeat of week one. Swap any of the four for another meal-prep-sunday-tagged recipe once you've got a rotation of five or six you like.
What You'll Make
Session Steps
- 1
Shop Saturday, cook Sunday. Start the rice first: it takes the longest unattended stretch, and everything else can happen around it.
- 2
While the rice cooks, prep all vegetables for every recipe in one pass: julienne carrot and cucumber, grate zucchini, dice capsicum, trim asparagus. Doing this once instead of four times is most of the time this template saves you.
- 3
Get the oven on for the salmon and asparagus tray first, since it needs the least hands-on attention once it's in.
- 4
While the oven runs, cook the chicken and sauce for the rice bowls on the stovetop.
- 5
Fry the tofu for the soba bowl while the chicken rests. Two pans running at once is the actual reason this fits in 90 minutes rather than three separate cooking sessions.
- 6
Cook the soba noodles and mix the peanut dressing.
- 7
Fry the zucchini fritters last, while everything else cools slightly before boxing.
- 8
Divide everything into 8 containers: 2 chicken rice bowls, 2 salmon-asparagus, 2 soba-tofu bowls, and fritters split across all containers as a side. Cool fully before sealing lids to avoid condensation.
Storage & Reheating
Fridge: 4 days for the rice bowls and soba bowls; the salmon is best within 3 days. Fritters hold 4 days separately and can be eaten cold. None of these four freeze as a combined box — if you want freezer backup, cook a double batch of just the chicken rice bowls (that recipe is the one built to freeze) and skip doubling the salmon or fritters.
