When we say “food prep” here, we’re looking atadvance preparation, not the everyday sort of food prep. (That should already be on your daily routine!) This can come in a number of forms, and it can be very extensive or fairly minimal. Let’s consider some of the options.
If you’re scaling recipes and/or planning a large cooking session, you will probably have other planning forms to use, as well. Freezer cooking session plans often include checklists of preparations (so you can compile the preparations for all recipes into a single list), containers needed, etc. Worksheets for scaling your recipes up can also be helpful. (If you adapt a lot of your own recipes for the freezer, this might also be a good place for a list of foods that freeze well/foods that don’t freeze well.)
But it doesn’t necessarily need to be that complicated. I might decide that I want to make four mixes this week off my list. I will need to be sure I have the ingredients available and the recipes on hand, obviously, but then I don’t need any other fancy paper plans.
Just have a place to store the “blanks” for any forms you use for this purpose, as well as a place for storing the assembled plans, if you think you might use them again.
This is not exactly food prep-related, but there’s one last category of kitchen paperwork that didn’t really fit in anywhere else, so let’s tackle it here: the miscellaneous stuff. I don’t know about you, but I have a certain category of paperwork that accumulates in the kitchen, because it’s specific to the kitchen, and if I don’t intentionally address it, it piles up and makes a mess.
This is things like ingredient panels and/or instructions off the packages of bulk foods, instruction manuals for kitchen tools, take-out menus (for those rare occasions when we order food to be delivered – and this is uncommon enough that we can never remember what’s available!), etc. These need a place or they’ll just pile up and become clutter!
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