How I prep 4 days of meals in 1.5 hours.
People on r/MealPrepSunday keep asking whether I do tutorials, so here's the whole thing. The gist: I cook everything in parallel and work backwards from when it all needs to be done. The trick is figuring out what to start first, so nothing's ever waiting on anything else.
The session.
Five dishes: gyudon, Japanese beef curry with rice, chicken pesto & rice bake, a chocolate Oreo Japanese cheesecake, and high protein banana bread.
This is the real schedule of those five recipes. Solid blocks are hands-on work, faded bars are the machines doing their thing. Tap a number to see the step. (The plan runs a little conservative: it budgets 1 hr 48 min because it queues the banana bread behind the chicken bake in the oven. I baked it in the air fryer instead and finished in 1h 30m.)
How it actually went.
- 1
Start the set-it-and-forget-it dish.
Gyudon first: everything goes into the rice cooker, about 5 minutes of work, and then it cooks on its own for ~30 minutes. Your first dish is 90% done with 5 minutes of effort.
- 2
Kick off every other long wait.
Preheat the oven for the chicken pesto rice bake. Get water boiling for the gyudon's soft-boiled eggs. None of this needs you. It just needs to start early.
- 3
Prep while the machines work.
That buys about 10 minutes: chop the broccoli and chicken and assemble the pesto bake. By the time the preheat beeps, it's ready to slide in. Second dish 90% done, 20–30 minutes into the session.
- 4
Give the stovetop your hands.
The beef curry is the hands-on dish: brown the ground beef and garlic, chop potatoes and carrots and let them cook together, then onions and the curry blocks. Most of the session's active time lives here, which is fine, because everything else is cooking itself.
- 5
Fill the gaps with no-bake work.
The Oreo cheesecake needs no oven. Mix everything and portion it into jars. About 10 minutes, done in whatever gaps appear.
- 6
Use the second heat source.
Mix the banana bread batter during a wait. Instead of queuing it behind the chicken bake in the oven, I baked it in the air fryer. Two heat sources, two bakes running at once. That single move is most of how the real session came in under the planned time.
The three rules.
- The longest hands-off wait starts first: rice cooker, oven preheat, boiling water.
- One appliance, one dish. Parallelize across appliances (rice cooker + oven + stovetop is the best combo), never inside one.
- Every wait gets filled: chopping, mixing, no-bake desserts.
The catch.
Every recipe is different. Mapping out this sequence for the brand-new recipes I save each week was taking longer than the cooking. I got tired of re-planning every single weekend.
So I built a tool that does the orchestration for me: it works out each recipe's timing and finds the shortest way to cook everything together, then talks me through the steps while I cook. It's called Sunday Chef, and you're on its site right now.
The gear.
People also ask about equipment and whether I have a wishlist page. I don't have anything fancy. Here's everything in my kitchen, honestly.
- Mixing bowls: 2× medium, 2× large, stainless steel (Ikea)
- Food containers: glass, plastic, and stainless, all Ikea
- Always Pan 2.0 (Our Place)
Oven-safe and deep for a pan. Makes life easy for the oven bakes.
- Instant Pot Duo 7-in-1, 8 quart
Big. Great for batch cooking.
- Air fryer (GoWISE)
An old model. After years of use I don't love the circular basket; if I were buying today, I'd get a rectangular one.
- Blender (Vitamix)
A ~10-year-old Costco model. My one "investment", from my daily-morning-shake era.
- Hand mixer
- Stainless steel pan · stainless steel pot · ceramic pot
- Ninja Creami
- Knives
Also about 10 years old. Nothing fancy, they cut.
This started on Reddit: the original session thread on r/MealPrepSunday (skeptics included) is here and the tutorial post pinned on my profile is here .