Category: Blog

Most weeks don’t unravel because we don’t enjoy cooking, they unravel because, by midweek, dinner feels like one decision too many. Prepped Not Processed was created to take that pressure off and make meal prep something you can genuinely look forward to.

Curated and designed by Melissa Hemsley, these menus are built around a simple but powerful idea: scratch-cook once at the start of the week, then let those ingredients carry you through five different dinners. Not repeats, not reheats, but thoughtfully planned, well-seasoned components that evolve as the week goes on. A traybake becomes tomorrow’s frittata. Cooked rice turns into a fast, vibrant fried rice. A big pot of chilli comes back later, confidently reinvented into cheesy quesadillas. On top of this, Melissa’s recipes use whole foods and minimally processed ingredients.

This is batch cooking with confidence and with real food firmly at the centre. Everything works together, which means less food waste, a shorter ingredients list and far less need to lean on ultra-processed convenience foods. Instead of packets, powders and shortcuts, you’re cooking with ingredients you recognise and use well. You’ll spend around 90 minutes cooking with purpose, then the rest of the week is mostly assembly.

Across the five days you’ll clock up more than 30 plant points, alongside plenty of fibre, protein and gut-loving diversity.

You can feel quietly smug knowing your midweek dinners are already half-done. It frees up your evenings while still delivering food you’re genuinely excited to eat. That’s the heart of Prepped Not Processed on the Good Food App: batch cooking but far better.

How to follow the plan

Melissa’s plan is designed to serve two people over a working week – cook once, get five meals.

Use your 90-minute cooking session to make the following base meals:

Then make the most of your power ‘hour’ by serving the recipes throughout the week:

Day one: Trout, potato & olive traybake (1/2 portion)

Day two: Bean & beef chilli with rice (1/2 portion)

Day three: Spanish tortilla

Day four: Rainbow fried rice (made with 1/2 portion of trout traybake)

Day five: Chilli quesadillas (made with 1/2 portion of bean & beef chilli)

K’S NEW ENGLAND CLAM-LESS CHOWDER
Recipe by Raeleen Wilson and Chris Tullar
Cooking with the Asheville Mushroom Club

We have made this soup many times, and it is super delicious. It is our favorite way to prepare blewits, and we serve this soup sometimes at our Fall Cultivation Workshops. If you don’t want to wait for your blewits to fruit, you can substitute with oyster mushrooms.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups peeled and finally chopped potatoes
• 1 cup chopped and sautéed onion
• 1 cube chicken or vegetable bouillon
• 1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1/2 tsp fresh chopped thyme
• 1/2 tsp pepper
• Butter or oil for sautéing
• 3/4 lb blewit mushrooms, cleaned and chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 2 cups milk
• 1 cup light cream
• 2 tsp flour
• 1 tsp Salt
• 2 tsp Kelp powder
• Oyster crackers to garnish

Method: 

Boil potatoes, onion, bouillon, Worcestershire sauce, thyme, and pepper in 1.5 cups water until soft. Sauté mushrooms and garlic in a small amount of butter or oil. Mix together the milk, cream, flour, and salt. Add milk mixture, mushrooms, and kelp to the potatoes and cook until thick and bubbly. Serve oyster crackers as garnish.

Tester: Alaina Chou, commerce writer
Best for: Anyone looking for some expert guidance in discovering new coffees from roasters all over the country.

If receiving personalized coffee picks from a catalogue of nearly 600 coffees from 60 different roasters sounds like your cup of tea (or, rather, joe), then I will point you toward MistoBox. I found a lot to love about this service after testing it for several months, particularly the way Misto tailored its selections and overall experience felt to me and my taste.

The ordering process starts with a quiz that’ll ask you about your coffee preferences: Choose among how you drink your coffee (black, with milk, etc.), whole or ground beans, roast level, other designations you’re interested in trying (single-origin, blend, espresso, or “I’m not sure”), frequency (ranging from weekly to every four weeks), and pay plan (pay for every individual bag, every six, or 12 coffees). But the customization doesn’t end there: After ordering, MistoBox will send you another quiz in which you’ll input things like how you make your coffee, how you grind your beans, which of the four options it presents sounds most appealing and which sounds the least, and a field to share any other important info with the MistoBox team as it goes to curate your order. The whole process feels very personal, which I appreciated—after all, while convenience is certainly one of the things you’re paying for when you opt for a subscription service, the other major perk that makes these services worth it to me is the expert-curated aspect.

I’ve loved every coffee MistoBox has sent me so far. The first shipment was the Roma Espresso Blend from Parisi Artisan Coffee, which was aptly described as having notes of milk chocolate, almond, and honeysuckle. I tend to drink espresso, most often with milk in a cappuccino made using my Breville Oracle Jet. The Roma blend, which MistoBox sent me based on that information, worked beautifully for this. After you receive each coffee, you’ll have the chance to rate it out of five and leave any tasting notes, which you can share with your curators if you’d like. Coffees you’ve tried show up in a customer dashboard, as will your “Brew Queue,” a.k.a. the lineup of the next coffees coming to your door. These will appear as “MistoBox’s choice” by default, but if you loved a coffee you tried and want it again, or spy a coffee in their collection that you’d like to request, you can opt to add specific coffees to your queue as well. All in all, MistoBox’s user-friendly interface and extensive feedback options make it a great choice for anyone looking for some expert guidance in discovering new coffees from roasters all over the country.

For the decaf drinker: Swiss Water

Swiss Water Curated Coffee Subscription

Want to make Japanese-style tsukemen? Content creator and recipe developer Verna Gao (aka @vernahungrybanana) shares her simple recipe for easy homemade tsukemen using instant ramen noodles. Try her recipe below, then discover more Japanese recipes. Read more about Verna Gao’s food travel series.

“My new obsession post-Japan is tsukemen and I think this is a genius way to liven up a standard packet of instant noodles. Tsukemen is a Japanese ramen style where cold, chewy noodles are served separately and dipped into a hot, ultra-concentrated broth. If you think about it, instant ramen is kind of perfect for this. By deliberately undercooking the noodles and shocking them in an ice bath, they stay super bouncy and springy, while using less water for the soup packet keeps the broth rich and punchy.

“Add a few strategic cheats (roasted ham brushed with sweet soy, jammy soy-marinated eggs) and suddenly this stops feeling like a hack and starts feeling intentional. I genuinely didn’t expect to like this as much as I did. Would you try it? For the full recipe on how to make those picture-perfect ramen eggs, search the internet for ‘Verna soy eggs’.”

Watch Verna’s recipe video below, then find more of Verna’s food and travel content over on olive’s Instagram where she shares her favourite foodie destinations, including the best places to try local dishes and recipes to make at home. Keep an eye out for her next video…

Verna Gao’s tsukemen recipe

Heat a large frying pan over a medium heat. Cook the quesadillas in the dry pan for 3-4 mins on each side until golden and crisp (you may need to do this in batches). Meanwhile, mix the relish with the yogurt and season to taste. Serve the quesadillas cut in half with the yogurt on the side for dipping.

I just made chanterelle vodka, it was sooooo easy. I am watching it and it is already turning a nice peach color. When it is done infusing, I am going to strain it through a coffee filter, and maybe find another recipe for the alcohol doused chanterelles.

Yesterday I went to the liquor store and picked up 1.5 gallons of the plainest vodka I could find. The jug I used is 1 gallon, and I found it in the woods when I was morel hunting. I knew it was going to come to a good use ?

Recipe
— 1 gallon vodka
— enough fresh chanterelles that will fill up a quarter of your 1 gallon jug
— 1 gallon jug

Directions
— put the chanterelles into the jug
— pour the vodka over them
— close up the bottle, and let sit
— ready for drinking when all the chanterelles have sunk to the bottom of the jug

Here is another recipe that I am going to make later with the left over vodka:

Recipe: Spiced Mushrooms in Alcohol
— 1 cup chanterelles
— 1 tsp caraway seeds
— 1 lemon
— 1 red chili
— 1.5 cups vodka

Combine all ingredients into a clean jar, pour vodka over them, when mushrooms stop floating, it is ready to serve. Chill before serving.