By Harold Phillips | June 9, 2026
The Sunday prep either happens or it doesn't. There's no middle ground.
When it happens, my week clicks into place. I know what I'm eating on Tuesday night without having to think about it. I come home from the gym, grab a container from the fridge, and that's dinner. Ninety minutes of prep on Sunday buys me fifteen minutes every weeknight, and for someone who trains four times a week and has approximately zero desire to make food decisions after a hard session, that trade is completely worth it.
When it doesn't happen, the week quietly falls apart. I start making bad calls. I order something on Wednesday. I eat plain eggs for the third meal in a row because it's the fastest protein I can find. By Friday I'm mildly irritated at myself and trying to remember why I skipped prep in the first place.
Some Sundays I'm tired, or we've got plans, or I just don't feel like standing at a stove for two hours on my day off. That's real and I want to say it plainly before I spend the rest of this going on about how great my system is. The system only works when I actually do it.
The No Frills Run
I shop at the No Frills on Queen East, usually Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning before I start anything. My partner comes maybe half the time. When they don't, I have a voice note habit I developed after arriving home with $70 worth of groceries and no eggs three separate times.
The produce section is the part I've had to figure out over time. Quality fluctuates and that's just what it is. Some weeks the spinach looks great; some weeks the bell peppers look off and you put them back. I've stopped trying to fight this and started building my prep around whatever looks good instead of showing up with a rigid list. If the broccoli is excellent, broccoli goes in this week. If it looks sad, I grab cauliflower and adjust. The flexibility matters more than the plan.
Protein is the big cost lever. I train three to four times a week and I eat high protein, not as a philosophy but just what my body needs to actually recover. Chicken thighs are almost always the right answer: cheaper than breast, more forgiving to cook, they don't dry out if you leave them in the oven an extra eight minutes. A kilogram runs about $11 most weeks, and I'm usually buying two. Eggs always go in the cart. A big tub of cottage cheese. Canned lentils, or dry red lentils depending on what I'm making.
I've written more about what the full weekly grocery bill actually looks like in my grocery editorial, so I won't retread the cost breakdown here. This is about the prep session itself.
What Gets Made
The prep takes between ninety minutes and two hours, start to finish. I'm not running five burners. Usually two things at most: one in the oven, one on the stove, while I do dishes or listen to something in between.
The oven gets the chicken. Big tray of thighs, garlic powder, smoked paprika, salt, whatever else I feel like. 400°F for about forty minutes. That's three or four dinners worth of protein handled.
On the stove: the dal. Red lentils, diced onion, a few cloves of garlic, canned tomatoes, cumin, turmeric, garam masala, coconut milk if I have it. One pot, about forty-five minutes, most of it unattended. A full batch costs somewhere around five or six dollars and covers three lunches. I'm genuinely proud of this dal. I know that's a strange thing to be proud of. I'm not a chef, I don't have real technique, I couldn't describe my knife skills without being embarrassed. But the dal is good and I've got it dialled in over about two years of making it.
The rest is easy: hard-boiled eggs, a batch of rice, whatever vegetable looked best at the store. Roasted or steamed depending on my energy level and whether I can be bothered to wash and chop things.
By early afternoon the fridge has containers in it. There's something quietly satisfying about that. The week already has a shape.
The Dal, More Specifically
I want to spend a moment on this because it's the one thing in my rotation I'd actually recommend someone try.
The dal gets better the next day. That's the thing. Day-one dal is good. Day-two dal, after it's had time to sit and the spices have done whatever they do overnight, is excellent. It reheats well in a microwave without going gluey, which you cannot say about everything. Packed with rice in a container, it's a complete lunch that costs maybe two dollars and takes thirty seconds to reheat at work.
I have no idea how I landed on making dal. Somewhere in my mid-twenties I searched "cheap high-protein meals" and started from a recipe, adjusted it over maybe a dozen batches, and ended up where I am now. It's become a habit in the same way the Sunday prep is a habit: something I do so regularly I barely notice it anymore.
If you want the actual proportions, I'll say: about a cup of dry red lentils, one large onion, four cloves of garlic, a can of diced tomatoes, a can of coconut milk, a teaspoon each of cumin and coriander and turmeric, half a teaspoon of chili powder, salt to taste. Sauté the onion and garlic first, add everything else, simmer covered for thirty-five to forty minutes. That's it.
Containers: A Brief Rant
I have four glass containers and a rotating cast of plastic ones, and I've stopped trying to achieve any kind of matching set. Two of the glass lids no longer pair with their containers because one cracked, which means I have an orphan container I use as a bowl when everything else is in the dishwasher.
The only thing that actually matters in a container is that the lid seals properly.
Anything you're going to microwave: glass is better. It doesn't absorb smells, it doesn't warp, and food heats more evenly. The trade-off is that glass containers are heavier and will crack if you drop them on a tile floor, which I learned the hard way. Plastic is fine for cold food: snacks, salads assembled day-of, that kind of thing.
Roasted vegetables are the big loser in any prep scheme. The texture degrades within twelve hours. I still roast them and eat them over a couple of days, but I've stopped expecting the day-four serving to be crispy. It won't be.
Protein First
I've done the actual math on hitting my protein targets through food. The short answer: eggs, chicken, cottage cheese, legumes, every day. That determines my shopping list more than anything else. The produce, the carbs, the flavour additions are secondary. The protein gets bought first.
I don't rely on protein powder. Per gram of protein, it's more expensive than real food and I'd rather eat chicken than drink a shake. The exception is creatine, which is inexpensive and has actual evidence behind it. The rest of the supplement industry is mostly noise. I've said this before and I'll keep saying it because I spent money on that noise in my early twenties and I'd like to save someone else the trouble.
Cottage cheese is probably the thing I eat most consistently outside of chicken. It's cheap, high in protein, and genuinely useful across a dozen different eating situations. I eat it plain. I eat it with fruit. I put it in things. It doesn't photograph well and I've never claimed otherwise, but it's functional food and it earns its place in the fridge every week.
When It Falls Apart
About one Sunday in four, the prep doesn't happen. I'm tired, we have plans, or I just sit down and the momentum never arrives. Those weeks follow a predictable pattern.
Monday is fine because there's always something left from the week before. Tuesday I can manage by improvising. Wednesday I'm eating rice and eggs at 9 PM because I didn't plan anything. Thursday I give up and order food.
Ordering food in Toronto is expensive now. A bowl from a decent takeout spot is $20-25 before fees. Meal kits are cheaper than delivery and better quality than takeout, but meaningfully more expensive than prep. I've tried a few of the main ones when I've needed a fallback. I wrote up the ones I've actually tested in my Factor vs. Goodfood comparison if you want that breakdown.
The week without prep costs me somewhere around $60-80 extra. I've accepted that as the cost of being a person who sometimes doesn't do the thing. The goal isn't perfect execution forever. The goal is most Sundays. I hit that.
What I Spend
The No Frills haul for a full prep week runs $60-80 in ingredients specifically for cooking. Some weeks I stop at Costco for bulk pantry items (olive oil, canned tomatoes, oats, Greek yogurt in the big tub), and those cost more upfront but average out over time.
The thing I've noticed is that having a rough plan before I walk in the door keeps the spend down. Not a detailed recipe list, just: I need two proteins, three or four vegetables, and something starchy. When I go in without that, I come out with random things that don't form actual meals and spend more in the process.
Produce is the most variable line. I've learned to work with what looks good rather than what I planned. I can adapt almost anything to whatever's on sale that week. The flexibility is what keeps the cost manageable.
Honestly, I'm not going to pretend this routine is glamorous. There's no beautiful mise en place, no aesthetically arranged containers. There's a sheet pan of chicken, a pot of dal, a dozen boiled eggs, and six mismatched containers on a shelf in the fridge. Most weeks, that's enough.
Opinions are my own. If I mention a service I use, there might be a referral link — you'll always see a note about it.