Dinner Party Prep vs. Weekly Meal Prep

Advanced Dinner Prep vs. Weekly Meal Prep–are these practically the same thing or not even closely related? In the descriptions of many of my recipes, you will see me call them out as great for either advanced dinner party prep or a weekly meal plan. That’s because I love recipes that can be staged, prepped, or partially prepared in advance. From a dinner party point of view, these staged or prep ahead recipes are a great way to de-stress the final lead up to your party. From a meal planning standpoint, they make it easy to get a complete meal on the table during the week after work that is not take-out or whatever you can raid from the fridge. (I’m looking at you, low carb wrap with shredded mozzarella and turkey pepperoni.)

Dinner Party Prep vs Meal Prep Infographic

I realize that not everyone is interested in planning dinner parties every couple of weeks. I suspect that more people are interested in, if not actually on the train of weekly meal prep.

Some Definitions

For the purposes of this post and references elsewhere in the blog, we’ll define “Weekly Meal Prep” as the planning of at least 2 to 4 meals for the week with the bulk of the preparation being completed in a dedicated block of time on the weekend with minimal finishing steps remaining for each weekday / weeknight meal. I will also say that there is a wide spectrum of what is encompassed by meal prep. For example, you could prep 3 meals a day for 5 days of the week. Or . . . weekly meal prep might be contained to 3 – 4 dinners per week with some version of leftovers for lunches. Or maybe it’s just lunches for the week. Whichever version most readily applies to you or your idea of meal prep, many of the recipes, skills, and techniques associated with it can easily cross apply to Advanced Dinner Party Prep.

Again, for the purpose of this post and elsewhere in the blog, we’ll define “Advanced Dinner Party Prep” as the staged breakdown of recipes, ingredient prep, and house prep associated with the 1 – 3 days prior to when you are hosting a dinner party. This 1 – 3 day timeframe also can change.

However, that’s not to say that there aren’t some distinct differences between dinner party prep and meal planning in how you approach the recipes and what the bigger picture prep plan looks like. I’d like to spend the next little bit laying out those similarities and differences while showing you how you can use the same recipes and skills for both.

Differences between Advanced Dinner Party Prep and Weekly Meal Planning

Let’s start off by talking about how Advanced Dinner Party Prep and Meal Planning differ. I know I’ve said this before, but I like to think of Advanced Dinner Party Prep as the lead up to a “Go Live” (if you’re in tech) or the planning and staging for an upcoming battle (if you go with the more violent analogy). Meal Planning is more like an ongoing operational strategy for a business or a long running war campaign (again with the violent analogy). Because of these two diverse paradigms, there are two key areas where they differ most:

Menu Composition
Time Required for Advanced Prep and Final “Day Of” Prep

Differences in Menu Composition

Clever Re-use of Ingredients vs. Designing a Cohesive Menu

Weekly Meal Plans often try to use the same ingredients in different ways. The idea is to be able to use one ingredient in 2 or 3 meals to cut down on the number of things you have to cook. With the goal of preventing boredom for whoever is eating throughout the week, meal planning can be an exercise in creativity. However, the primary constraint is the ingredient list followed closely by time.

For a dinner party, you’re likely not trying to come up with 3 ways to use ground turkey for that single meal. The menu focus is more about putting together a cohesive meal that is likely to span an evening. In this case, time becomes the primary constraint while the ingredient list is much less so.

Balance of Recipes by Course Type

There may or may not be a difference in the number of recipes you need to prepare. This depends on how many weeknights you want to include in your meal prep or how many dishes you want on your dinner party menu. For me, the number of recipes is about the same but the balance of appetizers to sides is shifted. Maybe your weeknights at home include an appetizer course but mine sure don’t. 😛 (That would be great, though. Maybe one day, if I retire to a cruise ship . . . anyway . . . ) Conversely, I typically have some vegetable side dish for every weeknight meal but only one or two for a dinner party depending on the specific menu.

Differences in Required Time for Advanced Prep and Final “Day Of” Prep

Distribution of Time Per Meal

When meal prepping, you are usually trying to confine your prep work to a couple / a few hours on the weekend. You then intend to have very limited finishing time for lunch packing / readying (if you work from home) as well as minimal final cooking time for weeknight dinners. Thirty minutes seems to be the magic acceptable prep number for dinner and more like 10 – 15 for lunch. (However, those 30 minutes never seem to account for clean-up, which in my opinion is the worst part of the equation.) The idea is to reduce the time needed for each meal throughout the week.

Advanced dinner party prep (at least as I write it), on the other hand, is intended to spread out the prep work over the evenings leading up to the day of the dinner party. They often require 2 – 3 hours of work in the one or two evenings preceding your party. I’m, of course, speaking in generalities here as the specific advanced prep time required depends on the menu. Then on the “Day Of” there is usually work to be done in the ~2 hours leading up to the guest arrival time. Basically, roughly the same amount of time is spent on one meal in the case of a dinner party vs. weekly meal prep for a few days of the week. It’s just allocated differently.

Day(s) of the Week for Prep

The other difference related to timing involves when the preparation takes place. For weekly meal planning, you’re usually talking about dedicating time on the weekend. Whereas for dinner party prep, you’re allocating time in the evenings leading up to the dinner party, whichever day that might be.

Hidden Time Costs

I’d also note that in advanced dinner party prep, I include lines for things like straightening up the house (at least the parts that will be seen) and grocery shopping. From a meal planning perspective, these tasks are often ignored or just considered part of everyday / weekly life. They certainly are, but they still take up your valuable time.

Similarities between Advanced Dinner Party Prep and Weekly Meal Planning

Okay, now that we’ve covered how Advanced Dinner Party Prep and Weekly Meal Prep differ, let’s get into the similarities. The two largest areas of cross-over are the recipes themselves and the required project planning skills. While some of the details of each may vary as noted above, the process for putting “it” all together and then executing the plan remains the same.

Recipes

One of the keys to success in either situation is recipe selection. Although you are optimizing the overall plan for different success criteria, you can choose from many of the same recipes.

Some hallmarks of recipes that make good candidates for either Advanced Dinner Party Prep or Weekly Meal Prep are:

Easy to Make in Discrete Stages
Easy to Store the Prepped Ingredients or Nearly Finished Dish in Fridge or Freezer
Relatively Short Finish or Final Cook Time
Easily Scalable to Larger Quantities Due to Number of Guests or Desire for Leftovers

Easy to Make in Discrete Stages

Recipes that make the best “crossover” candidates are ones that can be broken down into distinct steps or stages. In most cases, you should be able to stop after any one of these stages and store what you’ve done for later.

The way that I most typically break down my stages is as follows:

Raw ingredient prep – usually veggies first and then any raw meat (e.g. chopping, measuring dry ingredients or spices)
Pre-Cook (Do any of the ingredients need to be cooked before assembly? e.g. making a syrup for a dessert, cooking veggies or meats that will go into a casserole)
Assembly (e.g. assembling a casserole right up to the point before baking, prepping meat with a rub or vacuum seal so it is ready to cook, combining all of the chopped veggies and seasonings to be cooked later)
Final Cook or Assembly (e.g. baking a casserole, roasting a pork tenderloin, roasting vegetables)

Every stage will not apply to every recipe, but I find that breaking it down this way enables a more streamlined process.

Easy to Store the Prepped Ingredients or Nearly Finished Dish in Fridge or Freezer

If you’ve read many of my recipes, you may think that I own stock in zip top bags or some brand of airtight containers based on how much I talk about them. (Sadly, I don’t.)

One of the things that slows me down the most in cooking is the “interstitial clean-up,” meaning the need to clear and clean an area and utensils before moving onto something else. If I had infinite kitchen counters, cutting boards, and utensils, I could much more quickly plow through a sea of prep, leaving a trail of dirty dishes in my wake. Alas, I don’t, and like most people, need to reuse the same space and tools from one task to the next.

To make this process as efficient as possible, I group like tasks or ingredients together in my prep process. e.g. If recipe #1, #2, and #5 need chopped onions, then they’re all getting chopped in one fell swoop and divided up into baggies or containers labeled with which recipe they belong to and their quantity. I stick those in the fridge until I’m ready for the next stage of their use.

A good prep plan will:

Group like tasks together (i.e, chopping vegetables vs.. chopping raw meat)
Account for dependencies (meaning you can’t do Step “X” until Ingredient “Z” is ready)
Consolidate clean-up cycles
Use the “inactive” time (like drying bread cubes) from a recipe wisely by planning other prep work during that time

Relatively Short Finish or Final Cook Time

Whether you are trying to get dinner on the table after work or trying to line up the timing for all of your dinner party food so that you can socialize as your guests arrive, minimizing the time needed to finish a dish is key. Most of the recipes that I list as good for either advanced dinner party prep or meal prep fall into one of these categories:

Can be finished in the oven, hands off
Can be served cold or room temperature straight from the fridge
Can be finished with 30 minutes or less of hands on cooking, usually less

When you see me allocate about 2 hours on the “Day Of” your dinner party, that may seem like way more work than the ~30 minutes for weeknight dinner. However, remember that for the dinner party, we’re making about the same number of recipes as we would throughout the whole week in a meal prep plan. All of those ~30 minutes add up. 🙂

Easily Scalable to Larger Quantities Due to Number of Guests or Desire for Leftovers

Depending on the size of your dinner party or the number of times you are happy to eat leftovers in your weekly meal plan, the serving sizes that you need to prepare may change. However, there are convenient little serving adjusters in most online recipes that will save you time and effort.

Project Planning Process and Skills

Again, if you’ve been reading along with me for any length of time, it will come as no surprise that I view dinner party planning and weekly meal planning as just categories of general project planning. The phases and processes can draw parallel lines to any other type of project–be it tech, construction, event planning, etc. The scale, scope, budget, and number of integrations will certainly differ; but the principles translate.

As it relates to similarities between Advanced Dinner Party Prep and Weekly Meal Prep, they both require designing the menu, figuring out what (resources) you need, and budgeting the appropriate amount of time to get it all ready. Again, while the specifics might differ, the process is the same.

Creating a List of Recipes

While on face value creating a list of recipes may sound like the easy part, I’m going to have to disagree. This is essentially the “design phase” of your plan. Of course you can change things and adjust along the way, but this is where you have to bring together:

Knowledge of your audience (i.e. who can and will eat what?)
Coordination of recipes based on factors like re-use of ingredients for multiple dishes, desired quantity, what ingredients are in season, etc.
Understanding of the complexity of each recipe and the time you will need to alot for it

I’m not going to lie. Recipe selections can be challenging and time consuming. This is why meal planning services are a thing and, frankly, abound in spades.

Deriving a Unified Shopping List from the Plan

Now that you know what you want to make, it’s time to figure out what you need to make it. Usually the list contains ingredients, but don’t forget about any non-food items you may need as well (e.g. cheesecloth). The key here is to get to a cohesive, useful list that can translate into an actual purchase.

My steps for generating my grocery lists for either a weekly meal plan or a dinner party include:

Grab the list of all ingredients from all planned recipes
Sort the ingredients into groups by grocery store category (e.g. produce, spices, dairy, meat, etc.)
Consolidate like ingredients to show a single totaled quantity needed (e.g. 3 eggs from recipe “A” + 2 eggs from recipe “B” → should be listed as 5 eggs)
Cross off or remove what you already have

*** Fun Dinner Party Diaries Feature Note:

You can now create your own menu from any group of recipes you choose on the site and generate a shopping list. The shopping list is grouped by ingredient categories for your convenience. You can also add to the list, check things off if you already have them, and share it with someone else (who can also edit the list).

Allotting a Clear Time Block or Blocks to Ingredient Prep and Assembly One or More Days in Advance of Need

Setting aside the time for advanced prep can be a challenge given the busyness of life, but that’s really where the rubber meets the road for either Advanced Dinner Party Prep or Weekly Meal Prep. As I mentioned, “when” you need to schedule time will likely vary between the two. However, the need for a dedicated block or blocks of time holds true for both. I most often work in 2 – 3 hour blocks. For Weekly Meal Prep, I usually do this on a Sunday afternoon or evening. For Advanced Dinner Party Prep, I usually space out my work on Wednesday and Thursday evenings to prep for a dinner party on Friday.

If you can manage limited interruptions, that’s great because focused work will usually speed things up. However, that’s not usually how my time shakes out.

Summary

At first blush, it may seem like Weekly Meal Prep and Dinner Parties are completely unrelated. Hopefully, it’s now apparent that that is not the case. You can leverage the same recipes and skills for both Advanced Dinner Party Prep and Weekly Meal Planning. If you are already meal prepping but are intimidated by the idea of planning a dinner party or just feel like you don’t have time, think about your meal planning process but give it a single night goal. Likewise, if you’ve got the dinner party thing down but would like to smooth out the process of getting cohesive meals on the table throughout the week, shift your prep work to a dedicated, timeboxed session on the weekend and space out the execution over the course of the week.

As with many things in life, in either case planning will “set you free”. Recipes and planning skills that are good for meal planning are usually also great for advanced dinner party prep. (I say “usually” because there are always exceptions and very few absolutes in life.) While there are differences in the details, the fundamentals are the same.

Good luck and let me know how your next dinner party or weekly meal plan turns out!

If you’re interested in some recipes that are great for either Advanced Dinner Party Prep or Weekly Meal Prep, take a look at these: