Meal-prepping may sound like the perfect “I planned ahead” solution to your dinner woes, but not everyone is on board with the meal-prepping craze—at least not the way many people do it. Meredith Hayden of Wishbone Kitchen, for one, is a self-proclaimed meal-prep critic. 

“Normalize not meal prepping really big containers of ground meat and rice and reheating them for five days in a row,” Hayden, an Institute of Culinary Education-trained chef, told Better Homes & Gardens during our recent cover shoot. “There are other options. We don’t have to be doing that.”

We’re fans of make-ahead casseroles and taking steps to reduce the amount of time it takes to take food on the table, especially during busy weeks, but Hayden makes a good point—beyond the possible risk of getting food poisoning from leftover rice (and any other past-its-prime food you’ve prepared), there’s not a lot of fun to be had in eating the same thing for lunch or dinner five days in a row.

Hayden—whose cookbook, The Wishbone Kitchen Cookbook, comes out May 6—isn’t totally against meal-prepping, though. She just wants people to do it in tastier, more food-safe ways.

“Make soup that you can put in the freezer and not give yourself food poisoning,” she suggests. “You could also batch out your food prep, so you prep ingredients instead of fully cooking your meals all the way through.”

Hayden recommends chopping raw ingredients you use often, like an onion, at the beginning of the week so you can use the pre-chopped ingredients as needed while you cook fresh food (with less chopping, and one less thing to wash afterward!) throughout the week.

“I think that’s sometimes the time-saver that you need instead of just relying on fully cooking everything to completion and microwaving it,” she says. “It’s a good little hack.”

For more from our cover shoot and conversations with Meredith Hayden, check out our cover story, Q&A, and more.