“Prepping” food, meaning either just peeling and cutting the ingredients in advance or cooking entire meals and keeping them in the fridge, has a lot of benefits. You can plan your shopping so that half your groceries don’t end up being fed to the garbage disposal, you have more control over when you spend time in the kitchen and last but certainly not least, there’s much less of a temptation to pop a frozen pizza in the oven when you have a healthier option at your fingertips.
In practice, however, prepping can quickly become messy.
Tossing a bunch of stuff in an electric pressure cooker on Sunday afternoon is easy enough. Unfortunately, storing everything you’ve just cooked in one large container means that it’s likely to spoil before your teenagers manage to find the motivation to actually spoon some onto a plate.
Similarly, even with the very best of intentions, it’s way too easy to forget about some random tupperware container. If it’s hiding at the back of the labyrinth that is the average family fridge, you might not notice it until mushrooms have grown inside it.
These handy prep boxes make the whole process much easier and more rewarding. Each is just the right size for a complete single meal, divided into three compartments to keep ingredients and sauces from mixing. They can also go straight from the refrigerator to the oven or microwave, cutting down on dishwashing on those evenings you just can’t be bothered.
As they’re made of glass, you can see what’s inside, which can help awaken your appetite and lets you select your meal without having to take off lids. Glass has another advantage, too: it’s much safer than plastic.
Whether artificial chemicals leaching into your food really puts you at risk is still an open question. Remember, however, that both DDT and smoking were once considered to be perfectly safe even as evidence to the contrary was mounting up. With these containers, at least, you can heat your food or store acidic ingredients like marinating meat without worrying about what you might be ingesting.
They work well as lunchboxes, too: they seal tightly against spills and an included knife and fork actually nestle in the lid itself, which almost by itself makes this product worth buying.
The only real drawback we can see is that the internal compartments can make it difficult to get some kinds of food out and also complicates washing up (though the bowls are dishwasher safe).
It’s also possible to shatter them, though since they’re made of special borosilicate glass, you’ll have to be exceptionally clumsy to damage them during normal use.
