The Absolute Best Way To Meal Prep With Olive Garden's $6 Take-Home Entrees

Olive Garden has a deal that's worth dining for: Whenever you order a dish for dine-in or takeout, you can choose one of three other dishes to take home for just $6 more. The options are fettuccine Alfredo, five cheese ziti al forno, or spaghetti with meat sauce. The good news: All of these are some of Chowhound's favorite Olive Garden dishes, and all of them cost two to three times as much when ordered normally. But if you want to make the most of the leftovers and turn them into meals for the next few days, then it's best to go with the ziti.

Fettuccine Alfredo isn't the best option for meal prepping because it typically doesn't reheat well. It's one of those sauces that tends to separate, and while you can deal with that, it first leaves you with an oily dish that isn't anywhere as good as when it was freshly prepared. Spaghetti and meat sauce reheats well because it's just a red sauce base, and the five cheese ziti will reheat well, too, since it also has a marinara base. But if you want the most filling meal, go with the five cheese ziti — it packs 4 grams of fiber and 24 grams of protein compared to just 3 and 14 grams respectively for the spaghetti.

The five cheese ziti already has plenty of protein, but if you want the meal to stretch further, prep it with some chicken or sausage. This will let you split the meal into multiple meals' worth, so you can take full advantage of your $6 Olive Garden entree. Bake some sausage in the oven and slice it, and sauté fresh spinach with a little olive oil. Then, when you pack your dish for meal prep, divide the pasta into two to three containers, and toss each serving with the spinach and sausage for an easy way to turn one meal into several. You can even pair other easy side dishes, like a spruced-up bagged salad or frozen garlic bread, with this entree for a full pasta dinner.

If additional at-home cooking isn't for you, one Reddit user suggested ordering Olive Garden's jumbo salad to go with your discounted entree. While it's a little pricier at $23.49 (depending on location), it comes with a dozen breadsticks and feeds up to six people, meaning you'd be able to portion out smaller amounts of the ziti, pair it with the salad and breadsticks, and prep as many as six meals from the one pasta entree totaling under $30, or around $5 per meal.