Weekly Meal Prep Starts Now

I have decided that Sundays will be my day to "meal prep" for the week. This really helps me be able to "do it all" the rest of the week. I don't mean meal prep like those fitness influences that eat the same meal for way too many days in a row (that could never be me). I just mean picking up the groceries (hallelujah for online order pick up), cutting up the produce, and trimming up the meats. We have started to trim quite a bit from our chicken breasts to avoid any tough spots and we give the cooked trimmings to the dogs, so it's a win-win. So let's talk about what this looks like this week.

Plan your meals & place the grocery order

This week I placed the order on Saturday while laying in bed and scheduled the pick up for Sunday mid-morning. I did a rather good job on coordinating all meals & ingredients if I do say so myself. It doesn't always work out that way. This weeks meal plan:

Sunday	Crockpot shredded enchilada chicken rice bowls
Monday	Chicken pot pie (double it and freeze one)
Tuesday	Left overs
Wednesday	Chicken Salad on croissants
Thursday	Left overs
Friday	Creamy tuscan chicken
Saturday	Left overs

Sunday I want something easy so I can focus on prepping everything else. It will also leave us with left overs for lunch the next day. I am currently following along with the car mom's thawgust recipes. You have to follow her on instagram and listen to the podcast (the car pool). Anyway, every week they are making a new recipe, doubling it and freezing one in anticipation of their maternity leave in September. It just so happen to time perfectly since we are likely moving around the end of August, so now I will have some freezer meals ready to go while we are moving. The chicken pot pie uses heaving cream, so I decided to also make creamy tuscan chicken (from Tasty) this week to try to use up the heavy cream since I always waste it. The chicken pot pie I'm making is based on the pioneer woman's recipe and it uses celery. Well, I make a chicken salad recipe from a friend that also uses celery. And on top of that, these are some of our favorite recipes. While I have a "plan" for the days, I don't always follow it to a T. It's more like these are 4 things I have the stuff for this week and it may flex what days it actually gets made. For example, I am traveling for work Thursday and Friday so I could see the creamy tuscan chicken being made saturday instead. I realize this is heavy on the chicken. Honestly, I haven't been great at using anything else besides ground beef but I am getting better. Last week I made a mississippi chuck roast twice!

With this plan made, I placed my grocery pick up order accordingly and picked it up Sunday morning. I could also do a pick up Friday or Saturday if I was going to be close to a walmart.

Meal prep

Think of subway, they have all those little containers of the difference meats, cheeses and vegetables prepped and ready to go. They don't make that fresh every day, it gets stored in the fridge for the next day (I'm really just assuming, but I can't imagine they prep all that every morning and throw out what didn't get used). This is what I decided my meal prep would be. I would go ahead and chop all the veggies I needs for the different recipes at one time and just store in the fridge until I make that recipe. On top of that, I've also started to buy a lot of chicken breasts and trim them all at once. Whatever I plan to use that week, I store in the fride or go ahead and cook and shred and the rest goes in the freeze already trimmed and ready to cook. We do a lot of shredded chicken, and I kind of hate the extra step to trim the chicken. It will be nice to have some in the freeze already trimmed the next time we need it. Speaking of shredding chicken, that something the first three recipes all have in common. While the crockpot chicken enchiladas are cooked and shredded separately the chicken for the pot pies and chicken salad I went ahead and cooked and shredded all at the same time. To add to my ambitous Sunday plans, I already made chicken spaghetti for a friend that just had a baby, so I added that to the chicken to cook and shred. So here's a timeline of everything that got prepped.

• Trim chicken - Freeze what you don't need this week.

• Cook & shred chicken - I cooked 11 chicken breasts on our blackstone, seared the first side for a few minutes, flipped and pours a little chicken broth over the top and covered with a large basting lid for about 10 minutes until it reached temp. To shred we have a shredder from amazon with the clear lid and it is an absolute game changer for shredding chicken.

• Chop produce - For my planned recipes, I need carrots, celery, onions, garlic, grapes, and tomatoes. I need onion for both the pot pie and creamy tuscan chicken for example so I checked both recipes and figured out total how much I would need. I've also decided I really love fresh minced garlic so much more than the jarred version from the store. I definitely have not mastered how to easily do it yet and as I'm writing this I'm remember just how sticky it is, but the flavot is so much better.

• Clean up my diaster of kitchen.

Cook your meals

Now everything is prepped and ready to go. While you do still have to make dinner, I personally find that I dread making dinner a little less by doing this. I specifically dislike cutting up vegetables, which sounds dramatic but I am not great at it and it takes me a while. I am also way less likely to order out because I already did half the work to make dinner! On top of all this, my husband can easily make dinner as well because everything is already prepped ready to go.