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Meal Prep: Week 1

This isn’t my first meal prep rodeo. And probably not my last. But every time you do it, that’s a win. So let’s see how long this one lasts.

My situation is that I work from home, husband works in an office, and I have 2 teenage kids that do school lunches, yet still seem to come home hungry more often than not. So I need to cover packed lunch for my husband, dinners for 4, after school snacks, and ideally lunch for myself as well since I absolutely don’t have time to go pick up takeout for lunch (nor would I, given that we’re on the FIRE program).

A lot of starting this up again was inspired by the Ethan Chlebowski chicken meal prep YouTube vid. I really like his approach of aiming more for flexibility than a rigidly planned week, or one of mass-producing 12 servings of the same meal for the week. It’s sort of like the agile version of meal prep.

So I salted half a dozen chicken thighs and 3 thin-cut chicken breasts, with the idea of using them for Ethan’s Go-To Chicken Salad, Curry Chicken Salad sandwiches, and a Chicken Caesar Salad during this week.

I took the dry-brined chicken, coated it with mayo and about 1/3 a packet of blackened chicken seasoning powder, then fried the chicken thighs for 4-5 minutes per side in a dutch oven. The chicken breasts needed a slightly shorter amount of time so as not to overcook.

I have already found that trying to do ALL the week’s prep on a Sunday is a mistake, and that for me, it’s best to do a big chunk of it Sunday, but plan on a second round mid-week. So here’s how the week shook out:

Made Sunday

  • chicken thighs
  • 1 batch of curry chicken salad
  • Cut celery for lunches
  • Cut pineapple for snacks/lunches
  • A batch of rice – for whatever
  • A batch of granola
  • 2 yogurt parfaits for lunches

Made Tuesday

  • Chicken bone broth for hot pot. For some reason this was a total bust. I guess partly because I added a couple chicken boullion cubes, which imparted a totally artificial flavor and made the broth feel really unspecial. It was a bummer since bone broth takes hours.
  • Ground beef stroganoff. I had a seasoning packet for crockpot beef stroganoff, so I just used that with some ground beef and however much water and sour cream it looked like it needed. This provided dinner that night, plus 2 servings of leftovers that my husband and I had for lunch the next day.

Made Wednesday

  • Hamburger mac. Basically just browning hamburger with some onion and Worcestershire sauce, and adding it to a family sized Kraft mac ‘n cheese. The kids love this stuff.
  • Pho broth. Yeah, I was super annoyed about the hot pot fail earlier in the week, so I went and got the beef bones and such to make a Joshua Weissman Pho. I made the broth on Wednesday. It took a total of 4 hours, though for most of that time you’re totally ignoring it. I didn’t have coriander seeds or cardamom pods, so I used ground coriander and cardamom, but even so, it turned out DAMN GOOD.

Packed lunches

Here are a couple examples of the packed lunches I made during the week:

  • Yogurt parfait, 2 hard boiled eggs with seasoning, celery with peanut butter
  • Curry chicken sandwich, pineapple, nuts, baby carrots, mini granola bar
  • Curry chicken sandwich, grapes, celery, date bites, dark chocolate

Dinners

  • Monday: Cobb salad with the prepped chicken thighs
  • Tuesday: Beef stroganoff
  • Wednesday: Chicken Caesar Salads
  • Thursday: Pho
  • Friday: Takeout

Learnings

I didn’t make enough chicken thighs, those were SO GOOD. My daughter brought them to work for her dinner. I’ll definitely make twice as many next time.

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Meal Prepping: Gardening and FIRE, Manifested

On some random weekend recently, for an unremembered reason, we got FIREd up again. We knew about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) already, but it was decided on that day that we would revisit doing FIRE.

Maybe it was my first weekend going to Market Basket instead of Hannaford and seeing how much lower the grocery bill actually was. I don’t remember. But anyway, we looked at all our subscriptions, canceled the ones we didn’t need, broke out the old French Press so we could stop going to Starbucks every morning, and turned to meal prepping.

Bear with me, this does involve gardening. Eventually. But it also involves the homesteading mindset, directly, and I’m all about the homesteading life Or maybe I’m more of a glamsteading person? I don’t want to slaughter my own pigs, and I don’t yet own chickens. So maybe that’s a thing, and there’s no shame in my glamsteading game!

So NOW I’m thinking this blog will be not just about gardening, but also about all the stuff I’m doing that’s super adjacent to gardening/homesteading, and that I think are really interesting, valuable, and worth sharing.