Meal Prep Day 2.26.12

Every good meal prep day starts with a breakfast.  Today it was buttermilk pancakes and turkey bacon.  I always try to make a bigger batch of pancakes and cook off the entire package of bacon when possible.  The reason I do that is because I typically portion out the uneaten pancakes and throw them in the refrigerator or freezer depending on the schedule.  That way some sleepy Saturday we can just reheat the pancakes and just like that it's hot breakfast time.  The bacon I will reheat during the week if I need a little something more than my coffee, cereal and smoothies.

Some for next weekend and some for the freezer

Then it's sitting down with the meal plan and making a plan and any adjustments.  For example, my chicken breasts that I had planned to make last night would have to be made today.  They didn't defrost enough and we just made a pork tenderloin for dinner.  This put us in the spot of having a couple days of lunches and chicken that would have to be cooked up today.

The first thing on the prep plan was to get our Apple Cider Braised Pork in the slow cooker, it had been sitting in an Apple Cider brine for nearly 12 hours when we got it going.  

During the prep, Hubs (my sous chef) was cutting up celery so I had him break down the rest of the celery in the package into celery sticks for snacks. 

I portioned out some peanut butter to go along with these snacks.  This way we don't have celery sitting around in the fridge most likely going bad and getting wasted.

After that we cleaned up the dishes and started on lunch.  I had some frozen pork buns from our trip the the HMart awhile back and we steamed those up and made a delicious asian inspired rice with snow peas for a delightful lunch, which gave me an opportunity to use my Chimp Sticks, which are monkey chopsticks.  I gave my sister some for christmas and I got them as a return gift within a week.  They are fantastic for folks that don't take themselves too seriously.  Which I don't.

If only Meg was here to help me eat this meal

After that Hubs helped me trim down some split chicken breasts and I roasted them with some garlic dijon thyme compound butter I'd made the night before.  

We took a break so I could get my ass kicked at Monopoly and then pulled out the chicken, which was smelling up the whole house with delightfulness.  It was packaged up and put away for Wednesday nights dinner.

After this I broke down a boneless pork butt that I plan to use for a pork filling similar to the Shredded Chicken Filling that was made a couple months ago.  Since we hit Chipotle yesterday for lunch I could tell the urge for burritos was kicking back in.

Then I whipped up a pizza sauce that will make enough for three pizzas, we try to make Friday nights as easy meal that either of us can throw together based on who has better luck with traffic coming from work.  Pizza shells & shredded cheese are always in stock in our kitchen.  I always put pizza sauce on the prep list when I run out.  I will post the recipe later in the week as we're planning to make a Chicken Chorizo Pizza for Friday night.

After the pizza sauce was portioned for three pizzas, it was running a little later than I had hoped, so instead of making Ginger Carrot Soup for Monday, I reviewed the recipe as being pretty straightforward and easy and decided to just chop the carrots up and asked Hubs to peel the yukon gold potatoes for dinner tonight

After the carrots were broken down I cut up the rest of the carrots into carrot sticks for snacks for the week.  Again not wanting the carrots to go bad, makes more sense to utilize all of the produce in some way to avoid waste.

I also put together some cookie dough for my new cooke recipe for Red Velvet Cookies. That went into the fridge so we could make dinner.

Dinner was great and then we packaged it up for lunches and Hubs did the dishes so I could come blog it all out.

Have a great week folks!