Meal Prep with some before and after… (But only some. Because it’s only Tuesday.)

What a month May has turned into… Every weekend has been filled with activities and projects. (Yay! I love activities and projects!) The projecting will be culminating this Sunday when we host Mother’s Day for the first time at the new house. And I really want everything to look nice – also, I’m more likely to get things done with a deadline – so I’ve been doing a lot more projecting than meal prepping the last couple weekends.

But we still have to eat. And I love a good puzzle. (i.e. how to feed us well with minimum kitchen time.) So I made up what seemed to be a quickie menu… And – per usual – it took a little longer than I thought. (But I still had time to sand and paint a bench the hubs made out of the old deck wood! So, really, win-win.)

All that to say, I feel like some meal prep talk is overdue. So here’s what it looked like at my house on a busy weekend…

The Menu

• Roasted Drummies with Slow Cooked Carrots & Cauliflower Mash
• Spaghetti Squash “Pizza” Bake
• Grilled Chicken Thighs with Grilled Green Bean Foil Pack & Brown Rice
• Leftovers (if we got ‘em) (Blackened Salmon with a Microwave Steamer Veg, if we don’t)

The Prep

First, I tossed a bag (plus some leftovers from a veggie platter, because no veg left behind) of baby carrots in the slow cooker while I prepped. Carrots always take so long to cook so, with a slow cooker liner and some multi-tasking, it’s like you barely even do anything to knock this side dish out. Warms up later great too.

With the cooker cookin’ carrots (alliteration!), I pulled out a recent fave…  Chicken drumsticks. They’re so cheap, easy and tasty. I think I forgot about them for a while. (How I forgot about them, I dunno. I sure love a good turkey leg.) I dried them well and wrapped them in paper towels to keep them that way. Packed ’em up, ready to be dashed with some seasoning.

Which turned out right nice for Monday night. (Also, that Central BBQ Hot Rub is so good.)

The spaghetti squash bake was the most intensive. Largely because it involved the oven AND stove top which made me hot. (Summer is knockin’.) While I baked the spaghetti squash, I chopped and sautéed some chopped onion. Tossed in some big, hot Italian ground turkey links (I like to take them out of the casing) and, after those were browned, poured in some pizza sauce (the kind that’s basically tomatoes, not sugar) and let the whole thing simmer. Once the squash was done, I forked it out of its shell, gave it a good wringing out in towel and tossed it in with the sauce.

Oh, and I threw in some thawed freezer spinach to make it extra healthy. If you wonder why it’s greenish.

And then added cheese to make it less healthy. Heh.

Mmm. Big ole buncha melty.

So, we’re not quite to hump day but so far, so good!

For tomorrow, the hubs loves chicken thighs. I made a big batch to grill so we should have leftovers for lunches too. Trimmed off the fat and dumped them in Frank’s Buffalo Sauce to marinate. (That could probably be stated more appetizingly… But that’s what happened.)

I took a short cut and bought the green beans trimmed, washed, and ready to go. I’ll shake them in the bag they came in with olive oil, kosher salt, garlic powder and then pour it all into a homemade aluminum foil pocket for grilling.

So that’s what the week’s prep looks like here. We’ll see if leftovers hold out or we need to defrost some fish for Thursday. Hope everyone is eating well this week!

Oh, yeah. And spinach/zucchini egg muffins. Might be what put me over the edge on time. But worth it!