 Hey friends, welcome back to another weekly meal prep. So today we are going to be putting together some easy meals and a few meals that actually are some of our new favorites. These are so delicious and so simple. So on Monday, we're gonna be making teriyaki ground beef bowls. This is one of our new favorites because it's an easy way to use up ground beef. We do purchase local beef so we tend to get it in a whole cow or half of one. And so often I have a lot of ground beef around so I'm always looking for good ways to use ground beef. And this recipe is so, so simple. So I just tore up some broccoli into really small bite-sized pieces, put that into the skillet with a little bit of oil and now I'm putting together a sauce. I would consider this to be almost more like a yum yum sauce. So you're gonna do a little bit of mayo, some chili sauce and some honey and some rice vinegar and then a little bit of garlic powder. So I stirred all of that up and then I also put some brown rice on the stove with some of my homemade chicken broth. I love making my own chicken broth and if I can remember, I'll see if I can link a video below on how I do this. I've done it a couple of times I think in videos and it's super simple but then I can it all and it's just at my fingertips for recipes like this. So once my broccoli has steamed just a bit and gotten a little bit soft and a little bit kind of grilled, I'm just pulling that off and I'm putting a pound of ground beef into the frying pan. Once that ground beef is browned up, I'm putting a little bit of oil in the middle of it and then I have frozen cubes of garlic and of ginger that I'm adding into that ground beef just to bring in some yummy, fresh flavor. Once that's cooked up a bit, I'm adding the broccoli back in and then we're gonna use this kinders teriyaki sauce to make that really good teriyaki flavor. You can use any teriyaki sauce you want to but we really like that one. This was the first time I used it and I'll definitely be purchasing it again. Okay, so now we're going to go ahead and assemble our bowls and this is such a simple one bowl meal for a busy Monday night. So I'm just putting some of the brown rice into the bowl and then I'm gonna put some of the teriyaki mixture in as well, drizzle across that really good sauce and then I'm going to add some sesame seeds and some green onions. And most of you know this by now but I like to remind people that are new. These recipes are either linked if they have a website associated with them or typed out in the description box. Okay, so Tuesday we're going to make a buffalo chicken potato casserole with garlic green beans. Now the garlic green beans, I'll be making the night that we eat this but I am prepping the casserole. So it's got just a few ingredients for the sauce. It's some hot sauce, some olive oil. I think it's garlic powder and then some smoked paprika is what I used. You're just gonna whisk all of that up together and then I took some red potatoes. You could peel the potatoes personally. We don't mind eating some red potatoes with the skin on and I'm just making them into nice bite size pieces. You're gonna put all of that into the bowl and you're going to toss it in that sauce. And whenever you put everything into this nine by 13 you're just gonna kind of slowly do it because you want some sauce left in the bottom of the bowl because we're gonna use that next. So you're gonna line this into the bottom layer of the nine by 13 and put it into the oven. And we're going to bake that for about 20 minutes while we prepare the chicken. So we are going to take a quick coffee break in the midst of this prep and this coffee break is brought to you by Bydeem. They are sponsoring this portion of today's video. They sent me this multifunction electric steam brewer for tea and coffee. This one and a half liter stainless steel brewer is just perfect. I think that it's such a unique system and it makes making steamed coffee really fast. Also, if you're someone like me and you don't drink all of your coffee at one time it does keep it warm for eight hours by the temperature of 158 degrees Fahrenheit. The bottom controller is waterproof so you can make all of your selections really easily even if your fingertips are wet. It has a BPA free silicone lid. It also is a food grade stainless steel with the food grade removable silicone. With its professional steam brew it fully extracts the essence and flavor of tea leaves and coffee. I also drink tea so I know that this is gonna be a really quick way to make my tea all in one unit. With the tea water separation design it prevents prolonged soaking and avoids a bitter taste in flavors. So essentially it keeps your tea leaves in the top portion basket and then it keeps your tea in the bottom nice and hot and you're not gonna get a bitter taste from too much steeping of the tea. It has four temperature settings for rapidly heating water to 140 degrees, 175 degrees and 200 degrees along with 212 degrees. I love that it has a strength setting feature for coffee so I can choose how strong I want it to brew. As a busy mom and someone who's always on the go making my coffee quickly or tea quickly and efficiently is really convenient so I love this system and if you head to the description box you will find the information and the link there for this great by-deam brewer. So I'm gonna cut chicken also into bite-sized pieces. We're gonna throw it into the same bowl and kind of use up the rest of that spice marinade that we made and if you really enjoy buffalo sauce you're gonna love this recipe. We like buffalo wings around here so I knew this one would be really, really good. This week I knew I was going to need bacon for two different recipes so I went ahead and I made it in my cast iron. If you watch often you're probably wondering why I'm not making it in my air fryer because I generally do that. Well, it is good for my cast irons to make bacon and then once in a while just all of that good fat really to season the cast iron so I decided to go ahead and just make it in there this day. I also knew I was gonna need cheese for a couple of different recipes this day as well so I just got out my food processor and I'm just gonna shred up all of the cheese that I need for this day and I can't say enough good stuff about this food processor. It's made by Ninja and the reason that I chose this one this past year when I needed a new food processor was because the slicing plate which we will also be using this day is adjustable so I can make really thin slices or really thick slices and that's super, super nice. A lot of them come pre-adjusted and you only can slice things to the thickness that it's already adjusted to. So once the potatoes have baked for about 20 minutes I'm going to go ahead and layer the chicken across them and we're gonna put it back into the oven for another 20 minutes and I thought that this was a little bit of an extra process with the baking different times but I understand now because if you were to put the chicken in with the potatoes it would really dry out the chicken and it would make it a little less appetizing to eat. So once the chicken has been completely cooked through you're going to pull it out you're gonna layer it with cheese and pop it back in the oven just for a couple of minutes to melt that cheese then you're going to top it with some bacon bits and then I just took my sour cream put it in a Ziploc and cut the corner to drizzle it across the top and after that I topped it with some green onions. Now you might wanna wait to do the green onions in the sour cream until you're ready to bake this but this is what I did when we were ready to eat it. All right so on Wednesday we're gonna be making some burgers and I'm also gonna make some really simple scalp potatoes and broccoli salad. Now the burgers we will prepare the night that we eat this meal but I wanted to get the scalp potatoes and the broccoli salad prepped. Now you can let me know in the comments if you've ever prepped scalp potatoes and not baked them right away. I was afraid the potatoes were gonna end up turning black on me in the refrigerator or oxidizing and turning really really brown one way or the other so I went ahead and pre-baked these scalp potatoes and then I can just pop them back in the oven for a nice little warm up on the night that we eat this meal. This scalp potato recipe is incredibly simple to make the sauce for it. All you're gonna do is melt down some butter and then you're gonna add in minced garlic. Now I have my little garlic cubes that are in the freezer so I just popped some of those in with the butter to thaw out and to create a good garlic butter. Once that garlic butter has been created then you're gonna go ahead and add in flour. Now I did use a gluten-free flour and this still turned out perfectly so once you have all of that combined you're gonna add your heavy cream and then I actually put a little bit of sour cream into this as well just to make that sauce a bit thicker so you're gonna let that simmer just a little bit before you add it in to the scalp potatoes. Now you're ready to layer everything up so I left the skin on these potatoes. Again, you could totally peel them and it would be fine so I'm just layering a nice layer of potatoes on the bottom. I did grease this nine by 13 and then I am going to put about half of the cream mixture with some cheese and I'm using cheddar cheese. This is kind of where you could customize it and use really any type of cheese you want to. So I'm just doing a layer of cheese, a layer of the cream sauce and then another layer of potatoes and then just repeat the whole process again topping it off with a little more cheese and then I'm going to pop it into the oven to bake. While the scalp potatoes are baking we're gonna go ahead and make up our broccoli salad. I think I have done this, I don't know how many times here on my channel because it is something that we do eat often. So I don't do major measurements but I will try to find a very similar recipe to link below. That way if you want measurements for this recipe you can have them. So I am just taking some mayo, some yellow mustard, a little bit of Worcestershire sauce and I'm gonna mix all of that up and then I'm going to be tearing up the broccoli into really small pieces and just making sure that they're easy to bite into. They're not too big and bulky. I've made salads before where I've had the broccoli way too big and I feel like we don't eat it up as fast. So I try to make sure that they are really small and torn up. You could add purple onion into this as well but I was just going for a very simple salad this time. You could also add in things like slivered almonds, there's so many different things you can put into broccoli salad. Some people like raisins but we just tend to like a more simple I guess salad. So along with the broccoli we're gonna do bacon and some shredded cheddar cheese. I'm gonna mix that all up and I'm going to put that into a container and a lot of times with these cold salads they just taste a whole lot better if they've sat a few days in the refrigerator anyways so I really like to prep these ahead of time. And you can see the scallop potatoes came out beautifully and like I said, I'll just be popping them back in the oven just enough to reheat them when we're ready to eat them. Okay, so on Thursday we're going to make up a very, very simple meal prep and that is a fajita sheet pan. You know me, I love my sheet pan meals. They're just so simple and even if I'm going to be meal prepping them they're just an easy thing to include in my meal prep day and it just is one more thing off my list. So for this fajita sheet pan meal we're gonna be doing some bell pepper, some purple onion and some chicken and we're gonna bake it all up and then I will put it into a storage container. We'll reheat it to build our fajitas and I'll make a little fajita bar on the night that we eat all of this. So one thing I did do this time around is I got the baby bell peppers. They are so, so sweet and I just love them. They're something that I wanna start working with more often because the flavor is just to me a little more top notch than the full-size bell peppers. They're just so sweet and yummy. Once I have the chicken and the onion all cut up and of course the bell peppers I just put everything onto a sheet pan. I do try to remember to line it just so that it's a whole lot easier to wash up whenever I'm done and then I'm going to take my homemade taco seasoning and sprinkle everything with that and I do have a video somewhere I think that has all the measurements for that but if I can remember I will put that in the description box below. Making your own taco seasoning is so incredibly simple. It's really cheap considering how much the packets cost and also it doesn't have any extra additives. It's just the spices and if you didn't know there's a lot of additives in those packet seasoning mixes so being able to just have the spices is really good and personally we like the flavor better. We think that there's so much more flavor in making your own seasoning mix. I don't think I mentioned but I also drizzled all of this with olive oil before I put the seasoning on and then I'm just gonna pop that in the oven. You can do it 350 degrees, you could do it 400 degrees until the chicken is completely cooked through and then whenever that is done you just take it all out and let it cool and then you're gonna put it in a storage container for your fajita bar night. Okay so now for Friday we are going to make Swedish meatballs, roasted carrots and then on the night we eat this I will make a tossed salad as well and these Swedish meatballs turned out so, so incredibly good. It's a mixture of ground beef and ground pork that you use to create the meatballs and so just to mix all of that up I added in some gluten free breadcrumbs. It calls for panko breadcrumbs in the recipe but I feel like the gluten free breadcrumbs are pretty similar in texture and taste to the panko breadcrumbs so we're gonna add that in. We're also gonna add an egg to that along with some seasoning. We got some onion powder and garlic powder and I think there's a few other spices in the original recipe but I just decided to go with this. I knew that the sauce that goes with this is going to be the main flavor kicker here and that's one thing that I encourage you is to work with what you have. You don't always have to purchase every single spice that's in a recipe. Of course it might give a more full blown flavor but if you're trying to stay within a budget spices can be expensive and I totally get that so that's one thing I encourage you with is just work with what you have. Get creative, try tweaking the recipe to work with what's in your pantry instead of having to get things that you may never use in another recipe again. So once you've mixed up the meatball combination you're going to go ahead and create some meatballs. Now I think I could have potentially made these smaller and I think the recipe calls to make them a little smaller than this but I decided to try to get it all into one pan instead of doing two separate pan loads of meatballs. I think that's what the recipe actually suggests. So I made them a little bit bigger and I just lined them into an oiled pan and then you're going to just watch them as you're doing any of your other prep and turn them as they cook. While the meatballs were on the stove I'm going to be prepping my roasted carrot. This is one of my personal favorite vegetable dishes. It's just so good. Something about roasting carrots pulls out that natural sugars that are in the carrots and almost caramelizes them. It just makes their flavor incredible. So all I do is just take some regular sized carrots and I just cut them to whatever size seems the best. When it comes to roasting vegetables I've talked about this before but one of the keys is just making sure that all of your vegetable cuts are around the same size. So if you have a really large piece of carrot and a really small piece of carrot they're not going to cook at the same time so you're either going to end up with that large piece of carrot not being cooked through and the smaller one being done or the large one being done but the smaller one being burnt. So that's why making sure that your cuts are relatively similar is pretty important when it comes to roasting veggies whether it's potatoes, carrots, onions, any type of vegetable you just want your cuts to be pretty close in size. Now I did drizzle these carrots with some olive oil and then I'm going to go ahead, shocker, right guys? I'm going to use the kinders, buttery steakhouse seasoning. I think I use it somewhere in almost every video and I know that not all of you have access to Costco or maybe a store that carries it so I will see if I can find a link for Amazon if you want to try it and give it an order but it's so good, we use it in mashed potatoes, we use it in pretty much every vegetable dish I make. Once in a while I do switch it up and use something else but it just gives veggies such a fantastic flavor. Okay, so back to our meatballs. We are going to go ahead and pull them out of the pan and we're going to make our sauce that goes in to that classic Swedish meatball dish. So once I have everything pulled out I'm gonna put butter into the pan and I'm going to go ahead and kind of use my whisk to scrape off the little crispy pieces in the bottom of the pan. That just adds a whole other level of flavor to this sauce. So once we've done that, we're again going to add some gluten free flour to this to just thicken it up just a little bit and then we're gonna add some beef broth. Again, this is broth that I make and can myself and then once it has simmered for a little bit we're gonna be adding in some sour cream just to give it that classic Swedish meatball creamy flavor, these are so, so good and honestly I think the key in this recipe is the combination of beef and pork because I have made other Swedish meatballs in the past that have not been our absolute favorite but this recipe definitely beats all. So once you've got the sauce made up you're gonna put the meatballs back into the pan and you can let these simmer a little bit if you want to but since I'm going to be reheating this dish for us to eat later in the week I really just mixed it in with the sauce and then I'll let it cook up and simmer a bit more whenever I reheat it in the skillet. Then to give it a little bit of greenery I just topped it off with some delicious parsley. So I hope that this video has inspired you all today especially with those weeknight meals is finding some simple meals. Subscribe if you're new here, I'd love it if you joined my channel and don't forget to leave a comment below. Give us some meal ideas on what you are making this week. It's a great community connection where we can all kind of learn from each other and I'll see you all in my next video.