 Hey everyone, welcome back to my channel. Welcome back to another great meal prep. So this day was kind of rainy and dreary. We've been having those types of days around here. So it's always a nice day to get in the kitchen, make the kitchen warm by starting the oven and just knocking out some food prep. As always, I'm going to be giving you lots of budget tips, ways to save money, but still be able to cook healthy, rounded meals for your family. I'm starting off by peeling these potatoes. And I've had so many requests because I talk about it so often to show you all how I can potatoes. Now in the past, I have water bath canned my potatoes and using traditional Amish methods. And of course, this is not USDA approved, but I would can them in the water bath for three hours. Now that I have a pressure canner and I use that a little more often since they only have to be canned for 40 minutes at 10 pounds pressure in my area. Of course, I use that more often just because it's a lot faster. So to save money here, the big budget part of this is I buy my red potatoes in 50 pound bags, which makes them one third of the price of buying a five pound bag per pound from the store. So I'm saving a lot of money. We're going to get into more on how I do that later, but one of the tricks to getting wonderful canned potatoes is you want them to soak in water. So that was the first thing I did this day, just getting them soaking so that they could soak over the hours that I was going to be cooking. And then I'm putting some eggs on to hard boil because we are going to be making a dessert with those hard boiled eggs. Yes, you heard me right, a dessert. So stay tuned for that as well. So the first thing I really started cooking here is some lemon pepper wings. I love lemon pepper wings. And this recipe is very, very simple. All you're gonna need to do is for a dozen wings is you want to juice one lemon. You also want the zest from that lemon. So as you saw, I was using the cheese grater to put some of the zest from the lemon over the wings. You really want that zest in there. That's what helps give it a very distinct lemon taste and not just kind of sour. You want that really lemon flavor. And then once you've juiced the lemon, you're going to go ahead and drizzle that juice over the wings and you're gonna add in some salt and a fair amount of black pepper since we are making a lemon pepper wing. So I prefer my wings a little more crunchy and dry versus chewy. So I definitely like this because it does produce a nice crunch with the wings. There's not a ton of sauce, but there is a ton of flavor. And then the oil that I'm gonna drizzle over these, I'm going to be using some avocado oil. You could also use olive oil. Avocado oil is just my go to because it's really good for you and it also doesn't have a massive flavor. So once I had them doused in that, I went ahead and laid them flat in my air fryer. You could also do these in the oven. I love to give you guys all the options to make sure that you feel like you can make these recipes without any fancy equipment. So if you wanna make them in the oven, you would want to make them around between 375 and 400. And then once they are cooked through, you can even put them under the broiler a little bit in your oven just to get them nice and crunchy. So here I'm just setting them for 10 minutes at 400 degrees in the air fryer while the wings were getting fried up. I went ahead and started in to my next recipe. This one is also very, very budget friendly. I think these days we need good solid recipes that we can serve our families that don't cost a lot. So it's using cabbage and cabbage is generally a very inexpensive vegetable that's really filling and really yummy, especially if you put it with some great sauces or seasonings like we're going to today. And red cabbage itself actually is full of a ton of vitamins. So if you wanna look that up on Google, you can. I'm not gonna list all of them off here, but it is a very healthy, healthy vegetable. And I know at times my one market will have cabbage heads for 99 cents. And so that would be a great time to do this recipe. So what I'm doing is I'm shredding up the cabbage with my food processor. This is the cheapest food processor that Walmart has in this size. I've had it for quite a while. And I tell you what, this thing has served me well, especially for the price point that it's at. And so I just am using the slicing, not the shredding, but the slicing part of the disc. And since the cabbage is already kind of in strips when you cut it, it's making it look shredded once I have ran it through the food processor. So I did half ahead of the purple cabbage and then half ahead of the regular cabbage just to give it a nice color difference and will be a very pretty tray. So this is going to be a sheet pan meal. I know I show you these probably about one a video just because it makes making dinner so easy. And personally in our family, we only have a handful of crock-pot meals that we really enjoy. But roasting the food on a sheet pan is something that we tend to enjoy more than a crock-pot meal. So this is kind of my way of getting an easy meal without using the crock-pot. So here I'm pulling out a sheet pan. I just use my little oil dispenser. I put some oil on the bottom just so that the cabbage wouldn't stick. And as you saw, I did mix in some avocado oil with the cabbage just to help it have a fat there to roast and to help soften the cabbage in the oven. I know I mentioned this seasoning in my last video. It's called Potato Slayer. It is at Walmart. You can also find it on Amazon sometimes. It is so great on any veggie. So here I'm shaking it very liberally over the cabbage and it also has salt in it. So you don't need to add any extra salt to your veggies if you're using it. And then I got this beef dinner sausage and I'm just slicing that up. These go on sale sometimes at the store and I know often they're like two for a certain amount. So if I get two of them, I'll throw one in the freezer and I will keep that one for another meal. So often I can get these in multiples and be able to free some of them. And since they're already vacuum packed, they freeze so well for quick dinners. At this point, my eggs were done and I just got this colander from Amazon. I'll link it below, but isn't it so cute? I just think it's adorable. My other one had just broken, so I was in the market for a new one and I found that and thought it was really, really cute. And it is metal. It's not plastic. At this point, my wings were done, so I pulled them out and I was making this into kind of a quick grab and go meal. We've been using these so much in our house just being able to have a meal in the refrigerator ready to be popped in the microwave or dumped into a frying pan and heated up and eaten nice and quick. So I combined the lemon pepper wings along with the cabbage and sausage sheet pan meal. I love these containers and they've been so sturdy. I've been running them through my dishwasher on the top shelf pretty regularly. So these are awesome. They don't crack. I've had other ones in the past that have been a little bit more cheaply made, but these really work out well. Okay, so here we are with the dessert with the hard-boiled eggs. If any of you are familiar with Maria Emerick, she is a cookbook writer. Then you may have already heard of this recipe, but it is hard-boiled egg chocolate pudding. I know, crazy, crazy. And every single person that I get to taste this pudding doesn't believe me that it's made with hard-boiled eggs. The other thing that's awesome about this is if you are looking for a dairy-free pudding, this is your ticket. So you need 10 eggs. You need a can of full-fat coconut milk. You need some vanilla, some sweetener, whether you're gonna use sugar. I used some stevia and also an allulose blend, but you can also use maple syrup. You can use whatever you want to sweeten it with. It doesn't really matter. And then you're gonna add in a little bit of salt. And then my personal twist on this is I like to use the extra dark Hershey's baking chocolate, the powder. And I feel like it just makes it all the more decadent. So here's the trick. You want to refrigerate these for at least five hours. If you taste it right away, you are going to taste a bit of that hard-boiled egg flavor. I know, it's so weird. But if it sits in the refrigerator for at least five hours, I usually put mine in overnight and then I eat, you can start eating it the next day. But it tastes like a delicious decadent chocolate mousse. It is so good. I will leave Maria's recipe linked below. It's on her website. So it's free for you to try out. If you're someone that has chickens and you want to use up a lot of eggs, this is another really awesome recipe. And it's so healthy and it's perfect for a breakfast because you're getting about two eggs per serving. So if you're someone that likes a sweeter breakfast, it may be the ticket for you. Okay, so moving on to the next recipe. We're going to be making a broccoli tuna casserole and I love this. This is so good. My daughters loved this recipe. And of course, tuna is probably a protein that you have stashed away in your pantry and you need to use up like I do. So I'm trying to use some of my tuna up so you may see a few more tuna recipes coming out of me here after in the next couple of weeks. But tuna is a very cheap protein and it's a really healthy protein. It's got some of those good nutrients that we need from fish. And this recipe hides it really well. If you have a family member that doesn't really like tuna, they may end up enjoying this. So to start out, I'm using the homemade ranch recipe that is attached with this recipe. You'll find it in the link below, but it's pretty simple. It's just some sour cream and some mayo and a few herbs and spices. You just whip that together. And then here I am taking some cheddar cheese and I'm using my food processor again and just shredding that up. And you're also going to need some Parmesan cheese for this recipe as well. So this is not dairy-free. I like to share a lot of gluten-free and dairy-free options here on my channel. And I know that many of you appreciate that just because there aren't a lot of channels here on YouTube that really incorporate those things in, particularly for family-friendly meals. So I try my best to bring those things in. Personally, I don't eat a lot of dairy in our house and we also have some gluten sensitivity in our house. So we have a mixture. It's not all dairy-free. It's not all gluten-free, but I definitely share a fair amount of those types of recipes here on my channel. I am the type of person that likes to shred my own cheese. I feel like it melts so much better. The flavor's so much better than pre-shredded. On occasion, I do grab it just to make things go a bit faster, but I like the end product of my recipes so much better when I shred my own cheese. So here I am just taking some broccoli crowns apart. You need about six cups, I think, for this recipe along with your tuna. Now I actually use two cans of tuna in the recipe. She recommends just using one, but I wanted to amp up this recipe just a bit more and have a little bit more protein in it. And then along with that, you're gonna put some peas in this. And I think that the peas really make this recipe because they give those little pops of flavor in it when you bite into it along with the great Parmesan cheese hint. It's just really, really yummy. So all you really have to do is dump all of this together and you wanna keep aside the Parmesan cheese and half of the cheddar cheese. So other than that, you dump the broccoli, the peas, the tuna, all of it in here along with the homemade ranch dressing. And when I make this recipe again, because yes, I'm gonna be making this again, it's so yummy, especially because I have tuna on the shelf and can use it again. I'm definitely going to make that homemade ranch out to go along with it because it just really brings that yummy depth that I don't really think store-bought ranch could bring to this recipe. Also another quick tip about this recipe is she recommends kind of steaming the broccoli before you put it in to the oven. So you could use a frozen broccoli, but I just put it in the oven and baked it for about 10 minutes longer and the broccoli was perfectly tender. It was all really delicious. So I didn't take that extra step of steaming the broccoli beforehand. All right, this is another thing that I have had some pretty big requests on and that is how I can my Mandarin oranges. So this week I was at the grocery store, I was not planning on doing this, but these were around $2 a bag and I couldn't turn it down through this past probably six months or so or maybe even a year. These things have been anywhere from $4 to $5 a bag at Walmart and at least in my area and I just couldn't pass this up. I love canning these because it's just a nice option to have something citrus that is shelf stable that if you're going through sickness and you don't wanna get to the store to have some citrus on hand, it's a quick snack and my daughters love these as a snack, the canned Mandarin oranges. So here I am making a very light syrup is what they call it. This wouldn't even be considered a syrup. It's just a little bit of sugar and water just to help to preserve the flavor of the oranges and some people have a problem with putting sugar into home canned goods. I have no issue with that because we eat very little like store bought cereals and things like that anymore. I do get them for a treat on occasion but most of the time the things that we eat are made from scratch or homemade so having a little bit of sugar in the water that these are sitting in is not a great concern to me compared to eating the sugared cereal every single morning or that type of thing. So all you need to do is peel these up and I didn't show it but I did eventually get the girls to come help me peel these because there was a lot. It's a little bit of a labor of love but it works out well. So we peeled all of these and then all you need to do is add that water in with a little bit of sugar up to about an inch headspace and that's really it. It's not super complicated, it's very, very simple and then all you want to do is water bath them for about 15 minutes. And like I said, my girls really love these as a snack and it's not that hard and in the end I really only paid a little over a dollar per quart for every single one of these which is a great budget friendly way to have some citrus on hand. All right, at this point the casserole was out of the oven and I went ahead and just divvied it out into these single serve containers for some quick and easy lunches. Okay, so now we're back to the potatoes. So I let them sit outside on the porch since it was nice and cool. You do want to run cold water over these when you are getting ready to soak them but soaking them is very important. Another important factor is that you can red potatoes. Any other potato is not gonna hold up very well to the heat and is going to end up very mushy and we dump these out right into the frying pan to make fried potatoes with them. Most of the time, 90% of the time we're making them into fried potatoes with butter. So I want a potato that's gonna hold its shape and not get really mushy. So here I'm just filling them up. I drained off all of the water and it will either turn kind of a brown color or be very foggy and that's just a bunch of the starch leaving if you don't soak them, they may end up with the water inside the jar just being very foggy and just kind of tasting extra starchy. So that soaking step is really important. And then in each of these quarts I put a half teaspoon of salt. That's just to help preserve flavor. I can add some more salt whenever we go to cook them. And so here I am just topping off the jars with some filtered water. I just didn't have enough time to run enough water through our burky to make these. So I grabbed some extra water just to kind of help me out a little bit because I do not use our tap water to can with. I do use filtered water which most of the time I use my burky water. And then you're going to put your lids and your rings on. Oh, there's a peak at the mandarin oranges in the water bath canner that's on my basement stove. And then here we are going to be pressure canning the potatoes for 40 minutes at 10 pounds pressure like you saw. And this is the end product. I'm so happy with what I accomplished this day. I feel like I got a lot knocked off of my to-do list. I hope this inspired you, gave you some budget-friendly ideas for your family. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you're new here. I'd love for you to join my tribe here on my channel and I will see you all in my next video.