 Hi everyone, welcome back to my kitchen and welcome back to another meal prep. So today's meal prep is going to be a fairly simple one. I just had a few odds and ends. I wanted to prep and I like showing you all preps like this where it's not a lot of time involved and you can take just a few hours after work if you are someone that works to pull together homemade prepped items for your family. So the first thing that we're going to be making today is a very very easy granola and this is a granola that can be gluten-free. It also could be dairy-free if you didn't use butter and you used some coconut oil instead and obviously making sure that your rolled oats are a gluten-free rolled oat. It is not sugar-free however you could use a sugar substitute if you wanted to make it sugar-free. It does take a cup I believe it's a cup of some chopped pecans but you could also use any other nut that you really enjoy. This is one that I knew that my daughters would really like since they would be the ones primarily eating this and once I got this in the oven they could not stop asking me when it was going to be done because it smelled so incredibly delightful. So I just chopped up those pecans and put them in the bowl and this was kind of a dreary day so as you can see my kitchen was a little dark but those are the best days to do some baking and just to warm up your kitchen. So here I am melting that butter down and grabbing some brown sugar. You could use a brown sugar substitute like I mentioned and as always these recipes will either be linked below or they will be typed out in the description box for you guys to check out there. So once you have the butter melted for this like I said this is just really really easy. All you have to do is add in all of the other ingredients sort of making a sauce that you put over top of the rolled oats and the nuts. You could add shredded coconut. You all have seen me make a lot of different styles of granola in my meal preps because it's something that is healthy and pretty simple to make and also very very budget friendly. I buy my rolled oats in a 50 pound bag and I keep them in large buckets in my storage area and I've been getting a lot of requests again to show you my canning and dry goods storage area and I'm gonna be honest I just haven't had time to really get it pulled together. It's on my goals list for this next month to really get it cleaned up and organized and once I get that done I will definitely be showing you all how I store all of my long-term food storage because that is a huge key to bending less on groceries and just keeping things in a reasonable budget when you have a family that you are trying to feed. So here I am just spreading the mixture out on two two different cookie sheets. I could have piled this all on one cookie sheet but I just find that it gets crunchier and bakes a little more evenly if I do it on two cookie sheets so I popped that into the oven and then I had some apples that I needed to use up I feel like there's often you know a couple apples floating out around our refrigerators that we don't really know what to do with or nobody really wants to eat so definitely keep this recipe in mind for when you're down to the last two or three apples and you want to do something with them. So this is an apple salad I'm going to leave the link for this below I did find this on a blog but I made quite a few tweaks and changes so I will let the link below and then I will also write down how I made it because I made it a little more flavorful I think than what the recipe the original recipe called for one of the things I did to make it more flavorful was add in some brown sugar and I did add in a handful or two of some mini marshmallows since my daughters were going to be eating this and we had some that were left over in the pantry again kind of using up pantry items to make something taste yummy and I did use some cranberries in this and I found some that were 50% less sugar I want to dry some of my own cranberries because I really just want cranberries without any added sugar for my different recipes so that is going to go on my list of stuff to get in my dehydrator is some cranberries so here I'm making up the sauce that I put in with this apple salad I just used some mayo some brown sugar and then I used an apple pie spice to mix it all together and I don't think I showed this but I did add a little bit of liquid stevia to this as well I love having cold salads and sides like this in the refrigerator to pull out for lunch we can whip up some quick sandwiches and then have this as a good fruit side this would also be a great lunchbox addition where you could add it into some packed lunches and for us since we homeschool this is a good snack break treat so here the granola had been in the oven for a while and I pulled it out and I just went ahead and scraped it up with one of my spatulas I love making granola just for the fact that it makes my house smell so delicious and just makes it feel so homey when the oven has something warm inside and the cinnamon is wafting through the air speaking of cinnamon if you all follow me on Instagram you know that I have shared a real over there where I make a chai latte I'm a really healthy chai latte well this is the chai seasoning spice that I use for that and I make a chai latte I would say at least five times a week just because I drink mostly decaf beverages and I can make it with a decaf tea so you just need a handful of spices for this spice recipe I will leave the recipe in the description box below and then all you need to do is mix that together and I just used a little whisk on a plate I use the plate just to make sure that no clumps were left in the mixture and then I store it in one of my cute little spice containers that I use for my own spice blends and the rest of it I put into a small jar at this point the granola was done and out of the oven so I just got one of my jar funnels and filled up some jars I just thought this might be the best way to store these in the pantry and also so that we definitely get them sealed I think sometimes whenever I store them in a Ziploc bag and the girls are getting their granola sometimes I'm not paying attention in the bag doesn't get completely closed whereas with this I think they will be able to put the lid on and keep it fresher for longer okay so next I got some raspberries I don't know why we have been on such a raspberry kick lately and have been really enjoying raspberries so you could definitely use frozen raspberries for this or canned raspberries I didn't can any this past year and I didn't have any in the freezer also I know my store runs sales on raspberries fresh so either way there is ways to not have to pay full price for your raspberries and keep them in your budget but I am going to be making a chai pudding with these raspberries I need two cups of raspberries two cups of whatever milk you want to use we use almond milk and then you're going to put your chai seeds in with it after you've blended up the raspberries in the milk and then I also used my one sugar alternative I like to use it is a monk fruit and alylose blend to sweeten it and I added in some vanilla my homemade vanilla that I showed you all a few months ago is not yet yet ready I'm excited for it to get ready and to be able to use it but for now my Costco vanilla is going to have to do and I just thought that the color that these raspberries brought to this was so pretty especially on such a dreary day so here I am putting the chai seeds into a bowl and I am or chia I'm not sure let me know in the comments how you say it chia seeds chai seeds and then I put the milk and raspberry mixture into the bowl with the seeds kind of stirring it around and something like this I like to put into small jars so that we have individual servings and can just grab them out of the refrigerator a little bit like a yogurt cup okay so along with a lot of these things that are kind of breakfast items I'm going to make up some quick breakfast sandwiches to have in the freezer so this is a little bit of a freezer meal prep item so I put about nine eggs into a mixing bowl a little bit of heavy cream and then one of my favorite seasonings the buttery steakhouse and I just took my oil dispenser and really just put some oil in the bottom of the pan and then I whisk up those eggs and threw them into the oven and just baked them up it was just a quick way to make some nice sandwich sized pieces of egg to go into the sandwiches and then I could prep the other parts while they were baking and they really only take about 15 minutes I believe I will try to leave that below as well and then I like to get these sausage patties from Costco they're so good they have no hormones or other things in them and of course with the Costco membership they are a great price and there's something that our family really enjoys and then I didn't have any regular sliced cheese or store sliced cheese in the refrigerator but I had this block of cheddar cheese so I decided to go ahead and use that up and I'm going to be putting all of these on to English muffins we prefer to use the whole wheat English muffins but my store was all out of them so I had to grab a regular pack as well so I just did some of both and then I'm going to be using the press and seal wrap I really love this stuff especially for things that are going to go into the freezer I feel like it wraps them really well so that they don't get freezer burnt because that's always my concern with making freezer meals and preparing food for the freezer is that stuff does not get freezer burnt so to assemble my sandwiches all I'm doing here is putting some egg down a sausage patty and then putting the cheese on top and putting the top on and you can get these out you can toast the bread if you want to in a toaster oven or air fryer or in your oven or you can pop the whole sandwich in the oven you can do it in the microwave you can add mayo to these it's kind of your preference on how you want to reheat them and make them work and if you are someone that has a husband that takes lunch to work I know a lot of times this is a good way to avoid having extra costs with stopping for a breakfast sandwich in the morning whenever you can have it ready to go ready to heat up right out of the freezer and then once they're all individually wrapped I just put them in to a bigger bag so that they're kind of contained in the freezer and then again it also gives another protection against them getting freezer burnt so the next thing that I'm going to be prepping you guys have seen me make quite a few times and you actually saw me make these in my Christmas cookie video but I'm making up two double batches of our favorite chocolate chip cookies and these chocolate chip cookies are ones I grew up on my mom actually taught me how to make these cookies as one of my first baking projects and so if you see here on the recipe you'll see she put little numbers by it every time I show this recipe I get questions of why there's numbers by the different things so she was just showing me the correct order to mix up the dough so you want to mix your butter and your sugar and those things together and I will always treasure the fact that she taught me those things and now I know how to teach them to my girls as well so these are good because as you're seeing I'm dumping some instant pudding into these and that's what makes these the best chocolate chip cookies ever my husband definitely can't get enough of them and we really like them in our house I personally don't eat them very often just because I eat very low sugar and also gluten-free so it would be a treat whenever I have them but for my daughters and my husband they are our favorite so one double batch I did regular where I did vanilla with the chocolate chips to make regular chocolate chip cookies and then the other double batch I actually swapped out the vanilla pudding for a chocolate pudding and put chocolate chips in that as well and that's what's fun about this recipe is you can really swap out how whatever you want to do I know I talked about this in my cookie video but you can take out the chocolate chips and use pistachio pudding that's one of my favorites to just and you could put pistachios in it instead there's just a lot of different combinations you can do with this and really make a huge variety of cookies but have that wonderful soft texture and a great base and you're gonna see here in a moment after a couple of hours I had pulled out my chia pudding and I put a few raspberries on top of each one just to kind of bring a good appeal I appeal to those little pudding cups I want to thank you guys so much for watching today if you're new here don't forget to hit that subscribe button I hope this video gave you some inspiration for your coming week and whatever recipes you're putting together let me know below if you found any good recipes that are new and you want to share them that's what the space is for and I will see you all in my next video