 Hello friends, welcome back to my channel, welcome back to my kitchen. So a lot of you have asked me, what happens when you have a crazy week? What if I don't have an entire day to meal prep everything like I often do? I often do a lot of my meal prepping for the week in one single day. So this week was one of the craziest weeks of the year as you're going to see how this video unfolds. But first this day was kind of the day everything kicked off and I wanted to make sure the girls got a good breakfast. So a sweet friend of mine, Sherilyn Gingrich, if you guys aren't subscribed to her channel, you definitely should be. Gave me a beautiful loaf of sourdough bread. So we have been really enjoying that. So the girls had some toast and some eggs just for a good solid breakfast before we got the day started. The other thing I wanted to do was get dinner prepped for this day as well. So the night before I went ahead and soaked some black eyed peas and some black beans, which I should have soaked them separately because the black beans color the black eyed peas kind of dark gray. But either way it still works. I needed some beans for a dip I was going to be making for dinner. So I went ahead and drained them off the next day after they had been soaking all night and I got them cooking on the stove since they do take a while to simmer and cook. So you'll see what I'm gonna use them for here in a moment. And that's a great money saver having dried beans around versus canned. I want to home can some sometime, but haven't gotten to that. So Monday we're gonna do a fajita sheet pan meal with bean dip, hence soaking the beans. So this day, like I said, is going to be a very busy day. So I wanted to make sure I had this sheet pan meal done and ready to go for dinner so that all I had to do was heat it up come dinner time. So I had a bunch of chicken thighs in the freezer I needed to get used up. So I just laid them out on a greased cookie sheet and I sprinkled them with my homemade taco seasoning or Mexican seasoning, whatever you wanna call it cause I use it in a lot of different things. And then I got out these three bell peppers and I love these vacuum bags. I've been sharing about them over on my home channel and so you can find more information over there about them but they keep my produce for a really long time. These peppers I had actually bought two weeks prior to using them as you see here and you see how well they held up. So I'm just cutting them in slices. I'm actually using half of three peppers cause I'm gonna use the rest of the peppers in the bean dip. So I'm cutting up half of the green one, half of the orange one and half of the red one so that they can roast up with the chicken and we'll have amazing roasted peppers and onions for on our fajitas. So I chopped up an onion as well. You could obviously do as little or as much of those things as you enjoy. Some people like more than others and I think it just makes this tray so colorful and just so desirable to be eating. I love sheet pan meals. If you all have been around for a while you already know that they're just so fast and easy. So to go along with this we just needed some rice made up. So I just put some parboiled rice. That's my favorite type of rice to use. It's cooked so quickly with some of my homemade chicken broth and then I just add in a little bit of butter and I think I sprinkled a bit of the taco seasoning in here as well just to kind of give it a mexy flair since it was going to be going on our fajitas. The other thing I added in was a jar of my homemade tomato sauce. I made so much of that this summer and I have been loving having that at my fingertips to put into rice, to whip up a sauce. Nothing beats homemade tomato sauce that you know where the tomatoes came from. You cook them down yourself. Oh, it's just so delicious. So once the chicken had cooked fully through I took it out of the oven. I let it cool just a little bit but I do not like to shred chicken once it's cold. So it still was pretty warm and I just shredded all of the chicken up and put the bell peppers and onions into a container that has a lid as well. I could heat this up in the oven or in the microwave to be able to whip up our fajitas for dinner and I always get a huge pack of fajitas split it up into little baggies and put it in the freezer so that we can grab it whenever we want to make fajitas. All right, so this corn is a segue into why this week was so crazy. So we had a week of corn and if you are somebody that preserves corn for a family or a large family, you know it is a week long process and project, if not more depending on how much you're doing. So this was our corn week and I had some corn on hand to make this dip. Some people call this cowboy caviar. It's got onions and peppers and tomatoes and then you whip up a dressing for it. It also has fresh cilantro in it. Oh, it is so good. It's great on top of grilled chicken or just simply to eat with tortilla chips which is what we are going to be doing this day. I will leave the recipe for this linked below. I usually end up tweaking it in one way or another like I think it called for lime juice and I used lemon juice and I had some raw honey which I love that that goes into this because it's great for allergies and change in season like we are in right now, getting ready for fall and just has all these great ingredients including that taco seasoning mix that I made in a couple of videos back. I just love it for all these different types of recipes. Okay, so I'm gonna chat with you a little bit about the corn. So the way that I preserve corn is actually an old Amish way of preserving corn. It is canning the corn but this does not taste like canned corn. I actually had multiple people taste it this year and they were very surprised to find out that it is actually canned and not frozen. A lot of people freeze their corn in the modern day and age we live in and it is a little bit easier. You usually steam it, cut it all off and you just put it in bags in the freezer but this method I find is a bit easier than freezing. So this is how Corey's grandmother who used to be Amish taught me how to can corn and it will taste just as good as fresh. So the first thing that we are doing is we are husking all of the corn and that's a great job for little hands and my mom was over this day to help me out with this. So I cream all of it. I find that it just holds its flavor so well in the jar whenever it's creamed. So we have a couple creamers and you're gonna see a few little friendly bees flying around. We have lots of bees this day so we just kind of let them have their share as we were outside doing this. This is a good thing to do outside. And then we fill the quart jar with the creamed corn that is raw. This is raw corn, it's not cooked. And then I put a teaspoon of pink Himalayan salt in the top and this is the little Amish trick. You put a nice slice of fresh tomato in the top of the jar and then you water bath it. Most people would say to pressure can this but this is a recipe that has been through generations tested and this is my second year of doing it this way. We love it this way and it doesn't take up my freezer space. So this is an outdoor canner and some people might call it an Amish canner. I love having one of these. It just saves all the steam from going into your kitchen. It's all outside especially because you water bath this corn for three hours. So after three hours, you wanna take it out, set it on a towel and when you go to serve the corn, obviously it's cooked inside the jar. Just take out that slice of tomato, put it in a pot to warm it up, put butter and salt in it and you have amazing sweet corn that you can enjoy all year long. Now since this week was so crazy, my husband is the best. He made steaks from the freezer and we had corn Tuesday and Wednesday because we had so much corn. It was so crazy. It took a couple of days to get through all of our corn and he took over making dinner. Thursday is going to be shrimp tacos that I'm going to be marinating here but before I even tell you about that, I have to tell you I did 550 year of corn and I think I got about 64 corn out of that, something like that. So we have plenty of corn to last us through the year. I'm curious to see if it lasts us till next summer. We will see. We love corn around here. My husband likes to eat it sometimes a couple of times a week with our dinner and so that's why I did so much of it. So here I am taking some shrimp and actually after I did this, I really felt like I probably should have peeled these shrimp. They are raw and I put a little bit of oil across them and some of that margarita seasoning to let them marinate because I actually was going to make these on a cast iron in our smoker. We have a grill smoker combo and I just thought these would be so good in there. And then also to go with the tacos, I wanted to make a really light, kind of Asian inspired slaw. So I took some purple cabbage and some regular cabbage. I love keeping these in my extra refrigerator in my basement because they keep for so long and I can easily pull them out to make a quick coleslaw, whatever I wanna do. I did that and I also grabbed a big carrot and I put all of these things into my food processor with the shredding disc and I just shredded it all up to make my slaw. I'm saying slaw kind of lightly because a lot of people think of coleslaw as like a creamy dressing. Well, this one is going to have more of a lighter dressing and this was so good. So I just ate it like a salad throughout the week as well. So I just added a drizzle of Dijon mustard, some liquid aminos and as you can see, I'm just kind of shaking this stuff in, no measurements. A tiny drizzle of sesame oil. Sesame oil has a very strong flavor. So you just want a little bit and then some red wine vinegar because I've had it in my cupboard and I need to use it up and then a drizzle of avocado oil and then I mixed it all together and I want to make this again. However, I think I'll make the dressing separate because it took a lot of mixing to get this all mixed up. I also added in a few drops of stevia. You could add a sprinkle of sugar if you wanted to and this coleslaw, oh, it was so good. Even my daughters, we just couldn't stop eating it. It was just delicious and of course in the tacos, just amazing. So Friday, I'm going to make orange chicken and broccoli and rice. So it went ahead and got the rice started of course with my homemade chicken broth because that makes all rice so good. And I found this recipe not that long ago and we have been kind of repeating it because it's so good. It is supposed to be a Panda Express dupe for their orange chicken sauce. However, I'm not doing it with breaded chicken. I'm doing it with a more grilled chicken. So I heated my cast iron skillet and just diced up the chicken into about one inch bites that would be really good over the rice. And you wanna cook that through. I even like to cook it till it gets just a little bit brown on the outside. Then you're gonna go ahead and you're going to make the sauce. I don't think I make the sauce completely to what the ingredients all say on the recipe that I will link below because there is a lot of sugar in it and I want to figure out a way to kind of scale the sugar back. I think it's like 10 tablespoons of sugar but I will say this, it's probably better than the orange sauce that you would buy at the store that has lots of preservatives and corn syrup in it. So I think I would take the sugar over the corn syrup and the preservatives and my family is happy and they adore this meal. So to make the orange flavor, you're going to zest an entire orange and it's just amazing to me how much flavor zest truly holds. I know some recipes that are for like an orange chicken, they will take orange juice. This one just takes the orange zest and so far the couple of times I've made it, I'm amazed at how much orange flavor is in this sauce. So you're gonna add in the zest and then you're going to add in corn starch to thicken it. Now, this you're gonna whisk in to the sauce and at first it's not really gonna seem like it's doing anything because you need to add heat. So once you have it all pretty well whisked in, even if there's a few clumps, it's not really that big of a deal. It will all cook together in the skillet. You're gonna take the sauce and you're gonna pour it over your chicken in the skillet and the longer it sits, the thicker it will get. If you actually cook it completely down, it's gonna be very honey-like and very, very sticky. It's so good though. My family just raves over this. They would take this over takeout any day because we can use a good healthy chicken. We know what's in the sauce. It's just so delicious. And then I will be steaming the broccoli on the night that we eat this meal. So thanks a lot for hanging out with me. I know that this was a little bit of a quicker video this week, but like I said, this was a crazy week. Also, I wanted to mention that I did not prep all of these meals on the day that we started the corn. They were kind of done throughout the week, but I did them a bit before dinner time or I did two of the meals together just to try to condense as much of it as I could. This is what a busy week looks like for me. And I know you all have been asking about that. Subscribe if you're new and leave a comment below. I love to hear from you all and I'll see you guys in the next video.