 Hey friends, welcome back. As you can see, we have had a very rainy week, which meant for a lot of Lego playing inside. We started homeschool last week, so we are on a roll with a nice homeschool schedule. So of course, all the more that means that I need to stick to my meal prep schedule so that we can get dinners on the table on time every night. And that is what I have for you today, plus a few extra tips and tricks and a little bit of long-term meal prepping as well. So the first thing that I'm doing is just shredding up some cheese for this day. I had a couple recipes that I was going to need this cheese for. And I could have gotten my food processor out, but if it's just a little bit of cheese, I don't mind doing it by hand. And it's easier to put the box shredder into the dishwasher. As usual, the recipes will be linked or written out in the description box below. I like to go day by day and just prep everything kind of in order. And I prep about five days at a time, Monday through Friday. So I'll let you know what I am planning for each day and then what I'm prepping for that day as well. On Monday, I decided I was going to do sour cream chicken enchiladas and frozen peas. So I'll obviously be cooking the peas whenever I go to make this meal, but we can pre-assemble the enchiladas. And this recipe is a bit of a dump-together recipe. And I'm going to use some of my home canned diced tomatoes that I just canned this year, just a couple weeks ago. And I am going to reserve a little bit of that broth because we are making rice for another meal this week. And I wanted to go ahead and use some of that tomato broth or tomato juice to cook the rice. I always like to save my broths as much as I can and reuse them. They add so much flavor and nutrients to other things like rice and soups and things like that. So along with that, I am putting a whole quart jar of my home canned chicken. I really want to show you all step by step how to do that this fall or winter. It just doesn't taste anything like store-bought chicken. It has such a great flavor. And on top of the chicken, I'm putting about two cups of sour cream, roughly, and some of the homemade taco seasoning I made in my last video. And then I'm putting about half or a little more than half of the mozzarella cheese that I had shredded up, kind of making a filling. These things could be adjusted a little for your family's likings. You could add in some jalapenos or something to add a lot of heat. We don't generally add a ton of heat to these because we often put spicy salsa on top of them when we go to eat them. So I decided to kind of change this up and try something a little different. And this made these so delicious, but I used a tomato basil wrap and it just elevated the flavor all the more and made them so, so yummy. So I'm just taking the filling, putting it in the wraps and wrapping them up, lining them in a greased nine by 13 pan. And then when I go to bake all of this, I will just be baking it until it's hot and bubbly through since everything is fully cooked in the enchiladas. So to add a little bit of a saucy top, I put some of that broth, some more sour cream and a little more of the taco seasoning into a bowl and just mix it together until it was pourable. And then I poured it across the wraps and kind of smeared it out. And then I'm going to be finishing this whole works off with the rest of the mozzarella cheese. I think it gets a little bit of the cheddar mixed in, which is fine. And like I said, when you go to eat these, you can top them with whatever sounds good to you. If you wanna add jalapenos, if you wanna add avocado, really anything, you can kind of top them how you'd like. So Tuesday I'm doing pork-loaded baked potatoes and stir-fried green beans. This is kind of a new little concoction I've come up with. So we love loaded baked potatoes and I've had a lot of canned pork that I just haven't really used for much of anything in the last little while. And the other week I made this meal and my family really, really loved it. I'm gonna show you how I will put it all together. First of all, I'm putting the baked potatoes in some tin foil. I don't like using a ton of tin foil. So I wanted to ask if you all have any suggestions of another way to make baked potatoes where the skins are really soft and good without tin foil? Let me know in the comments because that is something that I would like to not use as much of. And here I am opening these jars of the ground pork that I had canned last year and I'm taking some of the pork fat out and putting it in a little dish for our little house dog. She loves these kinds of treats and I love giving them to her because I know that they are so healthy and really just help her be a healthy little dog. So once I had scooped out some of the fat in this, I went ahead and threw it in to my cast iron. And while that was getting hot, I went down to our cellar and I grabbed a bag of frozen green beans from this summer. Last year I canned a lot of green beans and I still have some of those on the shelf but I like to have frozen green beans as well for stir-fried green beans. So I knew I would need those for this week. So I just brought them upstairs into my freezer under my refrigerator so that they're easy to grab when it's time to make this meal. So we're gonna go back to our cast iron and I'm adding in a little bit of my pepper relish. I love this. I'm not sure if I filmed how to make this last year or not but I will definitely at some point film this recipe because it is one of our family's top favorite home canned food recipes is my sweet pepper relish. So I put a little bit of that in and then just a few tablespoons of some barbecue sauce and just let it all simmer until it gets thicker and this is the most amazing topping. We will also top the baked potatoes with shredded cheese. So I'm gonna put some of that cheddar cheese I had shredded earlier into a container, some sour cream, that meat, some jalapenos, a little bit of ranch drizzle and you have a great meal alongside some garlic stir-fried green beans. Wednesday we are having cottage pie and pasta salad and I put shepherds on there because we call this shepherd's pie and I've talked about it in the past and I know that that's not the correct terminology for this dish because shepherd's pie is generally made with lamb and this is made with beef and I believe it's called cottage pie. If you know anything more about it let me know in the comments. So I'm taking my cast iron skillet and I am putting a onion in there. I don't do measurements for this recipe because it's just so easy and it's actually one of our family's favorites. I am just kind of salting those onions and while the onions are frying I am going to go ahead and peel up my potatoes to make the mashed potatoes for on top of the shepherd's pie. So here I am adding two pounds of ground beef into the onions and then I'm just gonna add a little bit of salt and pepper and just let this all fry together. We have been loving our beef. We got a quarter beef a couple of months ago and we have another quarter coming very soon. So just having our own beef at home is so convenient and I highly recommend seeing if you can find someone near you that you can order a beef. It's just the best quality meat. So I put the potatoes onto boil to make the mashed potatoes. I added in some W sauce to my meat and here I'm showing you my home canned mushrooms. Whenever I hit another good sale on mushrooms I will be showing you all how to do this. I don't think I have in a video if I have and it's slipping my mind. I will leave it linked below but it is one of my favorite things to have on hand to be cooking with. So now I'm gonna take the meat mixture and I'm not even greasing the bottom of this pan. This is a smaller pan. It's not quite a nine by 13. I can't remember the exact size but it's a little bit smaller. Putting that in the bottom of the pan and now over the potatoes I drained the water off of the potatoes and I added probably a little less than a stick of butter or half a stick of butter. I'm adding in some chives from one of my herb planters. Salt, pepper, sour cream and I'm going to take my good old potato masher. It's my favorite way to mash potatoes. I know I said that I think in the last video. It's just the texture that we enjoy the most. I feel like if you put them in your mixer sometimes they can get a little too mushy and soupy and just doesn't have that good thick mashed potato texture. So this gives me that good thick texture and I can mix all of my ingredients in really well. Once I'm done mixing that I'm just going to dollop that that mashed potato all over my meat mixture and then I'm just going to kind of smooth it out really well and then I'm topping it with some fresh parsley again from my herb pots that I have and it is just a delicious meal that's sitting in the refrigerator and ready to go when we are ready to eat. All right, so before we move on to the next meal I wanted to touch on something that I haven't really talked about before but something I have started doing and it is so convenient. I just started bulk shopping for my pasta. So pretty much I buy a year's worth of pasta at once. You can find out the best way to do that for the best price. Sometimes it's in a really large bag. Sometimes it is in a good sale with smaller boxes. Whatever way you purchase the bulk amount of pasta. So for our family, we eat pasta about twice a month. So every other week is generally when we eat pasta. We're not big pasta people but we do like to have it on occasion. So with 52 weeks in a year I need about 26 or so meals worth of pasta which is not difficult to store at all if you have a seller or somewhere you can store things. The sun is coming out so it might get kind of bright here. So what I like to do is bring home my pasta whether it's in boxes or in a large bag and then I divide it out into mylar bags and I mark it with the date I bagged it. What kind it is and how long to boil it because different pastas take different amounts of time to boil and then I stick it on my shelf and this is actually good in the package for 10 years once you put it in mylar storage if it's stored correctly but I'm not going to be storing 10 years of pasta in any time soon. So it's just convenient it's one last thing I have to put on my list for going to the store also if I'm gonna go somewhere and I need to take a dish I can quickly make macaroni salad or I can make another pasta salad or I can make mac and cheese. More than likely I'm gonna have something around the house that I could combine with pasta to take a dish somewhere. All right so I'm gonna dump the pasta in and just boil it for the time that it says on the package before I drain it off. And the other thing I like about doing my pasta in packages like this is we generally don't eat an entire box of pasta it's more like three fourth of a box of pasta so I'm able to divvy it out into portion sizes that are better for our family by putting it in those baggies and in turn it actually stretches further and we are able to use up what is in those bags versus an entire box of pasta. So you can make pasta salad so many ways I just kind of used a little bit of what I had around I had some bell pepper, some little mini bell peppers I diced a couple of those up I had some of this raw Colby Jack cheese I've been getting this raw cheese from a local place and we have been just loving it it's so delicious I diced that up or cubed it up put that in and I also just put in the pasta and then I add in some Italian dressing and that's really the simplest way to do a pasta salad and I'm not doing anything crazy or fancy I've done many different pasta salads in my life but this is just what I like to do just see what I've got around throw in whatever sometimes I'll add in pepperoni you can add in diced tomatoes if you have those on hand you really could just get creative and add in whatever so to close this bowl off I decided to go ahead and grab one of my beeswax wraps and you're gonna see me kind of taking my hands around the sides and that's because the warmth of your hands is what actually makes the beeswax wrap stick to the bowl and to itself to cling around the bowl now I'm putting my cheese away I've been loving this zwelling system for storing my cheese cause it takes all the air out of the bag and then Thursday we are going to have pineapple ham rice and roasted carrots I love this meal it's so good and once in a while I do hit really good sales on ham steaks and they're just a great change up from chicken and beef if you're looking for something that is just a little bit different so to go with that I'm doing the roasted carrots and I decided to go ahead and roast these carrots up beforehand the carrots take longer to roast than the pineapple and ham because the ham's already actually cooked and the pineapple just needs a little char on it so you really just put it on the oven on high heat until it's all hot versus waiting for the carrots to completely roast so while I was doing all this cooking this day it worked out perfect to just let the carrots roast and put them in a dish and then be able to just pop them in the oven with the ham whenever it all heats together I am just doing some onions and topping it with our buttery steakhouse seasoning roasting it in there while that was roasting I went ahead and cut up my pineapple and I just cut it into I don't know how to explain it maybe like wedges so I just cut the outside off and just cut them kind of in half leaving the core in the middle to help hold it together since it's going to be in the oven and I'm going to layer that in between the ham and if you've never tried this even if you don't like pineapple ham on pizza and stuff like that I highly recommend trying this and it just gives the ham the most incredible flavor and then we use the leftovers to just do ham and eggs for breakfast over the couple of days after we eat this for dinner and it is just so, so delicious I've done this before in a sheet pan meal form and you can definitely do that as well along with some veggies that might cook a little quicker than the carrots or you could just do it all together and allow the ham to get a little bit darker I've done that as well but I just decided to divide it up this time and do the two parts of the meal separately so I have to tell you since I've been talking about my thrifted dishes lately this little dish with the lid is so special it is handmade there is no markings on it so I have no idea who made it but there's little imperfections on it like the handles on either side are not quite the same shape it's just this beautiful little dish that works so well in the oven and I'm so excited to have found it all right, so Friday we're just gonna do burgers on the grill so we'll get the meat out that day for it and we'll also eat leftover pasta salad that you all saw me make okay, so some long-term food prep I accomplished this week along with some other stuff I didn't film is I made marinara sauce and I actually kind of made my own recipe I have a lot of old cookbooks and old Mennonite cookbooks my one Mennonite cookbook that is specifically for canning recipes has I am not kidding you 12 pizza sauce recipes 12 so out of those 12 I kind of chose the things that I thought our family would really like and followed the instructions on how to do it so I started out with a tomato sauce if you don't know how I make tomato sauce a couple of videos ago I made it I can even link it below to see the basic of just making tomato sauce you cook it until it gets thick so that's what I'm really starting out with for the base of this next I'm taking some really big candy onions as you can see here I got these from a local farmer and they just make every all food so, so good and I'm going to go ahead and shred them in my food processor I really discovered that we love a good simple marinara we love a marinara from a local pizza shop and I actually went and got a little bit of theirs to kind of taste in comparison to get my flavors really down pat and we just love a simple sauce and I'm calling this marinara but you can use it as pizza sauce you can use it as a pasta sauce you can use it in lasagna you can use it to dip cheese sticks and you can use it for really anything spaghetti, spaghetti sauce some people would say they would use a separate sauce for pizza and all of them but I'm really just making a red sauce or a marinara sauce that works for everything I will leave the exact spice measurements I came up with for what we enjoy in the recipe below but this just worked out well it's got basil, oregano, parsley my good pink Himalayan salt which is a main reason I do a lot of my canning and it's got some sugar and onion and some garlic I got a question the other day of why I'm using white sugar so I am planning to switch to cane sugar but we last year had put a good amount of white sugar for the year into our food storage so I'm just really using that up and I'm actually getting close to the end of it and I'm going to be getting a couple of big bags of cane sugar if you all have any good suggestions on where to get it from let me know in the description box below I know a few suggestions I've gotten already but if you have any good prices or places that have good prices on cane sugar let me know that would be great cause I will be doing a stock up on that very very soon and what I like to do with the garlic and the onions for this sauce is I'm actually salting them in my cast iron skillet before I'm adding them into the sauce and it just gives a nice roasty flavor and I'm adding a little bit of avocado oil to cook those things up and I'm going to go ahead and put it in the sauce and then last thing I do is I really just stick my immersion blender in to make sure there's no big stringy pieces of onion or anything like that just to make the sauce consistency a little bit smoother, a little bit better and I let that all cook let the flavors combine until I'm happy with the thickness of the sauce so once I do that, then I get my jars ready now I've done several batches of this so I'm doing some in pint jars for pizzas and recipes and things but this particular day my husband loves this sauce recipe so much that even if he picks up like a cheese steak or something from a shop in town he still wants to come home and dip it in my sauce so I decided to go ahead and put this sauce into the small, I think they're like an eight ounce jelly jar, they're a wide mouth jelly jar and they're quite literally a side of sauce so I am canning a side of sauce for him to be able to grab and use when he wants to or if we have anything the girls want to use as a dip it's just a smaller portion of it thank you guys so much for watching today subscribe if you're new I'm so glad that you're here I hope that you felt inspired and I will see you all in my next video