 Hey everyone, welcome back to my kitchen and welcome back to another meal prep. It's been a while since I've posted, but after the holidays and doing a little bit of vacation time, I'm back to meal prepping and just making sure that I've got healthy recipes that I have ready in my refrigerator to heat up and go or things that I can put in my freezer whenever I do freezer meal preps. I just love having things prepped and the last couple of weeks have been rough because I have not been meal prepping. So today I'm going to be doing a few breakfast items along with some lunch items and you're going to also see what I make for dinner this day as well. So I'm going to be working on a couple different projects at the same time here in the beginning of the video. So I'm cutting up an onion because I'm making a Southwest pork bowl and this turned out so delicious. I'm definitely putting this on my recipe list for recipes I want to make again, really, really good. So I got the pork being fried up for that and while I was frying the pork up, I decided to mix up some baked oatmeal and in the background, you're going to see my daughter and my husband here and there because they were working on cooking some food as well. My husband cooks a lot, probably almost as much as I do. He is the guy that does a lot of the meat and grilling in our house and so we share the cooking a lot. So I had shown you all how to do this, I think a month or two ago and that is using canned, home canned fruit to make oatmeal and I will leave the recipe link below for this but in the recipe, there is a cup of milk. In place of that cup of milk, I'm using the juice from the canned fruit and then in place of the fresh fruit, I'm using some of the fruit from the canned fruit and obviously you could use store-bought canned fruit as well if that's something that you have in your pantry and maybe you're trying to use up. This is a great recipe option for that to use that up. So I'm making a peach version and the last time I did this, I did blueberry and strawberry and yes, I canned blueberries and strawberries. We love them. I've talked about this before, how much we use them in our house for all kinds of things and this is one of the things that I use them for but the girls requested that I make a peach version. So this day I did a peach version and I did a strawberry version and one little tip I'll give you to do this if you're going to make these tweaks and use canned fruit is to use a whisk attachment on your mixer to kind of help to mash up that fruit and get it spread throughout the oatmeal as much as possible. And as always, I'm here to give you guys the best budget tips when it comes to cooking. So as you saw, I was getting my oatmeal out of my big bucket. That's because I buy oatmeal in 50 pound bags and I store them in five gallon buckets and then in my kitchen, I store them in two gallon buckets. It's just the best way to get oatmeal at a really good price and then I'll always have it on hand and we can use it as a great whole grain. So this recipe does make an eight by eight pan and here I'm showing you what the canned strawberries look like. A lot of people when they find out I canned blueberries and strawberries, their first reaction is what is the texture? And I would say it's pretty much the same texture as if you were to take frozen strawberries or frozen blueberries and saw them out except for there is a bit of a freezer type taste to frozen berries that you don't get with canned berries. And so for the fact that I don't have to sell them out to make a recipe and the flavor in my opinion is a bit better, that's why I choose to can them and they don't have to take up freezer space. I know I get a lot of questions on why I can so many things and that's one of them is that I have three medium size deep freezers and I still struggle to find space for everything. So canning things and being able to keep it on the shelf is really, really helpful. So here I am just taking that pound of pork out of the frying pan and I'm going to leave the drippings in there to fry the onion and then you'll see me pressing some garlic as well. I've gotten questions when I use this garlic press if I like it and yes, I really like it. I'm not exactly sure what the true term of this garlic press is but I would consider it to be a rocking garlic press. It's just something that you take and you press down on a hard surface like a cutting board and you just rock it back and forth and it presses the garlic through and the reason I switched to this is because I got really tired of cleaning my other garlic press out and this one's a bit easier to clean. So if you're looking for a garlic press I can't recommend this one enough and I will try to link it below along with other things from this video. All right, so once the onions and garlic were fried up I went ahead and dumped a bag of rice cauliflower into this. I love using rice cauliflower. It's just another way to get more veggies into our diet. So I added that in, I put in a few other ingredients including some canned diced tomatoes and some canned green chilies. This is just such a yummy recipe. If you're someone that really likes ground pork then you will really like this one. Once you have all of the ingredients in here you just wanna stir this up and mix it together. And as usual I like to do things like this for lunches or sometimes for dinner depending on what else I'm making. We will use these for dinner as well and I just like these little single serve containers just to portion everything out to know how much I have and they're just easy to grab out of the refrigerator. And then to go along with these Southwest bowls I chopped up some cilantro to mix on top. Fresh herbs on top of things like this are so delicious. And then I also went ahead and cut up some lime and I don't know why it may be because I made this with pork but for some reason the fresh squeezed lime over this is just absolutely wonderful. So it's the flavor profile of this whole recipe was just delicious. And I actually had this for lunch this day while I was cooking and I wanted to show you how I will be eating it or anyone else in our house will be eating it and that is with some avocado and then squeezing some lime over it and then I did also put some pink Himalayan salt over top of the avocado and it was so yummy and so filling. And then here is the end result of the baked oatmeal and I just took a knife and cut them into pieces. We will probably eat these throughout this week if in five days or so I have some leftover I may throw it in the freezer but for now I will just be storing these in the refrigerator. They'll just be easier to scoop out portion sizes. So the next thing I'm making is a breakfast item. I love that natural choice. It has lower chemicals and just a little bit of a cleaner option when it comes to deli ham. So this recipe is so easy to make. It's only a few ingredients like you're seeing here. I grabbed some of my home can salsa but you can use regular salsa and these are actually eggs from our chickens that we share with my parents and my brothers and their wives. They are laying like I think around 20 eggs a day right now so I need to come up with some good recipes and use them like this one. So all you need to do is mix some of the salsa in with the eggs. I added a little bit of salt and pepper and you're gonna whisk that together. Then you're going to get out a muffin tin and or you can use some silicone muffin liners like you're going to see me do here in a bit. They're a little easier to pop out of those than a traditional muffin tin so that's why I opt to use those. So all you need to do is take a slice of that ham, put it in the bottom of the muffin tin or the muffin liner like I'm doing here and then you're gonna scoop about a fourth cup of the egg mixture into the ham part and then I like to top mine with a little bit of chopped up green onion like you're going to see here in a moment. Now, you can definitely add in sour cream to the egg mixture to make it a bit fluffier. You could add cheddar cheese to the top of these. I personally try not to eat too much dairy just for some health reasons and so I opted to just do these with the cut up onion on top and I used some scissors to cut that up. That's a really easy way to cut up green onions and they are absolutely delicious and I don't even miss the cheese but if you're someone that loves cheese this would be a great option to add cheese to. All right, so if you guys watch my videos often you already know what I'm about to do but I love this thing. In fact, I just bought one for my sister-in-law because I use it so much but this is a zucchini noodle maker actually really a veggie noodle maker. You can make veggie noodles with carrots. There's a few other options you can use this thing for and it's got a lot of different sizes of noodles that you can make. So we are gonna be making a peanut tie bowl I think is what it's called, something like that. So I love protein bowls and noodle bowls and all of those types of things. I just love having a combination of different ingredients that are right in front of me where I can see them all in the bowl and then I get to choose and pick how I eat them and what combinations. So I'm going to be making the zucchini noodles for the bottom of the bowl and I don't normally do this but I was reminded this week about doing this and this is an option to make your zucchini noodles not so soft and mushy. So basically you wanna lay them out on a paper towel and you just wanna put salt on them and allow the salt to sit for about 15 minutes and then you're able to actually squeeze a lot more water out of the noodles before you cook them. So that just helps them to stay a little bit more firm and not quite as mushy. So while the chicken was cooking, I went ahead and made up the peanut sauce and I love peanut sauce and one thing I'm gonna remember to add the next time I make this is some red pepper flakes. I felt like it could have used a bit more spice, a little more kick but other than that, it was a fantastic recipe. Here I am using liquid aminos instead of soy sauce. It's just a healthier option, has a lot of good benefits for you and I like being able to sneak in some superfoods like that. So this is really simple, just has some lime and a few other ingredients and you can just mix it up and I actually only ended up using half of this recipe and I put the other half in the refrigerator thinking maybe next week I would find another use for that or somewhere along this week finding some reason to find something to dip into the sauce since it was so delicious. And here I am using my curly whisk to whisk this up. It's one of my favorite kitchen tools. I will try to leave it linked below. It's amazing to me sometimes what that thing can whisk up and how much it can really take on even though it's so small. So here after I let the zucchini noodles sit for a while with that salt on them, I just put them into the paper towel and really squeezed them out. I actually did that twice just to try to get as much of the moisture out of them as I could. And then I just wiped out the pan that I fried the chicken in and put a little bit of avocado oil in it and dumped the noodles in and I just barely saltate these. I really just wanted them to cook just a very slight bit and then they would still kind of hold together good in the bottom of my peanut bowls. So here before I start assembling my Thai peanut bowls, I decided to put my little egg cups away and I just put them in some Ziploc bags that I could easily tuck away in my refrigerator and pull out through the week to heat up. So I ran out of my little prep containers. So I decided to pull these glass containers out. I actually ordered more of these prep containers this week just simply because we've been using them so much. So I just divided out the zucchini noodles and then I grabbed the chicken and the chicken. I don't know if I mentioned this but I really just seasoned it with salt and pepper and then fried it in avocado oil. I didn't do anything extra to it since it was going to get that peanut sauce over the top of it. I just thought it would take away from the flavor if I did a lot of seasonings. So I just cut it into strips and stuck it on top of the zucchini noodles. Next, I grabbed some purple cabbage. I love cabbage. It's so delicious. I just cut it up into kind of like a shredded size and put some into each bowl. I knew this would be a nice crunch and just the refreshing little bit of flavor in with the other ingredients in these bowls. Next, I cut up a red bell pepper again to just bring another fresh flavor into this protein bowl and to give it a little bit of a sweet kick as well. All right, so here goes the peanut sauce. This is so yummy. I am so excited to eat this this week. I actually didn't even eat one of these yet since I filmed this today because we ate something else for dinner but I was tempted to kick my dinner plans to the side and eat one of these because they look so good with all of the different flavors. So on top of the peanut sauce, I just put some sesame seeds and then I sprinkled some green onion over it. All right, so now you're going to see what I whipped up for dinner and if you need a really fast dinner idea, this one is fantastic. So you're just going to take some Brussels sprouts and I cut them in half and we're going to be making some bacon maple or maple bacon Brussels sprouts and this is so, so easy. So I had about two pounds of Brussels sprouts and I cut the tough ends off and just clean them up a bit and put them into a bowl and then I'm going to take an entire pack of bacon and cut it into some pretty bite-sized little pieces. It's easiest to take the entire thing and cut it all at once. So you're going to put that in with the bowl with the Brussels sprouts and then on top of that, you're going to be putting some maple syrup and some oil of your choice. I prefer avocado oil, so I drizzled that in over it and then you're going to mix it up really well and my bowl was almost too small for this but it worked out well. I also used a maple syrup that is a sugar-free maple syrup just because I am conscious of my sugar intake for health reasons. So I just decided to go ahead and try it with this and it worked out so well. My entire family raved about this and it was delicious. So to go along with this and to go along with something that is really fast and easy to make, I had already had some wings, chicken wings thawing out. I got them out in the morning and I had them thawing on the countertop and I put them into the air fryer and everything pretty much got done around the same time. This takes about 20 minutes to make. It's so, so easy and I just am going to keep this in mind for days whenever I know we're going to have a really busy day and I need to get dinner on the table and throw it together quickly. So here, whenever I was done mixing up the bacon with the Brussels sprouts, that's whenever I added some salt and pepper and threw it into the oven and I baked it at 400 for about 20 minutes. You could probably do it even 30 minutes. Just check it as you go. I did stir it every 10 minutes just to get everything cooked evenly. And then for my wings, I just threw them in a big bowl. I put some avocado oil over them, salt and pepper and I put them into my air fryer and basically we just dumped some of our favorite wing sauces on them individually. Whoever likes whatever sauce and ate that with the Brussels sprouts. So I hope this video inspired you guys. Please leave a comment below. That always helps me out. Give this video a like, subscribe if you're new and I'll see you all in my next video.