 Hi friends, welcome back to another weekly meal prep and welcome to my kitchen. If you are new here, I do a lot of meal prepping. We do monthly meal preps, weekly meal preps, freezer meal preps and a lot of other types of food, preservation and preparation and monthly grocery shopping in between. So here I am starting out by peeling some carrots and my daughters were asking for some as snacks and since I had plenty for my project this day, I was giving them some big carrots to chew on. It's just a fun snack and I think that sometimes whenever you give your children a healthy snack in a different form instead of cutting the carrot up into small bite sizes, it just makes it more interesting and new for them to have something different. So we're gonna start out the week on Monday with chicken thighs, carrot and sweet potato sheet pan bake and if you've been around for a minute, you know that I love sheet pan meals. I just think they're so easy. I love the taste of roasted vegetables and my family does too and you can season it and it's just done really quickly. I think a lot of times we have one pan meals or crock pot meals and those are easy as well but sometimes they take a bit more time and preparation than a sheet pan meal. So I'm just cutting up the carrots and I like to put them into a gallon Ziploc bag. Sometimes I do put them in a bowl but I just feel like you can really massage the oil into the vegetables and get them coated really well so that they roast nice and evenly and then I'm just gonna put them on the sheet. I did put a piece of parchment paper down on the bottom just to help out with the cleaning at the end because I knew that these carrots would let out a little bit of their natural sugars and we'd have some caramelization going on and so that always puts in nice sticky residue on the bottom of the pan. Next I am just taking some bone in and skin on chicken thighs and I'm putting them on the pan. That skin gets nice and crispy. I'm gonna shake some Creole seasoning over this. I change this up. Sometimes I do lemon pepper. There's all kinds of options. I also like to use my own season salt recipe on this as well. It's so delicious and no sheet pan meal is complete without a few slices or a lot of slices of onion over the veggies. It just gives such a great aroma and it makes the veggies taste so good even if you don't like eating onion. You can pull them off and it still gives a good flavor into the rest of the veggies. Then I'm just gonna go ahead and bake them. I believe I baked this at 400 for like 40 minutes, something like that. And everything has a little bit of that char, a little bit of that roasted look which tells me that it all looks great. And I can actually pull this out just a bit before the done-ness I prefer since we will be reheating this on Monday to eat it. Next on Tuesday we are going to have burgers, spaghetti squash, and broccoli. Now the burgers I will be making that day and I will probably pull out burger on this day to make sure that it is thawed from the freezer. The broccoli I will just steam on the day that we eat this meal. However, spaghetti squash takes a little bit of time and a little bit of forethought. So it often takes around 40 to 45 minutes for me to roast a spaghetti squash in the oven. And a lot of times till we are down to dinner time, it is crunch time, we are trying to get that squeezed in between the end of the tasks for the day and getting into the evening routine, winding down all of that. So if I can cut my prep time at least down to 20 to 30 minutes instead of having to do a whole hour like the spaghetti squash would take if I baked it on that night, I do prefer that. So I do bake it. Like I said, 45 minutes, 400 degrees. And then I just bake it face down on the sheet pan and then I take it and I flip it over and I let it cool before I start pulling it out. And then we'll just eat this with butter and some seasoning sprinkled over it. It's a great healthy side. If you've never tried it, I think I recently said in a video, please try spaghetti squash, it's so, so good. Wednesday we are gonna do a beef vegetable soup and drop biscuits. It is started to really drop in temperature here in central Pennsylvania. And that means soup season around here. It's just so warming and delicious to have a nice hot bowl of soup after a really cold day. And my husband works outside a lot. He builds fences and he does other construction work where he's outside. So coming home to a nice warm stew or a soup is just so refreshing and just sets the mood for a nice winter evening. So here I just put some beef in the bottom of my Dutch oven and then I added in some diced onion and then this huge bag from Azure Standard of diced. It's very small diced. Celery comes in handy, I tell you what. I've just been using this a lot in recipes and I'm so glad I bought it. I know that through the winter with all the soups and things, I will definitely use that up. Then I'm adding in some of my frozen garlic cubes that we made together a few videos ago. Some salt, some pepper and I'm just gonna let that all fry together. Since the celery was a little bit frozen, there is some water in there to help steam that onion and celery. I just want all of that to kind of soften up the onion to get a little bit translucent so that you don't have crunchy veggies in the vegetable soup. So while I'm doing that, I'm gonna go ahead and work on the drop biscuits. Now, we are a mostly gluten-free household. I do make sourdough, but we do go with a lot of gluten-free options. Not that once in a while, I don't pull out my Mennonite heritage and make some good sticky buns as you all have seen, but like I said, on the regular basis, we do a lot of gluten-free recipes. So this one here, I kind of adapted from another recipe I had found along the way. It does have some almond flour and it also has some oat flour as well, has a little bit of sour cream and then Parmesan and some garlic and butter. It's just a really simple, quick throw-together drop biscuit recipe. I just thought this would be such a yummy thing to have with the vegetable soup and just a nice little side because vegetable soup, if you have a protein in there, is a pretty whole meal in and of itself. So I don't feel like I have to prep a whole lot next to most soups. And then I also used my minced garlic cubes in this as well. And I just kind of popped them in the microwave for a couple seconds and then I was able to dump them into this batter and drop biscuits are so easy. You don't have to shape them or roll them or anything like that. You just simply drop them onto a cookie sheet or any type of pan I like to line mine. I feel like they come off a whole lot nicer if I do it that way. And then I am going to go ahead and top these off with some of my freeze-dried chives from my garden. And I want to talk a little bit about my garden this past year at some point. It was not nearly as successful as I had hoped. We made a pretty massive mistake, which I will share all of that in a video soon, but we did get a few things like these herbs that I'm able to use here and there. All right, so I did reserve some of those carrots from the sheet pan meal because I had so many. I decided I would just go ahead and take a few of those and add it to the vegetable soup instead of making them separately or waiting for them to soften up with the rest of the veggies. Since they are a root vegetable, they do take a bit longer like potatoes or anything else. And then I'm just taking my little spatula and I'm kind of just chopping them up right inside of the Dutch oven. Instead of cutting them up with a knife, it worked out perfect since they were already roasted and ready to go. Then I'm adding in some of my homemade beef broth. Look how rich and color that is. And it made this soup so, so delicious. And then I'm just gonna add in some canned green beans. I do freeze green beans as well. And this is one instance where I like to have canned because they're already cooked and ready to go. Soups are so fast and easy to make when you have canned veggies around. You can just dump it all together and add the seasonings and you're good to go. That's kind of how I feel about chili as well, which is another thing that we're eating a lot of right now is chili. We just love it. And again, with the cold season, it warms you right up. And then one of my secret ingredients that I think makes beef vegetable soup so good is adding in some W sauce and it just adds that extra savory flavor and it is just so, so delicious. I actually froze some of this soup and so I have been pulling it out here and there and it's even a great lunch option for anybody in the household that needs a quick lunch. Thursday, we're gonna do some spinach, turkey meatballs, rice and green beans. I have this ground organic turkey that I had gotten from Azure that's been hanging out in my freezer and I wanted to find a good recipe to use it and I also had some spinach left over in my airtight container in my refrigerator that I wanted to use up as well. So I kind of adapted this recipe and used what I had on hand. I will leave the recipe link below for what I am sort of adapting off of in case you want to follow a tried and true recipe but it just has some mozzarella cheese and then some oregano, basil, parsley and cilantro, I believe. And then some salt and pepper and this just makes such a great flavor combination. One thing I will give a little caution with is as you're frying these meatballs unless you decide to bake them, which I think you could also do, we just prefer our meatballs fried in the cast iron but if you're frying them, that cheese is gonna be kind of sticky and it's going to stick to the bottom of your pan. So keep that in mind, you wanna turn them kind of often just to get it nice and evenly cooked or fried without burning or sticking too badly to the bottom of your pan. So while the meatballs were starting, I went ahead and started my brown rice and of course I pulled out some of my homemade chicken broth to cook that in. That's my main reason that I can so much chicken broth throughout the year is we use it for cooking rice. It just tastes so yummy and you are gonna have a little bit of, I don't know what to call it, pieces left behind in the bottom of the pan but never fear that's actually part of the process with this and it's gonna help add a ton of flavor to the sauce that goes with these meatballs. So once they are cooked through, you just remove them from the pan and then you add in your broth and you kind of scrape the bottom of the pan. If you have a non-stick pan, you of course wanna use the right spatula to be scraping the bottom of the pan but for me with cast iron, I'm good with using my metal utensils. I love cast iron for that reason and then I'm just adding some sour cream, some grated Parmesan, our favorite from Costco and I'm just going to cook it and whisk it all together and as all of that melts together, it's gonna create a bit of a thicker sauce. Next I added in a handful of spinach and I'm just gonna let that wilt down and kind of combine in with the sauce and this is such a yummy, yummy combination. I just think that the lighter version of a meatball with it being ground turkey instead of ground beef and then matching in with the spinach, it's just a nice fresh flavored dinner. I get so many questions on reheating and also storage. So obviously things that are more airtight for the meals that are gonna be later in the week is probably a good idea and then reheating. Sometimes I pop things into the oven. Sometimes I throw it back into a skillet on the stovetop, sometimes we use the good old microwave and just kind of however, whatever works best for our time in that evening and so I don't have a specific routine or way that I reheat everything every single time. We are all ready to Friday, can you believe it? So I am doing a twisted shepherd's pie and then I'll make a tossed salad that evening. So somebody had given me a suggestion, a friend of mine on a way to make shepherd's pie and then on top of it, I threw a whole another twist in to this dish and that is using sweet potato. Now these are white sweet potatoes so it's pretty well disguised and doesn't look too far off from shepherd's pie but the taste is definitely very different and if you used yams or orange or yellow sweet potatoes of course it would really look different and this is also something that's probably more referred to as cottage pie. We grew up calling it shepherd's pie even though it's not lamb. I believe if it's correctly stated the lamb would be the shepherd's pie but it's cottage pie if it's made with beef. So I just cooked up the beef with a few onions, garlic powder, salt, pepper and a little bit of broth and then here is the suggestion my friend gave and that is to layer corn between the beef and the mashed potatoes. This dish was a smashing hit in our house. I'm going to be making it again. It was so good especially being a winter time dish it was simply perfect. So I'm just smashing up the sweet potatoes like I would pretty much my regular mashed potatoes, some butter, some sour cream, some salt and some pepper and then I'm just gonna go ahead and I'm going to layer that on top of the dish. I'm going to sprinkle some parsley over the top of it and again I can't rave about this dish enough. We are not a big casserole family but this was so delicious. So that's what I have for you guys. Again another quick and simple meal prep for you all. Don't forget to subscribe if you're new here. Leave me a comment below. Let me know how you are planning to meal plan and meal prep in the new year and I will see you all in my next video.