 Hey everyone, welcome back to my kitchen and welcome back to another monthly meal prep. I do these about twice a month. Usually one of them is focusing more on full meals to go into the freezer and then I have one that I kind of focus on breakfast items and lunch items and snack things and that kind of thing. And that's what we're going to be doing today. Last month I did a lot of eggs and I have some egg bakes left over but I had this lunchmeat that I had thrown in the freezer a couple months ago and I wanted to use it up in a creative way and whenever lunchmeat has been frozen for a while sometimes it's good to use it in something hot or just not using it as a cold cut. So I decided to go ahead and make these ham and cheddar egg bites and I love these silicone muffin liners. They are great. You don't even need a muffin pan plus they're so much easier to wash than muffin pans are. So all I did was put a little bit of oil in the bottom of each of those and then I put pieces of the ham in there and I mixed up about I think it was like 13 eggs, 14 eggs, something like that. I had 12 of the muffin liners but I did a few more eggs than that. I put a little bit of this everything seasoning in with the eggs and then I normally shred my own cheese. You all know that I love doing my own shredded cheese but I found a super great deal on this cheddar cheese at a local discount store and so I have a huge bag of it and I decided to just use that on top of these bites. Next I washed up my berries that I was going to need for two different things this day so I just put them into my little colander in the sink and got them all rinsed off. Something I like to keep in the freezer especially for my daughters is smoothie packs now that they're to the age that they are they can actually make smoothies themselves and if it's all assembled for them it's just so much easier. So I like to use this canned coconut milk and then I had some agave syrup I needed to use up so I just went ahead and put that in there to sweeten it up a little bit. The thing I love about making these coconut milk cubes to go in these bags is you really don't need another milk so you can actually make these up with water. So even if you are out of milk that day you can still pull these packs out and throw some water in with the blender and it's still a really creamy yummy smoothie plus they're getting all of the added benefits of the coconut milk. So I just put them into some silicone molds these are actually for chocolates and then I had this random silicone ice cube tray and put them in there just to make some cubes to go into the bag so that they're easier for the blender to blend up. And then I asked the girls what they wanted because we were out of our smoothie packs I made the last time and they said mom can you please do one with pineapple and strawberry so that's what I went with since they're the ones that eat these the most. So I just got a nice juicy pineapple this one was so ripe and delicious and cut up these strawberries which were huge and so I cut them into pretty much fourths to go into the smoothie pack. The main idea is you don't want your blender to have to work too hard and everything's around the same size to throw in the blender and then at this point my egg bites were done and I went ahead and pulled them out of the silicone molds just so they would cool faster so that I could put them into the freezer and I generally reheat these in my air fryer since I get questions a lot on how I reheat things. I want to thank Bydeem for sponsoring this week's video. They sent me this really cool steamer. First of all it's absolutely so aesthetic and cute. I love the colors and it just looks adorable sitting on your counter. I have never had a steamer before so this was really fun to learn how to use. It also has an accessory that does slow cooking and makes perfect rice. Besides the accessory stew pots it also comes with a ceramic plate that you can use inside of it and it has stainless steel steaming trays. It also has a drip tray and it has a stainless steel lid and body. It has three modes you can steam stew and it has a yogurt mode as well which I love making my own homemade yogurt so this is perfect. The steaming is adjustable from 0 to 90 minutes. You can steam things like meat, vegetables, seafood, eggs, buns, rice, cake and you can even reheat leftovers in this. The stewing mode is adjustable from 30 minutes to 6 hours and you can cook soup and even make desserts and it has a warm function to keep your food warm. Bydeem's steamer has multiple functions integrating steamer, stew pot, yogurt machine, sterilizer, stalling machine and baby food supplement in to one. It is very convenient for you to live a healthy lifestyle. The steamer produces steam quickly within one minute. It does not leak air, it does not spray water and it is very quiet. The pot cover with a curved design makes sure that the steam will not drip onto your food. It has a drip tray to be sure that the dripping of the food will never flow back ensuring that the food and machine stay clean. The smart control allows you to walk away with no need to stand over the stove and worry about your food. The steamer has a dual protection function. When the water level is low, the cooker will automatically suspend running and prompt you to add water. When there is no water, the power shuts down automatically and the pot will not burn. Check out the link in the description box below to find out more about how you can get your hands on one of these bydeem steamers. I have thoroughly been enjoying learning how to cook this way. It's so healthy and just keeps things light and fresh. The next recipe I'm putting together, I will leave the link for it in the description box. Don't forget you can always check out the recipes below, but I'm making up a really kid friendly grindola and this is also gluten free friendly and could be dairy free friendly. I'll tell you about that in a second, but it is not sugar free. However, I just look at it this way. It's still so much healthier than sugary cereals and if your kids really enjoy it, then you're getting a win in all areas. So basically you want to combine all of the liquids in one bowl and the dry ingredients in another bowl and the dry ingredients is just oatmeal and unsweetened coconut flakes. So it's a very soft granola and it's not all full of nuts, which I know a lot of kids don't really like. And you could definitely make this dairy free by using coconut oil instead of butter. That is the only dairy product in this or you could use a dairy free butter if you want to still get that butter flavoring. After you mix the wet and dry ingredients together, you just spread it out on some cookie sheets and you put it in the oven. The other thing that's very nice about this recipe is you don't really have to do a lot of stirring. I did stop at one point and stir it a little bit, but you could really just leave it in the oven the entire time that it's getting crunchy. Okay, so this is technically not freezer prep, but I feel like I wish I would have started doing this a long time ago. I have been making our own almond milk and I'm going to show you the way that we enjoy it. One of the reasons I started doing this to be honest with you is a lot of times I found myself running to the store simply for almond milk. It's the milk that we use for pretty much everything. And so this way I can buy almonds in bulk and I really save a lot of trips to the store and I can just make it when we need it. It's so, so easy and I really don't add anything to mine. Some people add salt or vanilla or other things. I just do it very plain. So all you want to do is the night before you want to make it or even maybe like in the morning and then you make it in the afternoon. Give it a good handful of hours to soak. You want to put about a cup of almonds, raw almonds into some water and you're going to just soak them and basically it softens them up to get them ready to be blended. I like to pour mine into my nice little milk jug I have here. So I'm going to drain off this water that they were soaking in, put it in here and then I'm going to fill this jar one and a half times. So this is one cup of almonds soaked, put in here after it's been drained and then you want to add, at least this is the way we enjoy it, about six cups of water into here. Blend it until it is completely milky looking and then I will show you the next step. If your blender is not a high powered blender, I just suggest making this in a smaller batch and just blending it for a little bit longer and you will still get some great almond milk. Now that we are all blended up and this is a high speed blender, it's like an off brand of Vitamix. I love it. If it's still in stock, I will link it below. It was a lot cheaper when I bought it than a Vitamix and you're just going to need a bowl. It doesn't really matter what bowl and then you can use cheesecloth for this or when I first started doing this, I didn't have any cheesecloth on hand. I'd have some now but I've just continued to use this. This is actually a piece cut out of a white t-shirt and so I just continued to use it and wash it at the sink, just hand wash it because obviously you wouldn't want to use detergent and things like that on this cloth if you're straining your milk through it. You just need to lay it in here and then pour your almondy mixture into here. You're going to gather it up together and wring out and you will see all of the almond milk come out through the bottom. It's that easy. By the way, if you are a coffee drinker and you like to froth your milk, this homemade almond milk froths so much better than store-bought almond milk and the taste in coffee is just unbeatable. Also, I do save the pulp as you're going to see me putting it into a freezer bag. Once I have a freezer bag full, I will be dumping this into my dehydrator and making up almond flour with it so none of it goes to waste. Okay, so next we're going to make up some oatmeal cups and actually one of my viewers recently tagged me on Instagram because she made these up and it reminded me that I should make them again. It's been a while so basically all you want to do is cook up your oatmeal. I did mine with a mixture of water and my almond milk. I put a little bit of vanilla in it and then I used some vanilla stevia just to kind of have an option around that doesn't have a lot of sugar in it. I try to keep balance that way. I also added some butter and you just want to cook up your oats like normal. I do use rolled oats just because they're a little bit more healthy for you. And then next I went ahead and stirred my granola and then I went to put together my smoothie packs. I'm going to be honest with you, my coconut cubes were not 100% frozen but I still pulled them out anyways because I wanted to get this done and it doesn't really matter because in the end they're all going to go into the blender. Okay, so back to my little oatmeal cups. The basic idea with these is just to replace the little packets of oatmeal with a healthier version and so I'm back to using my silicone muffin liners and this is just really simple. All you do is scoop the cooked oatmeal into each one of them. You can top them with slivered almonds. You can do anything that you enjoy or your children enjoy if you're making it for them and you pop them into the freezer and then when they come out of the freezer all you have to do is peel them out of the silicone liner, put them into a large Ziploc bag and then when somebody wants oatmeal you just take out that portion size and you can heat it up really quickly. At this point my oatmeal was done and pretty cooled so I went ahead and put one pan into one of my cereal containers for in the pantry and then the other pan I put into a freezer bag and threw it into the freezer. I'm going to be honest I think this is the best granola recipe I have ever made and I've made quite a few so that's saying a lot but this was so delicious and my daughters were honestly begging for more of it because they enjoyed it so much. Alright so like every week I am moving on to my long term food storage segment of the video and I am actually going to jar up some maple syrup. I know in the granola today I used a cup of maple syrup that is very very very unusual for me to use that much maple syrup at one time so I got a gallon of maple syrup this week. This is two half gallons and really they would be fine to store right in these jugs however number one I just don't think I'll work through it fast enough and number two I would rather have them stored in glass. I got this at a really great price so I'm going to actually put all of it into these glass jars. I'm not sure how many jars I'm going to get out of it. I'm hoping at least six and we'll see if I need the other two then I'm going to do something called dry canning and I want to be very clear on this there is only certain things that you can do this with please do your research this does not replace any other type of canning. This is mainly for dry goods hence why it is kind of called dry canning and you're not putting in water and all of that but I'm also using this as a method to store maple syrup because maple syrup has a super high sugar content it can store on its own just like honey and one thing that helps it last longer is to take the air out of the jar so I'm going to pour them in here and then I'm going to show you this is a little kit that comes on Amazon there is a regular mouth which is what the size is and a large mouth I don't have it out piece for this it also comes with this tiny little hand pump but I use something called a brake bleeder this is actually something that mechanics use but it works perfectly it has even a little attachment that works perfect to suck the air out of this and because it has a gauge and I can see how much air is being sucked out of it it kind of helps the whole process although this works fine too you can do like 15 to 20 pumps out of this and your lid will seal on top of these I hope that I'm explaining this okay and I'm no expert I always put that disclaimer out there I'm just doing things the way I know how to do them or how my grandmothers did them so definitely proceed at your own risk do whatever is best for your family but this is just a way that you can preserve things and take the air out of them so you're going to be seeing me doing some things with my dehydrator and this is another way to store things that have been dehydrated things like banana chips or different dried fruits and things like that you can put them in a jar and suck the air out of them so basically what it does is it fits over top of the lid not the ring just the lid and it pulls on it strong enough that it's pulling air out of the seal until there's no air left and all that's left to do is for the lid to actually seal down onto the jar when you're going to preserve something I really encourage you to do your own research on the different ways that you can preserve something for a longer period of time and then make the decision on how you want to choose to preserve it it also helps a lot if you can talk to older people a lot of them have been doing food preservation for years and they can give you a lot of tips and tricks on ways to preserve things but this is one really handy inexpensive way the little brake bleeder is very inexpensive so are the attachments for the jar lids so this is something to keep on hand to even be able to store your pantry items and be able to get a good seal on things like sugar and flour all right I got nine jars out of this they're obviously not completely filled now one other note I want to make about storing maple syrup I'm gonna get some labels out here in a second and label these and put the date and all that but you want to store these in the dark my basement I have the windows blacked out where these are stored so it's no problem light will definitely affect the quality and all of that of these but they can store a good long time and you will have maple syrup so you can buy maple syrup in bulk and save a little bit and then kind of repackage it this way especially if it's not already stored in a glass bottle and the labels are washable which I love they I use them for all of my canned goods basically when you go to wash the jar the label but pretty much melts off so it saves you a lot of time and you don't have to write on the lids and you can see from the side when it's on the shelf what is inside thank you all so much for watching today I hope this video inspired you subscribe if you're new let me know in the comments what you thought leaving comments always helps me out and helps out the algorithm with my channel and give me any ideas on something that you would like to see for a long-term food storage and I'll see you all in my next video