 Welcome back to my channel. So this is not usually where I start off a cooking video, but I'm actually about to go in and get some groceries, stock up. I will be giving you my meal plan for this next week and kind of how I've been doing meal planning. I've kind of had a method that I've been doing and it's really been working well for me. And then of course I'm also going to be working on some of my monthly freezer things. If you guys are new around here about twice a month. So every two weeks I set aside a day like today and I just do a ton of cooking. I put stuff in the freezer. I put things in the refrigerator, just doing a little bit of a stock up. I do a lot of healthy cooking. So I do a lot of making my own things and it just takes a lot of time to do that very like every week. So it's really helpful if I can make something that lasts me a whole month or even a good portion of the month. So I'm gonna go ahead and go into Aldi and get the last few things I need. I also went to a local grocery store today. Just to be thinking about local businesses and supporting them especially through this time of social distancing and just everything that's going on in our country. I think it's really important that we support small businesses whenever we can. So I got a big bulk of things there. I got like my meats there because there's a butcher there and that kind of thing. But I still have some things that I need to go get. But since I already picked up my meat I need to do this as quickly as possible because my meat is sitting in the back of the car right now. So let's zip through and then we'll go home and I can show you my plan for the day. All right, I'm back home. Everly's here. She's gonna be helping me out a little bit since the two younger ones are taking a nap. This is actually not nearly all the stuff I picked up today but I had to put a bunch of it into the refrigerator because it's so warm outside. So most of the meat is in the refrigerator. And what I'm gonna do is pop on the screen here kind of what I'm doing with my meal planning for week by week. So I wrote down two weeks' worth of meals that we really like. Some of them are repetitive. Like Tuesdays we always do tacos which is something that we all really love. And like Saturday nights we do burgers on a grill that kind of thing. So I just shop for that week that I'm on. And then Friday nights is kind of our wild card night. We generally will do either take out or else I'll get special ingredients to do like a new recipe. This has just really been working well for us because we have meals that we like. And instead of trying to come up with something different every single week, this is what I've been doing. So tomorrow we are planning to go to the beach. We live about two hours from the beach. So we are going to take sandwiches. So I got some sourdough bread and I also got some salami and some ham, tomatoes and lettuce. We're gonna make some nice big like club sandwiches and take those with us to eat. I'm gonna pop this in the refrigerator. And normally I would do a roast or like barbecue meatballs but since we are going away it's gonna be more like the cold cut sandwiches. I'm gonna do some deviled eggs and I got a cantaloupe we're gonna cut up to have some fresh fruit with us. We'll just put it all in an ice chest and take it with us. These go with a meal this week. And then I'm gonna go ahead and just kind of tell you briefly what I'm making today. I have a lot of stuff I'm making. So some of it I will just kind of show you as I go. I make breakfast sandwiches for in the freezer that we can just pull out quickly. I did grab this but I'm working on learning how to make sourdough myself. And so I wanna make sourdough English muffins hopefully in the next week or two. So I only got six of these to try it out to see how we like it and if it works out well for in the freezer. I got bacon to do these. Another thing we're gonna make today is some roasted red pepper hummus. So I grabbed a nice big red pepper from my local grocery shop. And then they had these amazing avocados. We do love avocados on taco night. So I got those. Something else I'm gonna make is some banana muffins. I actually kind of have two different variations I wanna make of those today and I do those in my blender. I'm also going to be making some of my homemade chicken nuggets. You guys have seen me make them before and you actually kind of let the chicken soak in some pickle juice first. They're very similar to the chicken nuggets that Chick-fil-A has. Most of the things I make during the week I can't really prep so but one thing I can is my chili. So I'm gonna go ahead and make that up today. All right, so this stuff is just some things that I got for like our weekly groceries. Like I said, this wasn't even all of the stuff I just thought I would run through some of it. I'm already preheating this to make yogurt. I'm not gonna talk about my yogurt today because I have a video where I went into detail on how to make it. So I will leave that linked below if you're interested in how to make yogurt and you do not need a pressure cooker. I tell you how to make it both ways if you have a pressure cooker and if you don't have one you can totally make it on your stove. But I do have this going because we are out of yogurt with having been gone the last two weeks. We're out of everything and so I really have a lot to prep today. So I'm gonna go ahead and get started. How is your sparkling water? Is it good? Do you like that kind? It's moving. Okay, I've got my yogurt rolling in there. It's all heated up, put the starter in, everything. And now I'm not gonna go into great detail of this because it's a lot of information and this video is more about meal prep and that kind of thing then about any of this stuff. But I need to do it right now so I figured why not film it and show it to you guys while I'm doing it. So this here in these jars, I don't know if you can see but this is called water kefir. And it's very similar to milk kefir. It's a fermented drink. So you ferment it the first time in these jars and then the second time you put it into bottles and you put your flavoring with it. So today we're gonna be making a blueberry lemonade flavor and then it has to sit in these bottles for another four days. So I just need to do all of this and then make a new batch to go into my jars. What I'm gonna do is leave a link below. I actually got my kefir grains from Amazon and started them from there. So I'll leave you the link that I got mine from. It comes with all of the instructions and everything you need to know and do and how to do it all. So I'll go ahead and do that. So here is some frozen blueberries that we thawed out and then we're gonna juice up some lemons and then Everly wants to use the immersion blender in here, we're gonna blend this up, kind of make a juicy kind of concentrate out of it and then put a little bit in each bottle. These bottles are ones where I've bought water kefir from the store and actually like took the labels off and I reuse them. And then these bottles I actually bought in a pack of 12 from Amazon. I can link those below as well. So we're gonna go ahead and put this all together. I really encourage you as you're spending more time at home with your kids to get them in the kitchen and get them learning just normal life skills and there is even the smallest things that they can do and they feel like they're helping out in big ways. So water kefir actually feeds off of sugar, it eats the sugar up so the drink does not contain much sugar at all whenever you consume it but that is what makes it fizzy and what actually ferments it. Okay so these things are for the breakfast sandwiches with the English muffins. So since I'm only doing six, I did six eggs as you saw and then I just splashed in a little bit of half and half, some salt, pepper and whisked it up and then sprayed the pan before I put it in and then I just laid out the bacon with some parchment paper. I'm gonna put them both in the oven. My oven is set at 325. This will take around 20 minutes or so and I'm gonna keep an eye on this. I don't want it to be overdone since we will be reheating them but at least obviously cooked. So I'll just kinda keep an eye on both things as I go but I figured why not double up and just get it all done in the oven together. So here I'm just getting started and on my chicken nuggets. I will leave the recipe below. I actually found this recipe on Pinterest and it is so good. Our whole family really enjoys it and it's definitely something that I will be making on repeat. The last time I made it, I made double this amount of chicken and it lasted us more than a month in the freezer. So this time around I made half the amount because I know that we just didn't need as much as I did the last time. All right, we had a friend over for dinner and some time has passed and now I'm ready to get rolling again. So I am getting ready to roast this red pepper to make some red pepper hummus. It's one of our favorite hummuses from the store and I've never made it myself so I'm really excited to try and make it. I just put it on some parchment paper and then I'm going to cut up these green peppers just in really small diced up sizes and then this onion as well because I am starting some chili on the stove. Chili is on the menu for this week and I just wanted to prepare it and throw it in the freezer then we can just get it out and heat it up on that night. It just is one last step this week and I figured while I'm working in the kitchen I might as well cook it up this evening. Over here at the stove I put a dozen eggs into hard boil and we'll be taking those with us tomorrow since we're doing cold cuts. I figured hard boiled eggs is perfect and then in here I am frying up some burger for my chili and I make my chili kind of, I don't know it's a little different every time. I'll show you what I'm putting in it as I go along today. Won't stop for traffic lights. After I got started into cutting these peppers up I realized I really only needed one pepper for this. I don't know what I was thinking or why I decided to do three. So the other ones I'll just use to make tuna salad with peppers or something like that this week. You can say I lost my mind I will keep on holding my head high Even if the sky's falling down Jumping from cliff so high Trusting our wings to fly All right, so I put peppers, onions and then the beef into the pot and then I also love adding rice cauliflower. It's just a great filler that's really healthy and then I put in diced tomatoes and tomato sauce. I ended up adding two cans of tomato sauce as I went just because I can tell by the color what it really needs and then I add salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder and chili powder. After I got soup going Everly and I started in on the muffins I'll leave this recipe below as well. It's really easy and it's so good but I doubled the batch and I really overloaded my blender. So all in all I ended up emptying my blender and actually doing it in little batches because it was such a mess but they turned out great anyways. Even if the sky's falling Okay, now that the whole muffin fiasco is over and I have them baking I'm gonna go ahead and you make my hummus. So I've made hummus but it's been a really long time and I've never made it with the roasted red peppers. So basically I just watched it until the skin got kind of wrinkly like that and really soft and I'm gonna dump in chickpeas in here put a little olive oil, salt, pepper maybe some like garlic powder and use my immersion blender and blend it all up and kind of taste as I go. Turned out absolutely amazing. Cory just asked me to get him some with salsa and chips and we are never buying hummus again. It's so much better homemade and it's so simple to make and really, really inexpensive to make a lot of it. So I'm gonna give him this and then I'm gonna show you the container I'm gonna put this in because it's something I found the other day that I'm kind of excited about. This is a guacamole keeper. It's absolutely genius. I've never seen anything like this before. It's like around $10 on Amazon. So it has this rubber seal and you put, it's obviously for guacamole because if you've ever made guacamole or had too much, you know that it turns brown if it's exposed to air. So this thing, you just put your guacamole in or your dip or whatever you wanna put in it and you just press down to whatever level the dip is at and it kind of seals it away from everything else. So I'm gonna go ahead and just use it for my hummus tonight but I thought maybe this would be something that would be helpful to somebody else out there. So whenever you go to do the nuggets after they've been marinating in the pickle juice for a while, you actually put them in an egg bath and then you roll them in breadcrumbs or you can do almond flour. That's what I use. It's super simple. You just add spices to it and it makes it very healthy and also gluten-free. My favorite way to freeze things is to put them into Ziploc bags because you can easily drop them in hot water and thaw them out super quickly whenever you're ready to warm things up. One of the last things I did was put some vanilla and some sweetener in to my yogurt and then I put it in the refrigerator to let it continue setting up because it was still warm at this point and if you watch my meal prep videos, you know that I like to actually make ice pops with these. It's just a really easy, healthy snack that my girls love. I hope this video inspired you. Like I said, I'll leave the links for the recipes that I can in the description box and don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you're new here. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in my next video.