 Hey everyone welcome back to my kitchen and welcome back to another monthly meal prep So if you guys watch my channel often, then you know once a month I generally prep about 30 meals just to get us to the month But this month I actually got sick for a little while. I had lost my voice for a little bit So I couldn't film quite as often as I wanted to and to be honest I was just really tired from being sick So I actually ended up making about eight to ten meals this month's prep plus since I wasn't feeling well We had ordered food in at times and things like that So I had a lot of meals left over from the month before so this prep is going to be a smaller prep It's not going to be nearly as many meals as I usually do But I thought it would be a great inspiration piece to show you that you can do a quick little prep like this and Still get a nice amount of meals in the freezer for busy days also along with that I'm going to go ahead and really kind of show you some real time Prepping in this where I'm mixing together. I'm doing a little bit of this for that recipe a little bit of that for another Recipe, it's not going to be all the steps for one particular recipe. Sometimes I clump together Footage that goes with each recipe, but in this video You're gonna see me doing a little bit of this and that throughout the whole video So the first thing that I was doing here was prepping some meatballs for a meatball soup recipe that I found and as usual I did make two meals out of this I usually double the recipes and some already getting everything for one of these and within a month It doesn't really bother us to eat something twice and this recipe I believe in the recipe actually calls for pre-made meatballs, but I like to make my own So that's what I was doing there and then I was just kind of browning the meatballs While those were browning I went ahead and put some chicken thighs into the pressure cooker to make a great chicken soup And I actually did not film making the rest of this chicken soup in this video But I did get the footage here of throwing the chicken thighs into the pressure cooker And I feel like it makes such tender chicken You can shred it up and put it into chicken salad or into a chicken soup like I did these meatballs were really simple I just added some egg and some almond flour and some salt and pepper and like I said just browned them They didn't really need to be completely cooked through since they were going in with the rest of the ingredients into the freezer And then whenever I got them out I was going to kind of make them in the slow cooker with the rest of the soup So they would finish cooking then before I started to bag up the meatball soup I actually put some meat into My pot there because I was going to be making beef vegetable soup So like I said, I was really kind of running around Trying to make the best of my time and just get this thrown together in a few hours So this recipe like the rest of them will be linked below in the description box And it really I've never made this before but it looks really really good It calls for three red bell peppers per Recipes so like I said, I was doubling this so I had six red bell peppers to cut up and put into these bags along with some marinara sauce and Some tomatoes and then the meatballs went on in with that So to cook this I would just get it out and saw it a little bit And then put it in to the slow cooker and I believe it needs to cook for about four hours on high And you have a really great red sauce based soup I'm going to notice as we get into cooler months that I'm going to be prepping more soups just because They're just something so filling and warm and delicious on a cold day So once my beef was fried up for my vegetable soup I went ahead and drained some of it before I chopped it up and started adding in all of the other ingredients Okay, so I do have to tell you a little kind of mistake I made in this and I love to tell you guys whenever I learned something new from a meal prep So I had grabbed those cauliflower florets and that big bag did great because I actually did this whole process twice in making two pots of this vegetable beef soup and The recipe called for cauliflower florets. I figured I'll do a little shortcut grab them frozen So I don't have to cut them up myself Well, the florets were very very large. So actually once this had cooked up a little bit I went through with either tongs or like a large spoon and I pulled out those big pieces of Cauliflower and actually put them on a cutting board and just chop them up so that they were a little bit more bite-size For this soup so I would probably recommend cutting up your own cauliflower for this recipe instead of getting the Pre-frozen cauliflower Pieces unless what I did for the second pot is I actually let them thaw out and I chopped them up a little bit more before throwing them in So that would be a way you could possibly do it But it might just be easier to use a fresh head of cauliflower All right, so as you can see like I said, we're jumping back and forth between different recipes So this is kind of to finish up the meatball soup I had some baby carrots and that's another tip I have for you use what you have on hand use things up So I needed to use that these baby carrots chopped them up I added the red sauce which since this was going to also get a beef broth dumped into it Once I was ready to cook it. I wasn't too particular about what kind of red sauce I used I just used an inexpensive one from Walmart And I felt like all of the flavors combined would really make a good soup and you could add even Fresh herbs basil time that kind of thing to the soup as well At this point my chicken was done that I was making for my chicken soup that I ended up making later and Something else I really love to do in my preps and if you guys watch my channel You've seen me do this before but that is make a nice amount of mashed potatoes and it's so simple to do I really didn't make a lot of mashed potatoes before I had a pressure cooker, but it's just so fast and easy Also, I wish so bad. I could peel potatoes this fast So you just put them all into the pressure cooker You put a little bit of water in and I would just Google You know what you what pressure and how much time you need for the amount of pounds of potatoes that you have And I don't cut them too small because I feel like if you cut them into two small of pieces You're gonna end up with really watery potatoes So cutting them about in half if they're not too large of a potato works out well So I got that started well, I got that started. I went ahead and made a chicken teriyaki stir fry I love stir fries, especially when you can find sauces that aren't loaded with sugar and this particular brand I use probably every month when I prep I Like their barbecue sauce as well, which you'll see here in a second but I went ahead and cut up some chicken and I dumped the sauce right in and one thing I wanted to say about dumping like a Marinade or barbecue sauce in with the meat is if you have time to let it sit in the refrigerator So that the meat kind of marinades in the sauce for a little while before you freeze it That would be ideal and really get your meat nice and flavorful that way Okay, so I needed to blanch the broccoli and then you'll see here in a minute I also have some sugar peas. I wanted to put into this the carrots once they're shredded like that are fine You really don't need to blanch those but broccoli it's best to blanch them So I got some water boiling I put the sugar peas and the broccoli in for about three minutes And then I quickly pulled them off and once you pull it off You can just run cold water over it to cool it down really fast And then you can add it to your freezer bags All right so this is a good example of kind of letting the meat sit if you can these are pork chops and I just put them into the bags And then I went ahead and put the barbecue sauce in there And once they've sat for a while in the barbecue sauce if you can leave them sit for a few hours in the refrigerator Before you freeze them you can just flatten the whole works out and that also is what's going along with this mashed potatoes So if you guys look in the description box, I like to write out what I have in mind for each meal so this would be barbecue pork chops mashed potatoes and Just regular buttered peas is what I would serve this all together with and freezing mashed potatoes is really awesome because they taste a lot better than the boxed kind But they're just as simple you can pull them out throw them in some hot water for a couple minutes And then dump them into a pot on the stove and heat them up that way And I think they taste exactly like they do when they come fresh out of the pot All right, so I thought I would go ahead and mention my label maker because that is a question I get a lot and I use a Label maker called mnemonic. I think I'm saying that right mnemonic and They are a special kind of label that are waterproof. So you don't have to worry about things thawing out and making your label all wet and They're really really simple plus you can personalize them a lot on your phone There is an app you can even do different fonts. You can do a lot of things I made the lettering really large on these But you can make them really small if you have detailed instructions for the meal so that if you have anyone else in Your household preparing the meal or if you're giving the meals to someone else All of the instructions are right with the meal and you won't have to be guessing what's inside the bag So I will leave my label maker from Amazon linked below But that's how fast and easy this prep was there was really nothing to it And I thank you guys so much for watching if you're new here Don't forget to subscribe and I will be back with another Video next week. I'm back on the ball with filming now that I'm feeling better and thanks a lot for watching