 Welcome back to my kitchen. Today we are gonna do a monthly freezer meal prep. It has been a while since I've done a monthly meal prep. I've been doing a lot of weekly meal preps and I used to do a lot of monthly freezer meal preps and just kind of got out of the groove of doing them. We're gonna talk a little bit more about that later on in this video but I mainly focused on breakfast items and a few odds and ends this day. Just some things that I needed to get into the freezer. One thing that we have been needing around our house is some homemade granola and I have a new found favorite to share with you all today. So a lot of times I make my homemade granola with maple syrup. So it gives it a nice maple flavor which of course is perfect for breakfast time but this time I decided to go with honey. I buy my maple syrup in five gallon buckets and currently I have one in the basement that is sealed that I need to break into and this day my husband was not home while I was making this. So I quite literally just didn't have maple syrup which I'm so glad that it worked out that way because we discovered how absolutely incredible raw honey is in granola. It kind of caramelizes. It's a little more sticky than maple syrup and it just creates these chunks of yum. You all know there's a lot of cereals out there that are honey based or at least in their title. They have honey whether or not they actually put honey in them. I do not know but I do know that there is something to honey being in a breakfast cereal like this. So I mixed in some raw cane sugar as well, some oats, some pecans. Pecans are some of my personal favorite and some butter, some avocado oil. A lot of these ingredients are also organic so I know that I'm getting a super high quality product that I'm putting together here. Obviously we can also eat this on yogurt and make parfaits and things like that but it will probably mostly get eaten just with some milk and enjoyed with some fruit. And that's the other half of the combo that we really found. We liked this day. We threw some freeze dried peaches I had done over the summertime into this. Now I don't store them in this. Some people might like to get even freeze dried strawberries. You can buy them very easily at the store and mix them right into it but I find that it kind of softens up the freeze dried fruit and I want that to stay nice and crunchy. So we just add it in over the top of the granola before we pour the milk in. Okay, so here I'm just showing you all how I'm making up some oat flour. As most of you know, we eat a majority of our diet gluten-free. I do also make sourdough. I like to throw that in there so we are not 100% gluten-free household but we are for the most part. And so I like to experiment. I've been finding more and more and more recipes with oat flour which I love because oat flour is so, so simple to make. And here's my little seven-year-old eating her granola yumminess for this day. A big thank you to Sintas for sponsoring this portion of today's video and helping me tackle the things that I wanted to vacuum pack for the freezer for this month. This six pack of Sintas vacuum sealer bags that come in rolls is so nice because I can cut the bags to the size that I need them for the items that I am vacuum packing. They come in two different sizes in this package. One of them is a eight inch roll and the other is an 11 inch roll. Since I can cut these two size, it gives me so much flexibility in what I'm able to vacuum pack. Also, these vacuum bag rolls work with all types of vacuum sealers. Simple operation, convenient to use. There is 120 feet total rolls with a single side embossed dotted to increase suction and provide puncture prevention. They are BPA free and suitable for a microwave oven. You all know that I talk a lot about saving money and reducing food waste. One of the ways I like to do that is getting bell peppers whenever they are on sale. And I like to slice them up, put them into these vacuum sealed bags and then I can just pull them out in portion sizes as I need them. That's another thing I love about these bags is I can create the portions that I wanna use and I can make the right size baggies for our family. I like to use these on pizza and also in egg omelettes for breakfast. Another reason these bags are a must have is I also like to vacuum pack my bacon. I buy large portions of bacon and since bacon are generally cut into strips, I like to be able to lay the strips out in the correct size package that I need that I can cut myself from these vacuum bag rolls. Then I'm able to vacuum pack my bacon and it stays fresh and nutrient dense in my deep freezer for months and months. Along with the bell peppers, I also had a few onions that were kind of on their last leg and I decided to dice them up and go ahead and vacuum seal them. I am going to tell you all, I do a lot of food preservation and vacuum sealing and I'm always looking for a nice, thick, high quality bag so I can't recommend these bag rolls enough. The other thing I wanted to mention is I like to use these for my refrigerator as well as my freezer. I buy a lot of cheese in five pound blocks which most of you know that if you watch my channel often and I will cut it into smaller portion sizes, vacuum seal it and put it into my refrigerator and it lasts so much longer and it saves me money in the long run. So go ahead and check out these Sintas vacuum sealer rolls in the description box below. I will have the link there. If you are someone that does food prepping like I do, you will definitely appreciate the quality of these bags. Okay, so with the oat flour we made earlier, we're gonna go ahead and make up some amazing banana bread. So if you want a healthier twist on banana bread instead of using white flour, you can go ahead and make yourself some oat flour. You will never know that this is oat flour. You will never know that this banana bread does not have wheat flour in it and it's just so delicious. So it just has a few ingredients. I will leave the recipe below with the other recipes from this video. I like to try to put everything down there unless it's something that's just really simple that you can kind of configure from watching the video. So this recipe just has oat flour. It has some baking soda, baking powder, some salt. So I'm gonna whisk up those dry ingredients first and I did pull these bananas out of the freezer. That's something I like to keep on hand. I do mostly once a month grocery shops if you are completely new around here. I have lots of videos on that on my channel, just how I prepare for that and then how I use my ingredients throughout the month. So this is one way I like to use those frozen bananas that I stock up every once in a while and you're just gonna add some eggs, some vanilla and then I went ahead and used honey in this again because that was a sweetener I had pulled out for the granola and it worked out so well but you could also use like agave. You could use raw cane sugar. You could use maple syrup. You could use really anything. And then I melted some butter up. We like to get the grass-fed butter. It's so yellow and just has such amazing flavor and of course that added one extra bit of yum to this banana bread. So then I mixed the wet and dry ingredients together. Now I actually have done it a few different ways. I have frozen the whole loaf of banana bread, especially if I make multiple loaves, like say I make four loaves at a time, then I will do that or you can slice the banana bread up and freeze the slices flat in a large gallon bag. Then you can pull out the slice and either let it thaw out on the countertop or pop it in your microwave or even better make some French toast with banana bread. If you've never tried that, you need to. And this banana bread would be perfect to do that with. So I love having some nice sweet breads in my freezer. It's just a convenient breakfast-y item, especially this because essentially you're just eating oatmeal with bananas and a few added ingredients, even some eggs for a little bonus protein in there. And you have a really healthy breakfast. Next up, we're going to tackle some egg bites. And this is one of my favorite ways to make egg bites. It reminds me a lot of the popular egg bites that you can get at drive-thrus these days. So I'm just taking a strip of bacon. You don't even have to grease your muffin tins. And that might actually, I should say this, that might depend on your muffin tins. If they're really, really old, you might want to grease them. But for the most part, I feel like the bacon strip has a good enough job creating some nice grease there that helps the sides not stick. So I'm just taking some bacon that I had pulled out of our freezer, thawed out. And I'm just creating these nice little cups. And these are actual muffin tins. I will try to remember to leave them linked below. They are not cupcake tins. They are the jumbo big guy muffin tins. And I think these work the best. I like the size of these. I've made them before in smaller tins and felt like they just weren't big enough for a breakfast. So if I have two of these, I feel like I've had a full-size breakfast. Now, the inside, we're going really, really simple. It's been our go-to in our house to make some fluffy eggs. So I went ahead and I figured about an egg and a half per muffin cup. So each pan had, let's see, three, so nine eggs per six cup pan, if that makes sense. And then I just take and put some sour cream. Yes, you heard me right, sour cream. You just need a little dollop for a few eggs. And I didn't measure this out, I just threw in the rest of my container of sour cream. And then of course I'm adding in my buttery steakhouse seasoning. What would a video be like on my channel without that seasoning? I use it for anything and everything. Then I just take a whisk and I really whisk it up. You wanna get that sour cream well combined into the eggs. The more combined, the better I would say, the fluffier they get. And then since my mixing bowl had a spout, I just took that and poured it into the cups evenly. And I'm gonna go ahead and just bake it up just like this. It's that simple. You wouldn't even need that seasoning. I mean, you could do any type of seasoning blend or just do salt and pepper for that matter. You're gonna see when these come out of the oven how crazy fluffy they are and just such an amazing breakfast item. They do deflate just a little bit once they cool down. So they aren't quite as rounded and fluffy but the texture is still there and you don't have a flat egg cup. If you're getting flat egg cups, if you're trying to make egg cups or egg bites, I guess, and they're getting flat, maybe try adding in some sour cream. And then when they come out, they look like this. I bake them at 350 until they're done. I know you guys might be cringing if you hate whenever people don't give accurate times and measurements and I can beat one of them sometimes. But I would say at least 30 to 40 minutes, probably at 350, I was just checking them while they were baking and look at that banana bread. So yummy, so delicious. My daughters could not wait to eat this and made the whole house just smell incredible and such great ingredients for them. So now I pulled out my vacuum sealer once again and I just took two of those egg cups, put them in their individual packages. Again, how great those vacuum bags are because you can cut them to the size that you want them. So I would have been wasting so many bags doing all of this with these smaller portion sizes if they were just large, regular-sized vacuum bags. So love that. And then I'm also vacuum packing the granola. Now one little tip I have if you have a vacuum sealer and you're going to vacuum pack something like this that's crunchy or could have sharp edges. You definitely want to stop it before it's gotten to the full vacuum effect. It can, some of those sharp little pieces of coconut or other nuts and things like that could puncture the bag. So what I do is I let it vacuum seal most of the way and then I kind of just stop it just before it would do that last tight squeeze, seal it and you're good to throw that right into the freezer. And granola lasts for, we've had it in the freezer for months whenever it's packaged that way. So one thing my mom was sharing with me recently is how well pineapple freezes. And if you're not gonna freeze it for insane amounts of time, but say you're going to freeze it for about a month, you can get away with having pineapple that is almost like fresh for the next few weeks if you cut it up. So like I said, I do a lot of once a month shopping and I wanted to make pineapple skewers later this month. I got this pineapple on a great deal and I decided to take some of it, chop it up, vacuum pack it and freeze it for those skewers in a week or two and the rest of it we ate fresh. So it's just one other way to enjoy pineapple. Thank you guys so much for watching today. If you're new here, don't forget to subscribe. I hope that you've got some inspiration out of this video and leave me a comment below and I'll see you guys in the next one.