 Hi guys welcome back to my channel. Welcome to another weekly meal prep. This week I just did a super super simple menu and meal plan. I'm going to be sharing with you all if you're new around here. Most weeks I like to share my weekly meal prep. I like to get everything ready basically taking a little bit of time out of the beginning of my week to just get as much cooked up and ready to go for my meals as possible so that when meal time rolls around it's a crazy time of day for you if you're the cook in the house and the mom and the wife and the one that everyone needs all at the same time. So it lightens your load a little bit just to get things prepared and ready. So for this week Monday I am just doing a easy creamy chicken broccoli soup. It's a cold time of year right now. It's a great time to just curl up with a nice warm bowl of soup and especially if you haven't been outside or doing a lot of strenuous things throughout the day. It's kind of nice to have a light dinner once in a while and soup is that perfect match of a light dinner but it leaves your tummy warm and makes you feel relaxed and refueled. So I grew up with my mom making broccoli soup quite often and sometimes it was more cheesy sometimes it was more creamy. One of my other goals for this week was to just use what I had on hand and you're going to see me do that throughout this entire prep. I just kind of work with what I have to make a really great menu and I encourage you to do that as well. If you take a week and you just decide you're not going to buy a lot of groceries or maybe you do monthly grocery shopping like I do and you don't have a lot around you just want to make do with what you have just look around and figure out your menu from what you have in the pantry and the refrigerator. So ideally when I make broccoli soup I love to do a good cheddar cheese but I was running low on cheese this week and I had some sour cream and I had cream cheese that needed to be used up so I decided to go ahead and use some sour cream to create the creamy soup. So one thing that helps me a lot whenever I'm making soups I think brings such a great depth of flavor is to kind of stir fry or saute your veggies in the bottom of your pot before you add any broth. So here I'm using some of my frozen celery from azure. I love having this bag on hand. I've been using it so much and I don't have to worry about having fresh celery around all the time. So I put my broccoli, my onion, some garlic, a little bit of avocado oil in the bottom of my pot. I got all of that cooked up to a nice tender point and then I went ahead and added in some of my homemade chicken broth and I actually also used a jar of my homemade shredded chicken that I go ahead and can up but I wanted to tell you a good alternative to that would be to get a rotisserie chicken that's kind of the same style chicken that it is. It's just cooked and shredded and then I'm adding a few scoops of the sour cream like I mentioned. This was so delicious and my children really loved this as well. So now we're moving on to Tuesday. We're going to do a baked spaghetti and I have a gluten-free friendly option for this as you will and we're going to do some deviled eggs and then I'll just make a side salad on the night that we're going to eat this. So I went ahead and got my local eggs. We don't have chickens yet. We're planning this spring to get some but for now I just pick up some eggs from a local farmer and I went ahead and got those boiling for the deviled eggs. In my cast iron I put about two pounds of ground beef and I'm just getting that fried up and I'm going to show you how I'm going to make this without a pre-made pasta sauce. I do have marinara that I make myself but I wanted to go about it in a little different way which I'll explain here in a minute. Okay so now I'm going to show you the gluten-free option to this. You could totally make up regular spaghetti pasta in place of this but in our house we eat a lot of gluten-free things because there are two family members that are gluten-free so when we're doing dinners and things like that most of the time it's gluten-free. So I'm actually using this brand of palm hearts of palm noodles and I don't know if you've ever heard of this but these are really good and I love the texture. I feel like they're very similar to regular pasta. They come they're just a shredded heart of palm but they are in the shape of like spaghetti and they really don't have a whole lot of flavor themselves so I like to add in a little bit of egg and some parm and stir that into it. It really helps those noodles grasp some flavor and then they aren't so plain tasting if that makes sense. So back to my pan of meat. Here I am adding a pint jar of diced tomatoes. I love seeing my summertime tomatoes that I work so hard to can come to life in dishes like this then I also added a small jar of tomato sauce. I believe this would be an eight ounce jar and I am essentially making my own pasta sauce. I wanted to make this with a little less sugar. I'm actually adding in a monk fruit sweetener in this as well. Now my pasta sauce that my marinara that I can in the summertime does have sugar in it so I was just trying to make this dish a little less carb heavy for myself so I'm adding in some onion powder some garlic powder some basil some oregano just to get all of those wonderful erby flavors in there and I'm stirring that all together. I also added some salt and pepper as well so now in the bottom of a baking pan I'm just adding in those noodles again you could just use regular cooked spaghetti noodles in place of that. On top of that I'm going to put my meat mixture and the shortcut to this is obviously to just put a marinara sauce on top of your meat. You wouldn't have to go to the extent I did with the diced tomatoes in the tomato sauce but it's an option if you want to be able to modify the flavors in your sauce then I went ahead and shredded up some mozzarella because I had a bunch of mozzarella on hand that was kind of on its last leg and really needed to be used up. Jumping ahead here for just one second so the next meal that we're going to be prepping I'm going to need bacon so I went ahead and started that in the air fryer and just so that that could be going in the background while I was still prepping Tuesday's meal so here I'm just getting the eggs peeled up and this egg container is one that I thrifted not that long ago it is an old Tupperware style container and I just felt like we needed a container that we could put some of the eggs away if we don't eat them all. We love deviled eggs in our house it is definitely a staple I make them fairly often and my whole family loves them. I just mix the yolks in with some mayo and some mustard and then I'll usually add a little bit of either sugar or some stevia just to add just a hair of sweetness to it and these are so delicious everybody always has a big smile on their face when they see these go on the table at dinnertime. Alright so now we are moving on to Wednesday's meal and here's where we'll be using some of that bacon that you saw so we're going to make a cheese stuffed chicken again going back to using up things that were in my refrigerator so I had some cream cheese that needed to be used up some blue cheese that needed to be used up but please don't be scared of the blue cheese if you're not a blue cheese fan a great replacement for that in this recipe would be feta cheese or you could even swap out for some shredded cheddar some mozzarella just any type of cheese that you really want to use I like I said just had this blue cheese on hand that needed to have something done with it so I decided as I was cleaning out the refrigerator and trying to come up with ideas of how to use everything up I would put it into some stuffed chicken breast so now I just added in some chive I think and some other herbs and spices you can just get crazy creative I think that stuffed chicken breast is an easy way to change up flavors you can play around with herbs and other ingredients as you'll see here so I'm just taking some of that cream cheese mixture and I'm just putting that inside of the chicken breast I just sliced it thinly and just sliced it open and put the stuffing inside folded the chicken breast back together and then the rest of the cream cheese mixture I'm just smearing on the top and then going back to some of that mozzarella that I needed to get used up I really finely shredded that topped that on top of the chicken breast and then I chopped up some bacon to top this off and I'm also adding in some of my freeze dried chives that I've been using in everything they were something that I grew in my garden this past year and have been just loving them in all kinds of recipes so this dish I'm actually not pre-baking I'm gonna go ahead and put the lid on it and I will wait until Wednesday to pop it in the oven at 350 for probably about 45 minutes to make sure that it's baked through and if you're not sure if it's completely done always check the temp of the inside of the chicken so now we're moving on to Thursday and if you've been around for any length of time you probably know this is like a staple staple staple meal in our house I think this will always be a meal I make and it's just a favorite of ours if not our favorite meal because I tend to make it almost every other week and that is a barbecue meatballs mashed potatoes and peas now the peas I'll be making on the night that I actually make this meal but this time around I'm also going to be making a homemade of barbecue sauce a lot of times we've used like sweet baby rays or like a brown sugar type of a barbecue store-bought sauce but recently I've been making a lot of my own barbecue sauce and I will be sure to leave the link for this sauce in the description box below but to get started in prepping this meal and this meal is so easy to prep I am boiling up my potatoes to make the mashed potatoes and while they are getting their boil on I'm going to go ahead and mix up my barbecue sauce I really like to cook this just a little bit just to dissolve the brown sugar and make sure that all of the flavors are combined you could potentially mix this up just cold and then pour it over the meatballs and bake them if you're going to bake them however that is not our preferred way to make meatballs in our house we like to fry them in our cast iron skillet and then when they are fried through I will add the barbecue sauce on top and just heat the sauce right with the meatballs so cooking it up beforehand is a little bit of a better way for me to prep this barbecue sauce again I'll leave all the exact measurements below but the base of it is just some ketchup and I like to get the organic ketchup that does not have any corn syrup in it and we use brown sugar and some spices and some w sauce and just a few other little things that you probably have on hand in your kitchen I feel like this is such an easy recipe and you can tweak it how to how you want it you could add some cayenne if you want to spice it up a little bit you could add some extra brown sugar if you want to make it sweeter or even some honey would be delicious in this it's just very easy to customize into the type of barbecue sauce that your family enjoys so now to prep the meatballs themselves I'm just using one pound of ground beef we have been loving these pork breadcrumbs again leaning into a gluten-free friendly idea these are basically made from a pork rind and then they're flavored a little bit and they have more of that panko flavor to them and then I'm adding in this brown sugar seasoning just to make these more of that barbecue meatball taste that we really really love so I'm just going to mix all of that together with some eggs and I'm going to create these meatballs and put them in a pan but they're not going to get baked in this pan like I said they're going to get fried in the cast iron skillet but just having them ready to go into the skillet is such a huge time saver I don't have to remember to throw out the meat and I don't have to get them all shaped and everything they are quite literally ready to go into the frying pan whenever it is dinner time so I'm just adding an extra layer of protection by putting some press and seal on here and I am going to just put the lid on this and put it into the refrigerator this could be frozen into a freezer meal very very easily especially with the sauce kind of being separate I think that it would freeze a little bit better if the sauce wasn't in with the meatballs although you could do it either way so when I make my mashed potatoes I just put in some butter and surprise surprise I add in the buttery steakhouse seasoning I use that on almost all of my veggies I think by now you all know that's just my staple that's my go-to and then I add some sour cream again using up that sour cream that needed to be done and a good stainless steel hand masher is my way of doing mashed potatoes I just feel like if I'm already making a pot dirty on the stove why would I get out my mixer and make a whole bunch more dirty I just like using my little hand masher I can throw that in the dishwasher try to remember to leave that link to below because that is such a handy little kitchen tool and then I took the barbecue sauce and put it into a jar to cool I'm just going to put a lid on that and put that into the refrigerator so it's ready to go for my meal and then the mashed potatoes I am putting into an airtight container since I'm going to eat this a little later in the week I figured it might be better off to store it in an airtight container okay so now we're moving on to Friday and I wanted to show you all something I mentioned in my video where I was talking about how to make produce last longer when you shop once a month so here is my lettuce wrapped in tinfoil and like I told you in that video I have had lettuce stay fresh for up to five weeks in tinfoil it's just amazing how long it stays nice and fresh and I can chop it up whenever it's needed for a meal so I decided to go ahead and just chop up this lettuce for taco salads really finely and put it into an airtight bag or I'm just going to squeeze as much air out as possible in this case along with some paper towels just to make sure that no moisture is hanging around in the bag and it will keep the lettuce nice and crisp and ready to go for our taco salad meal and again I will try to remember to leave that video linked below where I talk about how to keep your produce for longer I think it's just such a good video to really dive into trying not to cause too much food waste I noticed how much in my kitchen I've been able to keep and not be throwing out groceries that I paid good money for and I want to make last as long as possible pre-frying taco meat is such a helpful thing because all you have to do is either put it back in the skillet just to heat it up you can throw it in the microwave and it stores so well I have my homemade taco seasoning I use about three tablespoons of that for one per pound of meat and it tastes so good and I know it doesn't have all of those additives in there as well so I know that this prep was kind of short and sweet but that's what I want to show you all is that you can really take a really small amount of time to prep out your week and know that you'll be ready to go you're going to get dinner on the table no matter if you work away no matter if you are a homeschool mom no matter what type of lifestyle you are currently living you can get dinner on the table and have great healthy meals for your family if you are new here don't forget to subscribe thanks so much for joining me today leave a comment below give this video a like and I'll see you all in my next video