 Hi friends, welcome back to my channel and a very special welcome if you're new here. My name is Jen. I'm a certified weight loss and nutrition coach. I'm on Weight Watchers and I count calories and macros. Happy Monday. It is Monday. It's the week of Thanksgiving. So meal prep is even more important for me this week to stay on track. I have an amazing breakfast, lunch and dessert. A Thanksgiving inspired dessert would be perfect to make for the holiday. So if you're excited, give this video a big, huge thumbs up. Make sure you're subscribed and your bell notification is turned on because I do a meal prep every Monday and I upload five videos every single week. Down in the description box, I will link nutrition coaching. I do offer personalized to you macros and calories. I cannot recommend this enough. This is how I've lost over 130 pounds and I have one-on-one coaching if you would like to chat with me directly. Links, discounts to my favorite things as well as my Facebook group. Come on over, join us there or all down in that description box. So let's start cooking. I can't wait for this week's recipes. I'm making a biscuits and gravy casserole. This is a super simple recipe and it is absolutely incredible. I mean, the best in my opinion, biscuits and gravy recipe out there. So let me show you what you'll need. So you're going to need some milk. I always try to use Fairlife milk because it has protein in it. So it really just helps up the protein. You'll also need some light butter. Like I mentioned in my grocery haul, they did not have any of the small cans of biscuits at Walmart. Generally, you would need two of the small cans. So I picked up the jumbo biscuits and I'm just going to do one can. I figure this is pretty much the same as two small cans. You're also going to need all-purpose flour, salt, pepper and garlic powder and obviously sausage. So like I also mentioned in my grocery haul, I picked up this chicken sausage from Trader Joe's. I could not find a turkey sausage crumbles anywhere or a tube of turkey sausage, only pork sausage. So what I'm going to do is just remove the casing and use the actual sausage of these chicken sausages from Trader Joe's. These are delicious as well. So I went ahead and removed all the sausage from the casing and we're going to go ahead and brown that up. And then I'm going to cut my jumbo biscuits into eight pieces per biscuit. I went ahead and sprayed my nine by 13 baking dish with non-stick cooking spray. I'm going to put half of my cut up biscuit pieces into the bottom of my baking dish and I'm going to pop this into a 400 degree oven for about 10 minutes. In a small bowl, I've added four tablespoons of flour. I'm going to add my garlic powder, salt, pepper, stir that up. I have my cooked sausage and I'm going to sprinkle my flour mixture right on top. Stir that all together until the flour mixture is fully absorbed into the sausage. I added three cups of my Fair Life milk to my sausage. I have this over medium heat. We're going to allow this to come to a slow simmer. That's going to help thicken up the milk making our gravy. So I just pulled the biscuits out of the oven. My gravy is nice and thick. So we're going to pour that right over the top of the biscuits. Spread that out nice and even. And then we're going to top it with the rest of the biscuit pieces. And then I have a couple tablespoons of light melted butter and I'm just going to drizzle that right on top. That will help those biscuits brown really nicely. Plus add that kind of buttery vibe. Like what you would get if you buttered a biscuit at a restaurant, it's going to give it that same buttery feeling. It's going to go back in the oven for about another 15 to 20 minutes or until our biscuits are golden brown. Amazing looking biscuits and gravy at casserole is out of the oven. This looks so good. Look at how crispy and buttery those biscuits are. You can see that it's all nice and bubbly on the side. So this is going to be breakfast this week. I'll pair it with some fruit. I'll go ahead and pop points, calories, macros here on the screen for you. For lunch this week I'm making cheesy buffalo chicken pasta. This sounds amazing. I've been craving buffalo something. You know I don't love spicy but I'm going to use a mild sauce and that's really going to tame down the spice but still give me all of the flavor. And this is a slow cooker recipe. So super easy to throw in the crock-pop before you head out the door to work. It'll just make your life a lot easier on busy weeknights and weekends. So let me show you what's in the recipe. First you're going to need some vegetable broth, buffalo sauce, ranch, seasoning, salt and pepper. I will as always link my gravity-fed salt and pepper grinders down below for you. They are super affordable on Amazon and they are amazing. You're going to need some pasta. And of course I'm going to use fiber gourmet pasta. This is my all-time favorite. I love the taste, the texture of this. It is 48% less calories than traditional pasta. So it's only 110 versus 210, 220. There's 24 grams of fiber, 17 net carbs and about seven grams of protein per serving. It is non-GMO, it is vegan. I love this. It's a great way to eat pasta for less calories and points. So I'm going to use an entire box of the Spaghetti Fiber Gourmet. I will link this down below on Netrician's website. They have the best price and the most selection. They make multiple shapes, the spaghetti, penne, rotini and elbow macaroni. So I'll link Netrician down below for you. You're also going to need some light shredded cheese, cornstarch, garlic powder. The recipe calls for celery salt. I don't have any but that may be a nice addition to the dish. Eight ounces of light cream cheese and some chicken breast. I went ahead and added a crock pot liner to my slow cooker. It is much easier for cleanup. I'm going to put my chicken in the bottom of my crock pot. I do have some pre-cooked, pre-shredded chicken from sprouts in my fridge that I need to use up. I'm going to add that in at the end. So you would want about double this amount of raw chicken, about a pound and a half. But because I'm going to add in the pre-cooked, pre-shredded so I can use it up kind of towards the end, I'm going with a smaller amount of chicken initially. And then I'm going to add in three cups of broth. I'm using vegetable broth, you could use chicken broth. I picked veggie because I had it on hand. Also going to add one quarter cup of buffalo sauce. All of our seasoning, so salt and pepper, garlic powder and a tablespoon of ranch seasoning. You would also add in the celery salt at this stage as well. We're going to top it with our one third less fat cream cheese and we're using the entire package for the full eight ounces. And lastly, one cup of light shredded cheese. Now you have the option to cook this on high for four hours or low for eight. I'm going to start mine on high for the four hours. So hopefully it's done by the time I'm finished with the rest of my meal prep. So it's been four hours. I'm going to go ahead and remove the lid from my crock pot. And then taking a couple of forks, I'm just going to shred up the chicken that is in the crock pot. And then I'm going to add in that chicken I mentioned in the beginning that I had in my fridge from sprouts. Again, I just wanted to use this up so there was no need to cook fresh chicken when I had that in the refrigerator. I'm going to add the remaining quarter cup of buffalo sauce and stir everything up. Just make sure all your chicken is coated. So I added a tablespoon of cornstarch to a bowl, a little bit of water. Stir that together to make a slurry and then we're going to add that to the crock pot. That's going to help thicken up the sauce. Give it another quick stir. Now we're going to add in the pasta. You're probably going to have to break your noodles in half if you're using spaghetti noodles just because they might be a bit too long for the crock pot. Make sure your noodles get under the liquid and then we're going to turn our crock pot back on too high for about another hour or until our noodles are cooked through. You are going to want to stir them a few times while they're cooking just so the noodles don't stick together. One hour later. So the pasta is done. Our noodles are nice and soft. It's thickened up. I will tell you that it smells absolutely incredible. I'm going to add it to a storage container, a big glass bowl with a lid, pop it in the fridge and this is going to be my lunch all week. There's a good possibility I'll have some cucumbers or some other type of fruit or veggie with it but cheesy buffalo chicken pasta for the win. For dessert this week and like I said, this would make an amazing dessert to have for Thanksgiving. We're going to make a pumpkin bar with brown sugar frosting. You know those really fluffy pumpkin bars with all the frosting. We're going to make one WW calorie friendly. So let me show you what's in the recipe. First you're going to need all purpose flour, light butter, brown sugar alternative. You already know I'm using Lakonto. That is what I use for all of my sugar substitutes. This is the Lakonto golden. I will link Lakonto down in the description box for you with 15% off site wide. You'll also need vanilla extract, a powdered sugar alternative. This is the Lakonto powdered. Salt, pumpkin puree, baking soda, eggs, pumpkin pie spice and some cinnamon. In a large bowl we're going to add one and a half cups all purpose flour, our pumpkin pie spice, salt and a quarter teaspoon of baking soda. Stir that up to mix. To the flour mixture we're adding four ounces of light butter melted, two thirds cup of Lakonto golden, vanilla extract and one cup of pumpkin puree. Stir that together until fully mixed. You're going to spray your baking dish. You could do six by six, seven by seven, eight by eight and then we're going to add our pumpkin bar mixture. We want to spread that out as even as possible in the bottom of the baking dish. We're putting our bars into a 350 degree oven for about 25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. We want to keep our eye on this. We definitely don't want to overcook it. Pumpkin bars are in the oven. We're going to make up our frosting. So I have one cup of light butter at room temperature. I'm going to add one quarter cup of the Lakonto golden and then using my handheld mixer I'm going to cream these together. We're then going to add in some cinnamon and some salt and then little by little I'm adding in my Lakonto powdered. I have one and a half cups total. Using my mixer I'm going to mix that in until I have a frosting like consistency. Add half of a teaspoon of vanilla extract and mix again. If needed you can add milk for the desired consistency but mine actually looks pretty good. So here's my frosting. This looks perfect consistency. So I'm just going to set this aside until our bars are out of the oven and cooled. Our pumpkin bars are cooled. I'm going to go ahead and add the frosting. Allow that to kind of drip down along the sides of the pumpkin bars and here are the pumpkin bars. These look so good. I'm going to toss these in the refrigerator or help the frosting set just a little bit more. We'll slice them into bars and like I said this would be great to take two Thanksgiving celebrations. So I'll go ahead and put serving size, points, calories, all the information here on the screen for you. Thank you for joining me for this week's meal prep. I hope you are as excited about these three recipes as I am. As always all three recipes are on my website. My website is linked at the top of the description box for you along with nutrition coaching, links and discounts to my favorite things and my Facebook group. Don't forget to head on over and join us there. Happy Thanksgiving friends. I hope you make all of these meals for you and your family and I'll see you all in my next video. Bye.