 Hey everyone, welcome back to my kitchen and welcome back to another weekly meal prep. I show you how I incorporate fresh eating along with my freezer meals that I prep every single month. And as a quick reminder, at the end of each video, I also include something for long-term food storage. This week's video is sponsored by Skillshare, I'll be sharing more about that later on in the video. I decided to prep everything by days of the week, so you have an idea of how my week is planned out. So Monday is going to be taco night and I'm going to go ahead and make up my taco meat. I'm just doing ground beef and I did do two pounds of it, so we had some leftovers for some lunches. I got that going in my cast iron skillet and then I am going to attempt to make some flour tortillas. I made a comment in my last video about my long-term storage bags that I keep dry goods in and this is one of them and I do put an oxygen absorber in it as well just to be able to keep everything nice and dry and be able to buy things in bulk and then just kind of divvy it out into these bags. I am completely new to making tortillas, so if you are used to making them, I would love to hear your tips. I would like to also learn how to make corn tortillas as well, but I figured flour might be a little easier since I don't have a tortilla press. This recipe is a very simple traditional recipe and it does have a lard in it. I'll leave the recipe below and then I decided to make it in my food processor since I would be slowly adding water to it and it worked out perfectly. I know when it comes to making tortillas, it's all about how they feel and how the dough feels and I was pretty happy with the consistency of what I had going on here and I dumped it all out onto the counter to shape everything and roll out the tortillas. This recipe said that it made about 6 tortillas but since I was making taco sized, I did make them into 8 different little pieces and I think I ended up with more like 9 or 10 because I had some leftovers and I used my little oil dispenser that I love so much and I put just a little bit of oil in the pan and I did not re-oil it every time I put a new tortilla in. As I pulled them off of the pan, I did put them on some paper towels. Again, if you have tips, I'd love to hear them but I was pretty happy with how they turned out the first time around. I don't normally do taco seasoning mix, I like to do my own seasonings but this week I just decided to make it a little bit easier and throw a packet in. I did my chopping and cutting so I just cut up some tomatoes and I cut up some lettuce. I don't know about you all but I feel like if I cut lettuce with a plastic or ceramic knife I feel like it doesn't turn brown as fast as if I use a metal knife. Let me know if you do the same thing but I just got another ceramic knife. I hadn't had one for a while and they're so convenient just if you want to cut something without a metal knife. I did shred up some cheese as well and I left a little bit of flour that was left in here from making the tortillas just to help the cheese not stick to each other. Then I also will serve this with some of my home canned pickled jalapenos. They're so good and they're great on top of tacos. Tuesday I'm planning to do a wing night along with some veggie pizza. We have not done wings in a long time and wings are so simple to get in a marinade and have ready to go into your air fryer or your oven. It really doesn't matter I've done them both ways and as long as you crisp them up a little bit in the oven with the broiler when they're done they're still crispy and delicious and so I just separated the legs from the wings or drumsticks from the wings and got them into two different bags because I was going to do a hot sauce one and then we've been on a pretty big sweet baby raise kick lately so that is what I put into the other one. You could also freeze wings in a marinade like this and I've considered doing that. I may have done it a while back so that's something I want to add to my freezer meal list. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creators explore new skills deepen existing passions and get lost in creativity. I have personally been using Skillshare for years and I love the layout of their platform. It's curated specifically for learning meaning there are no ads and they are always launching new premium classes so you can stay focused and follow wherever your creativity takes you. Also as a busy mom another feature I love is every single class is broken into sections so I can watch small sections at a time and come back to it making it possible for me to complete full classes. Skillshare's entire catalog of classes now offers subtitles in Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch. They have a huge variety of class topics anything from creative writing to culinary skills which of course may interest you since you are watching a cooking video. This is the class I'm currently watching. It is indoor gardening and how to grow house plants, veggies and herbs. I know that you all will love Skillshare as much as I do. The first 1000 people to use the link in the description box will get a one month free trial of Skillshare to try out. Next I went ahead and made my vegetable pizza. This is a favor of mine. It's so delicious and I didn't realize it but apparently Pillsbury has started to make these crescent sheets. I actually grabbed four rolls of these thinking they were smaller and it's the perfect size for a 9x13 pan so I just put that in the bottom, threw that in the oven, got it baking while I cut up all of the veggies for the toppings and you can use whatever veggies you want to for this. I just kind of used what I had on hand and then along with some things I picked up. You can do shredded cheese, you can add bacon, you can get really really creative. I just simply did veggies and no meat or cheese since it's going to have a nice creamy dressing underneath. You'll want to let your crust cool down a bit and then you can go ahead and assemble your creamy layers. So I did a block of cream cheese around a tablespoon of ranch powder and then I just added enough sour cream until it got creamy. I kind of used my sour cream to smooth out the cream cheese and I am in the process of learning how to make my own sour cream so I will have to keep you guys updated on that. It seems pretty simple and I think I'm perfecting it but it is a staple in my kitchen and so I wanted to be able to make my own. Then I just went ahead and spread it all over the crust and then you just top it off with your veggies and you can store this in the refrigerator for a couple of days and it's still great. In fact I like it refrigerated at least overnight before you eat it just because it helps all of the flavors combine really well. Okay for Wednesday I'm doing a freezer meal which is shepherd's pie I'm going to use my homemade bread to make garlic bread and then I wanted to add in a pasta salad as well. So I used this pasta and I love it because it's made with chickpeas and I do try to steer. We have a mixture of things in our house. We do some dairy free things. We do some gluten free things. I know for myself I can't have too much gluten. I can have it every once in a while but it's just something that I try not to have too much of. That's why you see such a huge variety of recipes in our house. It's not like there's an allergy but just sensitivity if that makes sense and not everybody has that so I try to make a variety of things. So for this pasta salad I just made some cheese. I did some olives. I did some fresh cut tomatoes. I did a little bit of the yellow banana peppers and then I just put Italian dressing like the regular salad dressing over it, stir it all together and throw it into some containers and of course this will be used for lunches throughout the week as well. Okay so for Thursday I'm planning to do teriyaki chicken, fried rice. Those are both freezer meals that were in my last video and then I'm also doing homemade egg rolls. This was my first time making homemade egg rolls. I'm sold. We will always make these. I'm going to probably make these pretty regularly. I'm even considering canning the inside part so that we can just pull it out and make egg rolls really fast. But I just did a little bit of cabbage cut very fine. I actually got a bag of it pre-cut just because I knew I had a lot to prep this day and I wanted to do a little bit of canning today too so it was just one less thing. I added some carrots, some shredded ginger, some green onion, some pressed garlic and just stir-fried it all together with some oil, added a little bit of salt, some soy sauce and it was so delicious. And then I just got it really, really soft. I wanted the carrots to definitely be soft before I put them into the egg rolls. Okay so I'm going to be including a little bit more cast iron recipes because I've been loving my cast iron. So I just put a little bit of vegetable oil into the pan and I did save this oil so we can use it again the next time we make egg rolls which will probably be pretty soon because these are so yummy. And you just put a little bit of the filling. You can add pork to this. You can add shrimp. I just did veggie for my first try. And then you just roll them up like this and to seal the end you just want a little bit of water in a cup nearby so you can rub it across the pointy end and seal it up that way. And I was checking my oil. You do want it to be 375 degrees before you drop these in. They also fry very, very quickly and so you want to have them already if you have a big pan like this so you can fry them all at once. I almost wanted to leave the real time footage of this because it fries so fast. I cut out a little bit of it but most of this is real time and you can see how you drop them in and they are already frying up. You really want to pay attention to these. You cannot walk away while you are frying them and you pretty much want to turn them over plus I didn't want to over fry them because I was planning to put these in the refrigerator and then put them in the air fryer on the night that we eat these. So I didn't want them to be too dark so that they could just heat up really great in the air fryer and not burn. So I did pull them off pretty quickly but I did eat one of them just to test them out and they are so delicious. I ate them with a chili sauce that you are going to see here in a minute that I picked up at Walmart but now I am totally inspired to make my own chili sauce and keep the things on hand to make these because they are so yummy. Okay so here is my plan for the rest of the week. Friday we are going to do leftovers and clean out the refrigerator. Saturday we will be burgers and potato wedges which I will use my home canned potatoes to fry those up. You just throw them in the frying pan with butter and a little bit of garlic salt and they are so yummy and then Sunday we will order food in. Alright so these are what I call my bonus items that are not meals for the week but just things to fill in between and that is some fresh veggies for eating. My girls I mentioned in my last weekly meal prep how they love cucumbers and blow through these really quickly and then I just chopped up the rest of the veggies I had from the veggie pizza. Every week I pick two fruits and we just kind of have those for the week so I did the cantaloupe and grapes this week and having it already in the refrigerator it makes it so convenient for lunches and they always tend to get a fruit and a veggie with every meal. Alright so the sweet treat for this week is my absolute favorite chocolate chip cookies. I grew up eating these in fact I may insert a picture here of my mom's recipe because it was out of a cookbook that she used. You will see little notes that she gave for whenever I first started making these she directed which things I should mix up first so I've been making these since I was probably 10 years old and they're so yummy we cannot stay out of them when they are around and they're made with instant pudding in the mix which makes them so soft so delicious it's a tried and true recipe. The other thing that's really fun about this recipe is you can swap out that pudding for any type of pudding so you could use mint chocolate pudding you could use chocolate pudding with chocolate chips and do like a double chocolate cookie you can do Oreo pudding which I have done something similar to that before here on my channel but you can really get creative with these but just the plain vanilla with chocolate chips making a normal chocolate chip cookie oh they're so good and I did double this recipe so I had some to throw in the freezer as well. If I look really tired in this video it's because the day before this I canned 54 quarts of pickled beets we love pickled beets and then this day I did my weekly meal prep so by the time I was done with all of this I was pretty exhausted and ready to prop my feet up. Alright so now we're to our long-term food storage segment of the video and last week I showed you all how I make really easy bread and right at the end of it one of my daughters was holding the piece of bread with some of my jelly on it and I got requests can we please have your jelly recipe or jam I always say jelly because I just grew up saying that but this is technically jam because if it was jelly you would strain out all of the pulp from the strawberries which I leave it in so this is not anything sugar-free it's not anything healthy this is like your grandmother's recipe for homemade strawberry jam and I will leave it in the description box below it's got lots of sugar in it but remember you're only using a small amount of it on your bread or your waffles or whatever you're going to spread it on so just keep that in mind plus it doesn't have corn syrup in it which a lot of store-bought jams and jellies have that kind of stuff in it so this is just a good alternative to those things and canning it means that you have it on the shelf for a year or more which is really awesome so you just want to cook them up with all of the ingredients and I just you can tell just put my hands over the pot to see if it was hot you can get this to a rolling boil but honestly I was so tired after this day I just wanted to get the project done and I knew I could get away with getting it really hot and dissolving the sugar and blending it up and probably being good so you could definitely throw this in a blender if you don't have a hand blender it's just a lot less messy to just be able to put your immersion blender in and blend it all up so you'll see me chasing strawberries around because I wanted to get them all blended up and then I did let it simmer a little bit longer until I felt like the sugar was dissolved I took a spoon and just tasted some just to make sure the sugar wasn't like gritty in there but I knew that the pectin everything was dissolved so after you let it simmer just a little bit it's ready to go into the jars you want to have nice clean jars and you want to leave yourself about like an inch head space on the top of your jars I did get 24 out of this and I did about double the recipe so you can get 12 to 14 jelly jars out of this recipe and actually the whole reason I'm making this batch is I had a bunch of strawberries in the freezer and I actually already made a ton of strawberry jam this year have it down on the shelf already but I'm trying to clean my freezers out right now because I know that we've got a lot coming with summertime to go into the freezer and so this is actually strawberries that were frozen totally fine to do if you want to get strawberries out of the freezer and do something with them and so we have a lot of strawberry jam which is totally fine because it is a favorite and with me making homemade bread a lot right now we have been going through it after you have it all in the jars you just put your lids on I boil my lids first put my rings on and put it right into the water bath canner and you can can it for like 10 to 15 minutes I double layer mine so meaning I put one layer of jars and then put a second layer of jars because my canner is tall enough to do that so since I do that I do like to process them for more like 15 minutes just to make sure that they're all good in there pull them out and let them set up whenever you see me holding this jar it's actually like still not cooled at all so it does get more jelly than that it's not quite that runny but that is how I make mine it's so simple you've seen how quickly I put this together thanks a lot for watching today if you're new here don't forget to subscribe I'd love it if you joined my channel I hope this inspired you leave me a comment that always helps me out and I will see you guys in my next video