Month: July 2018

I was able to successfully meal prep my entire lunch week on Sunday, which doesn’t always happen. More often I piece them together from day to day with leftovers or toss salads together at the last minute. I notice a definite difference in my week when I can accomplish my prep over the weekend. I get to bed earlier, I get to work earlier, and my mornings are less stressful. It can be tricky because you need to know what will and will not stay fresh until Friday, and even trickier if you want a variety throughout the week. There’s a lot of meal prep plans out there that require eating the same thing  for lunch Mon-Fri, and that’s really not my style.

I saved even more time by prepping breakfast as well, which just consisted of a dozen hard boiled eggs. Very simple. Very cheap. While I love scrambled eggs loaded with onions, peppers, and ham, I don’t always have time to make them in the morning and they don’t stay terribly long in the refrigerator. I like hard boiled eggs just fine with a little salt and pepper. I took the entire carton with me and peeled them and sliced them each morning. I find that eggs peel a little easier if you put a tablespoon or two of white vinegar in the water when you boil them.

But let’s take a look back at the lunch menu.

This mix consisted of cucumber, chickpeas, tomato, red onion, peppers, basil, and 2% shredded cheddar cheese with a little bit of Wishbone Olive Oil Garden Herb Vinaigrette salad dressing. The Triscuits are Avocado, Cilantro, and Lime flavor and I spread them with Friendly Farms spreadable cheese from Aldi. It was good, but lacking enough protein to keep me full through the afternoon. I nearly had to staple my fingers to the desk to avoid reaching into my wallet for money for the snack machine.

Here we have the same cracker and cheese choice, but with a lot more filling protein. I made BBQ chicken kabobs for an earlier dinner and used the leftover in lunch. I made cauliflower rice cooked in chicken broth for the base. You can do this by taking frozen cauliflower rice and steaming it in a frying pan with chicken broth or by making the steam-in-the-bag kind and mixing in powdered bouillon afterwards. The cauli rice was used for the base and I added the BBQ chicken, corn, red onion, cheddar cheese, and tomato on top. It was even great  cold and took a long time to finish eating.

The chicken lunchmeat side on this one, in retrospect, was a poor idea. It tasted terrible alone and wound up in the trash. The rest was great! More cauliflower rice with peppers, tomato, corn, chickpeas, and red onion. I also put in a little leftover pesto pasta.

Tacos! Yes! In one of my earlier blogs I mentioned how when I make chicken breasts I cut them down to equal size and often use the leftovers to cook and shred for taco chicken meat. That’s exactly where this came from, and I added two small tortillas to build tacos with another compartment carrying the tomatoes and lettuce. I put some cilantro in with 2% shredded cheddar cheese. I only packed 2 tortillas but did have enough leftover ingredients that I could have made 3 small tacos. The size I used were “street taco” size, which seems a little smaller than your traditional soft taco shell. I added taco sauce from the stash of taco sauce packets I keep in my drawer. Every time I go to Taco Bell I “accidentally” get too many. Considering how many times I’ve gone through the drive thru for two tacos and received twenty packs of sauce, I don’t think it’s a big deal.

This taco bowl was amazing. I used the shredded taco chicken and added corn, tomato, peppers, and refried beans on the side. I didn’t even notice that I forgot cheese — and I’m a cheese addict. I saved a little mix of tomatoes, peppers, and chickpeas on the bigger side for a snack in the afternoon.

Speaking of snacks, I did make a big bowl of fruit to dig into in the afternoon. I try to keep my afternoon snacks to fruit salad, bananas, and yogurt or if I’m not in the mood for something sweet I’ll stock hummus and carrots in the fridge. That’s not to say I don’t make the occasional trip to the snack machine, but I try to keep myself well stocked with alternatives to avoid it.

It did take some time to prep everything but it was broken out over chunks in the day, so I couldn’t even give a fair estimation of time. I was glad that I had a good variety. One cool tip I did learn some years ago is that if you want to just get small amounts of things, try checking out the salad bar at the grocery store. It’s an easy stop to get a mix of things to use for sides in lunchboxes!

Back in the 90s, Ragu released a jarred sauce called “Chicken Tonight” with a catchy commercial jingle. It came in eight different flavors and the sauce was simmered over browned chicken, heralding it as a quick new innovation to boring old chicken. Along the same lines, Prego has now released a line of sauces. called “Prego Cooking Sauce.” It currently comes in five different flavors — Creamy Lemon Parmesan, Garlic & Italian Herb, Tomato & Fresh Ricotta, Creamy Marsala, and Carbonara.

The sauces are typically located either with the other jarred pasta sauces or near the pasta kits. I’ve gotten two different flavors thus far to try, the Creamy Lemon PArmesan and the Garlic & Italian Herb. Both are white sauces and come with the same basic instructions, brown chicken and simmer. Serve with pasta, rice, veggies, etc.

Granted, any of these sauces could simply be utilized for a pasta sauce, but that sort of defeats the purpose.

I’m a big cast iron fan for a lot of my cooking. I don’t use any sort of super special secret type of cast iron pan, just the Emeril one handed down from my mother. Judging by her love affair with QVC, I’m guessing that’s where it came from. Instructions for browning chicken always seem to call for one tablespoon of olive oil, but I have a tendency to use a pretty liberal tablespoon. I make sure the oil is nice and hot before I add my chicken, otherwise it tends to stick to the pan a bit.

On of my tips with chicken is I buy the big bulk packages and trim the breast down with a kitchen scissors so they’re a less thick and more reasonable cooking size. I like to throw the scraps in my small rice cooker which cooks it up really fast. Then the chicken can be shredded and used for salad or for shredded taco meat for later meals.

I have no idea how to tell if chicken is done other than to poke it with a kitchen thermometer. You can get one for a reasonable price on Amazon. Once the chicken is just about to 165, I turn down the temperature and add most of my sauce. I reserve about 1/4 of the jar to toss with some pasta and olive oil. Rice or veggies would work well, too.

The finished product is a nice browned chicken breast with a delicious sauce. The Garlic and Italian Herb was fairly mild, the garlic wasn’t overpowering, and it wasn’t too heavy like an alfredo sauce. I’ve also tried the the Creamy Lemon Parmesan, which wasn’t bad, but I was hoping for more of a lemon note that’d you’d get when fresh lemon zest is present in a dish. Parmesan was more the power player in that duo.

The cost is about $3 a jar retail but with recent promotions and coupons I’ve gotten a couple jars for $1 each and at least one jar for free. I’m not savvy with making my own sauces, so for me they’re a great lazy substitute. Easily a meal to make two or three times a month.

Suggestion for the next Prego Cooking Sauce — something with a Tex-Mex flare!