Meal prepping for lazies…..

Hi, my name is Michelle and I am lazy. While most people that know me in real life probably wouldn’t agree with this, I would have to say that I probably have them fooled. I’m a lazy perfectionist so I do a good bit of rushing around to make things look like I spent lots of time on them, in actuality I probably took a nap or spent an hour on Instagram and 10 minutes cleaning my house before people come over.
But, I’m a mom and there are certain things that I am responsible for. I have an amazing husband who takes more than a fair share of the chores including all laundry and ironing (Hello, I’m spoiled, I know!) So preparing lunches and dinner is something that I have taken on as my sole responsibility. And the people in my house want to eat everyday, weirdos, I know! And this is pretty much how I feel about that:

Like, seriously?!
Now that summer is over and everyone has a strict bed time I knew I had to get my act together and figure out how I could feed my family the laziest but yet healthiest way possible, and freezer prepping has proven to be successful for me in the past so, I got some motivation and put together a plan. Last year sometime I purchased this cookbook, from one of my favorite bloggers, Stephanie at Mama and Baby Love. The cookbook is filled with freezer to crock-pot meals, and every recipe is doubled. So basically it’s just chopping vegetables, adding seasonings and the raw meat and placing it in the freezer until cooking day. I have done these before and I just knew I had to get back to it. It’s the easiest way to get a hot meal on the table on nights when both kids need help with homework, there’s a Boy Scout meeting for C or AWANA for A. And every recipe is not only healthy but limited on grains, free of GMOs, and clean eating. I have learned so much about clean eating from Stephanie so I know every recipe is the healthiest, tastiest way to feed my crew.
So, enough chatting and lets get into the details about how I made this work for me.
Earlier in the week I wrote down all the recipes that I knew I wanted to do and checked my pantry for what I had on hand. Afterwards I made a shopping list so that I would be well prepared. On Friday I dragged my tired behind in the rain to Costco and picked up all the meat and bulk produce and on Saturday morning I headed out to get the produce while L got the kids out of the house to a baseball game with our church.

My shopping cart of produce

 Made a stop on the way home and used my free Gold drink to get a Trenta Iced Coffee to fuel this project.               

When I got home I didn’t even unpack the bags of groceries, I just went straight to the first recipe and got to work.

*Shortcut tip: First off I started chopping veggies. For me, because I knew I wanted to get a lot done and well, because I’m lazy, I didn’t care if the recipe called for sliced veggies, everything got diced with my handy Progressive International Onion Chopper My mom got this for me a few years ago for Christmas and I highly recommend it for any busy cook. It makes dicing any vegetable so much easier.

*Shortcut and Frugal tip: One of the things that I did as I chopped veggies was to save the scraps; the peels of carrots, the skin of onions, the leftover unusable parts of peppers, etc and threw them all in a big bowl. After all the veggies were chopped I added some seasonings and fresh herbs and tossed it all in my biggest stock pot. I filled it to the top with filtered water and set it to boil. This is FREE vegetable stock, FREE. The parts and pieces that I would typically throw away have just become some of the best tasting broth you will ever use. I use it to make brown rice and quinoa tasty and in any recipe that calls for chicken broth. I let it boil for about 6-8 hours and when it’s done I strain it and pour in 4 cup servings in freezer bags and lay them flat for easier storage.

I also leave a bag in my freezer at all times that I use to toss chicken bones and unused veggies before they go bad for the purpose of making stock. Here’s what it looks like:

Back to your regularly scheduled blog post:

Within 10 minutes I was 1/3 of the way done with my first two meals. Once I added the spices to the bag I set them aside.

 *Shortcut tip: I prefer to prep all of the bags with veggies and seasonings and when they are all done I wash and cut up the meat. That way I have one area of the kitchen cleaned up and done before I move on to the next. And the bags can sit out since there is no meat in them yet.

Before I started my next recipe I put about 6 pounds of chicken to boil using this recipe: Shredded Chicken Tacos I added one onion quartered, some chopped cilantro and about a cup of fresh salsa to the water to change the flavor a little. Once that was all done I drained it and jarred the broth that it made for future use and shredded all of the chicken.

 

I set some of the chicken aside for lunch that day and placed the rest in a freezer bag for our next taco night.

I spent about 3 hours chopping vegetables, measuring seasonings, washing and chopping meat (and chatting with my aunt who came by to see how I do things and help chop) and cleaning up the kitchen. When it was all said and done, around 2 in the afternoon I had 13 meals done in 3 HOURS!!

(This is the freezer in my kitchen, we have a large stand up freezer in our pantry for all of our extras that is not nearly as organized and pretty as this)

The only thing I had left to do was to strain the vegetable broth. Since all of the recipes are doubled, I kept one bag of the Zucchini, Black Bean and Steak fajitas out for dinner that evening (this is a skillet meal, no crock pot required and it was yummy!)

And after dinner I threw all caution to the wind and ended my night like this:

If you have any questions about this method of meal prepping, please don’t hesitate to send me a Facebook message and I would love to help you out!

Peace and Blessings,