It's chicken week! #chickenweek is my favorite meal planning week. First let me tell you a little more about our process, then I'll show you what we had for dinner!
Ready, set, go!
Matt and I decided instead of prepping whole meals, we'd just prep the meat for the week, then build meals around it. We made a board on Pinterest (love it!) with sections (only made me love it more!) for the item we prep.
You can view our Chicken section. After realizing we could make one big pot of chili last a week, we decided to give chicken a go. First we picked out 7 days worth of recipes that included chicken in some way. This was EXTREMELY helpful with focusing our grocery shopping. All we had to do was open our board on Pinterest and get the items we needed for the week. I really don't like eating food out of a box or a can if I can avoid it. I find them way too salty. If we are focused on what we're buying for a week, we can go fresh all the way. We shop mostly at Aldi, Walmart, and Checkers. We are trying to keep costs down.
We buy about $15 worth of chicken at Aldi. It's 3 packages of thighs usually. On prep night (which just falls whenever we've run out of the previous week's prepped meat) we put as many thighs as we can into our Instapot. It usually is around 8-10. Then we add some water. (This is apparently a super important step we learned the hard way!!!) We pressure cook them for 10 minutes, and ta-da! Chicken for chicken week! (Also, Matt and I have been experimenting with using the skin and fat to make cracklings. We don't eat pork because we're Jew-ish... and we have almost got a shareable and delicious process!!! Hang tight! We aren't health nuts, lol... but we are trying not to die too early)
Last night we prepped our meat and had chicken fajitas, and we'd eaten them all when I was like, "Hey maybe I should blog this..."
So here we are on day two. Something you've got to know about me... I love looking at pictures in cookbooks and online, but I hate following recipes. (Don't tell me how much or which spices to add, you don't know my life!) So tonight's Chicken Marinara Bake was very loosely based on the Chicken Parmesan Casserole on our board. Who knows? There's is probably better, but ours was good too!
Here's what I did
- ripped up 4 rolls we found in the clearanced bread section at walmart into a square baking dish and popped them in the oven at 350 to toast a little
- pulled the meat off 1.5 chicken thighs
- pulled out the baking dish, layered chicken, a jar of marinara sauce, and then a couple handfuls of cheese on top
- popped it all back in the oven until the cheese was nice and melty
*** since the chicken is pre-cooked the "is it done yet?" stress is totally gone
Also we try to eat a veggie with every meal, mostly so we know we can survive the zombie apocalypse when it comes. The more veggies we eat now, the more we'll recognize when we've got to scavenge. At least that's how we sell it to the boys. It's a surprisingly affective way to coerce them. Tonight's veggie was eggplant. It's one of my all time favorites! I just sauteed it in a pan with some olive oil and Italian seasoning. Easy peasy!
We've got an 8 year old and a six year old, so we are trying to *be healthier *eat cheaper *survive the zombie apocalypse *and appease the under lords without having to eat hot dogs all the damn time.
This meal was DEVOURED!!! (See that empty dish below???) The six year old's commentary was, "It's like our spaghetti, but with no noodles." Fair assessment! They gave it two thumbs up! Us too! (They didn't ask for seconds on eggplant, but they ate what I gave them without much grumbling... so win! Take that, zombies!)
Maybe it's a good time to add why easy peasy meal plans are important to us. These two goobs, mostly! It's really important to us to sit down and have family time every day. Connecting over food is one of the best ways to connect. Matt and I connect over making the food, and all of us connect over eating the food. Yes, some nights we eat Taco Bell at the laundry mat, because life! But most nights, we want to spend time together at our little table talking, laughing, and building a strong familial bond. Easy peasy meal plans leave more room for love!
(Also, we hard boiled like 15 eggs. We've gotten really into pickling things lately too. If you've never had pickled eggs {and you like pickles and eggs}, you should try them! We bought a giant jar of pickles a while back, ate them all, and Matt made me save the juice
*** And if you noticed the chicken mixed with cheese plus Jew-ish aside, we agree with the rabbis of the Middle Ages that poultry should be parve. At home we treat it as parve, but we wouldn't serve our Jewish friends poultry with dairy, unless they weren't strictly kosher. If you have no clue what any of that means, it's cool. It's a Jew-ish thing!
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