Free Inquiry Post 1 – Meal Prep Introduction!

Hi everyone, welcome to my first free inquiry blog post! The topic I will be exploring throughout this semester is meal prepping. My partner and I have been pretty good about meal prepping in the last year but the issue is we get bored with what we are eating and we (especially me) are not always the best at being efficient during cooking. Sometimes you find those recipes that say “easy one pot 20 minute dinner!” and in reality you end up with a lot of dishes and it takes an hour and a half. My goal for this free inquiry project is to try out new recipes, perfect some recipes that I already have, and make my meal prepping more time efficient! I will rate the recipes I try, post photos of the process or the finished product, and include approximately how long they took me to make. I want to be able to use this blog as a sort of “recipe book” of meal prep recipes that I can look back on and make again (or not make again if it turns out bad).

The resources I will be using are just different online recipes. When I look for a recipe, I usually look at how many people have rated it and how many stars it has. If there is one with a good amount of stars, has been rated by a lot of people, and is within my budget for groceries, I will usually choose that recipe. I do quite often make my own adjustments to recipes while I am cooking so if that is the case, I will try to remember to include my adjustments into the meal prep blog as well! Overall, I wanted to do this for my free inquiry topic because I just want to get faster and more comfortable with meal prepping, and not make it feel like such a difficult chore. Furthermore, I want to share good recipes with other people that are trying to get better at meal prepping!

To kick off this blog series, I will just include the small meal prep that we made this week (the photos are very bad this week so don’t mind that). This week’s dinner was chicken Caesar wraps with bacon and home made Greek yogurt Caesar dressing. My partner and I have been trying to make some slightly healthier adjustments so we used ancient grain tortillas for the wraps and made a Caesar dressing with a Greek yogurt base. These were super tasty and so quick to make (only about 30 minutes)! I just seasoned the chicken really well and cooked it in a pan, cooked the bacon separately, made the Caesar dressing, and then put it all together. I would definitely rate these a 9/10 (they would be even better if you breaded the chicken).

One more recipe I will share this week is the snack I baked: pumpkin muffins made with oats and oat flour. I added dark chocolate to some of them but those were just for my partner, I was not a fan of the muffins with chocolate. These only took me about 20 minutes to put together plus the baking time, and they worked out very well. They are definitely a denser muffin because I only used oat flour instead of all purpose or whole wheat flour but they have a very yummy pumpkin spice flavor! I would rate these an 8/10 especially if you microwave them for about 15 seconds. *Note: if you use oat flour or any other flour instead of what a recipe calls for, make sure to look up how to convert the measurement just in case it is different.