Food Prep Friday #4

It’s been a month of food prep

Since officially starting Food Prep Friday a month ago, it has made such an incredible difference for our family. It’s so fascinating when you personally start recording something you really notice the progression and difference it makes in your life.

I actually never understood the benefits of food prep, well actually meal/lunch prep (mostly) is what I saw on social media. I used to be concerned about produce going yuck because it’s being chopped up and wouldn’t last very long, food going to waste if you didnt use it up fast enough, lunch prep wasn’t really suitable to me as I’m at home and have easily access to left overs or simple lunches like eggs or avocado on toast. But I started making my son burgers for lunch and it spiralled into this time consuming situation where I would forget to defrost the mince to make burger patties and assembling the burgers daily.

I really started to think about how I could make my life easier daily in the kitchen between preparing breakfasts, lunchboxes, lunches, baking and dinners. I sat down and started to note all the foods I generally prepare and started to map it out as a list in Asana (Asana makes it easy to keep track of the food I make as a recurring task and have my list organised). Then I thought would it actually save me time if I dedicated a day to preparing as much food as I can so ingredients are easy to grab and assemble on the daily. I started to put it into practice then started recording it to share on YouTube. Over the time that I have have been food prepping I have learnt so much, in terms of how to prepare on the day of the prep, how to best prepare for a food prep day, how to make our groceries stretch and how to make it suit our family life best.

My favourite part about doing Food Prep Friday is having prepared baked goods on hand to pull out of the freezer every morning for lunches and finding new ways to make what I do around the home more efficient.

For the amount of money we spend on groceries, I have noticed we have more of an abundance of food, with options than we previously had.

Let’s FOOD PREP FRIDAY together…

My kids don’t prefer sandwiches in their lunchboxes so I aim to make a mix of items that can be frozen and rotated like pizza items. Today it’s a mix of pizza pockets and cheese kransky dough dogs. If I have made one of the items previously for Food Prep Friday it will only briefly feature on the YouTube episode.

Today I’m making:

• Homemade lemonade + ice blocks.
• Pancake jar mix (recipe testing)
• Pizza pockets to freeze for lunchboxes
• Cheese Kransky dough dogs to freeze for lunch boxes
• Plain pasta for snacks/lunches
• Grated zucchini/courgette to freeze to add to meals and a portion frozen for -Zucchini chocolate muffins.
• Double chocolate zucchini muffins
• Chocolate brownie
• Chopped capsicum to freeze for pizzas, stir frys etc

I had planned to grate cheese + make mayo in the Thermomix to store in the fridge for the week but I ran out of time

What I made:

• 1.5 litres + 7 ice blocks using my Homemade lemonade recipe.
• (3/4 of a half-gallon jar) Pancake jar mix recipe which is enough for three batches.
• x16 Pizza pockets recipe from Thermomix Cookidoo using pizza sauce, sliced ham, Italian herbs and cheese (you could use your own favourite pizza dough recipe to make these).
• 320g Plain pasta cooked in the Thermomix.
• Grated zucchini/courgette processed in the Thermomix, one portion for the double chocolate zucchini muffins to bake today, one portion to freeze for double chocolate zucchini muffins in the future and the remaining zucchini frozen in blocks to add to meals.
• x18 Double chocolate zucchini muffins.
• Chocolate brownie recipe made in the Thermomix.
• 1 sandwich snaplock bag of chopped capsicum to freeze for pizzas, stir frys etc.
• x28 Cheese Kransky dough dogs recipe from Thermomix Cookidoo (you could use 1/2 batch of your own favourite pizza dough recipe to wrap these Cheese Kransky’s).

Next week I will be adding mayo and grated cheese to my Food Prep Friday.

Breakfast for dinner

We love to have breakfast for dinner/Brinner once a fortnight, which normally consists of Breakfast English Muffins, or Pancakes with Bacon, Banana and Maple Syrup, French toast with Bacon, Banana and Maple Syrup or Bacon + Eggs with Hollandaise. I personally prefer a savoury Breakfast for dinner but my family loves a sweet breakfast for dinner haha. So having a jar of pancake mix will make the dinner so much faster to prepare!

Making a pancake jar would make a really great gift idea and get the kids involved with making pancakes!

Disclaimer

Just to note, I mention putting dough in the hot water cylinder (haha 🤦🏻‍♀️) I actually mean the hot water cupboard where our hot water cylinder is).

Some of the video content (brownie, zucchini, cooked pasta etc) is missing due to running out of battery life and storage (I often start offloading the content while making the food so I can continue filming).

Tips

I keep one of my thermomix bowls for savoury food and the other bowl for sweet. Depending on the food you are preparing you can easily just rinse out the bowls to reuse instead of doing a full-on bowl clean.

I prefer to listen to Audiobooks while preparing food using headphones, it keeps me entertained and more engaged with preparing food for longer than I would usually lose interest. Today I was listening to Forgiving Paris by Karen Kingsbury on Libby.

Make sure you keep notes (where it’s best accessible to you) of what you are planning to make/have previously made this will make it easier to track for future food prep days. I find Asana so helpful for this, I will be sharing the template I use with a meal planner very soon!

That’s a wrap

I hope you enjoyed meeting Dusty, my cleaning assistant haha. I hope you found this episode helpful, as I add the recipes I test and create for Food Prep Friday to the blog I will link them in these Food Prep Friday blog posts. I will see you next Friday for Episode 5 over on YouTube.