Balancing your family’s nutrition against the time you have to prepare meals is enjoyable and easy and in no way stressful. Making sure dinner is delicious while also healthy or ensuring your kids’ school lunch is both fueling and fulfilling is fun and is exactly the way you want to spend your time, right? What could be better than spending hours each week researching recipes, prepping, cooking, cleaning, and then doing it all over again day after day? Chicken 101: 3 Meal Hacks To Save You Some Time
OK, full disclosure? That was mostly sarcasm. But you caught on to that, ey? In fact, preparing healthy food that your family enjoys is not easy, and chiefly because you gotta do it three times a day, seven days a week! We could share a bunch of “quick ‘n easy” recipes with you and claim to be doing wonders for you and the family, but a quick Google search can do that also.
Instead, today we’re going to share three “meal hacks” that actually will make family prepping dinners and student lunches quicker and easier. It’s our way of helping out a bit with the back to school transition.
One thing to note, though: chicken. For any of this stuff to work, you’re going to need chicken. Fortunately, we know where you can get some!
1 - The Same Chicken Preparation Works for Chicken Salad and Chicken Sandwiches
How can you get away with one cooking session when you have two meals to prepare? Easy: hide the same meal between two slices of bread the next day! There are so many wonderful chicken salad recipes available we’re not going to bother picking one to share; what we’re here to say is to be tactical. While you’re chopping greens for the salad, leave a few large leaves aside. Slice a few tomatoes before dicing the rest. And so forth: the point is, you can prepare all the ingredients you need to make delicious chicken sandwiches (or chicken salad sandwiches, of course) while prepping chicken salad! Just leave the foods separate from one another, and in the morning your lunch prep will take about… oh… one minute.
2 - Bake the Chicken… Then Decide What Meal You’ll Serve Thanks to Sauces!
Cooked chicken can safely keep for 3 days in the fridge, so why not cook three meals worth of chicken at once? Chicken baked without any added flavoring will retain its natural taste and will be ready to quickly absorb flavors added later. So whether the kids decide they want barbecue or Italian, Chinese or Tex-Mex, all you’ll have to do is grab the sauce, soy, or salsa to dress up the entree you’ve already cooked.
3 - Make Huge Batches of Chicken Nuggets
Once you have lots of chicken nuggets, you have near endless possibilities! You also have one of the most easily portable protein sources around. Nuggets are of course great for popping in your youngster’s lunch box, but they can also be a dinner entree. And that’s true even if they’re disguised: chopped chicken nuggets are great in stir fried dishes, salads, soups, and even on pizza or mixed in with pasta. Investing the time to make one huge batch of nuggets can save you time down the road. Frozen cooked chicken can keep for months, and small nuggets are easier to thaw and then reheat than full sized chicken breasts. It’s easier to do a bit of chopping now and then than it is to prepare whole new batches from scratch, so make lots of nuggets today, and use ’em when you need ’em for weeks to come.
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