Meal Prep Week 2: Go Big or Go Home

Meal Prep Week 2 consisted of the following dishes:

• Pizza Mac & Cheese, 
• Baked Barbecue Pork and Chicken, 
• Broccoli and French Beans Sauteed in Garlic and Butter, 
• Enoki Mushroom Bacon Wraps, and 
• Steamed Rice

Why didn't I straighten the tupperware before I took the photo??
Now I'll have to live with this for the rest of my life.

Feeling confident due to a pretty successful attempt at Meal Prepping the week before, I decided to try my luck and cook more dishes the second time around. Hence, the mishmash of dishes you see above which all don't really go that well together. Oops.

I also gave myself a new goal of making twenty- yes, twenty individual meals, enough to sustain my husband and I for both lunch and dinner five times during the work week.

It was harder than I thought.

First of all, I never even considered whether the volume of raw food I painstakingly prepared all morning would even fit in the pots and pans I'd use to cook them. That left me with no choice but to cook each dish in batches to avoid the dreaded undercook, doubling my cooking time overall.

Second, I know I said in my very first entry that I should stick to cooking familiar things, but I'm stubborn and I couldn't resist trying something new. What was supposed to be a simple sausage mac and cheese recipe turned into a pizza mac and cheese monstrosity (don't worry, it was a yummy monstrosity- the word is more in reference to the sheer amount I ended up preparing) because I couldn't resist changing it up a bit. It led to a terrible mess in the kitchen that I spent a lot of time cleaning up. Good thing the end result was worth it. Basically, be prepared to make a giant mess if you're preparing a dish you know nothing about or are making up as you go along.

Lastly, I realized I needed more space! Meal prepping requires a lot of counter space for ingredients and tupperware. I am only one woman, I can't cook all my ingredients at the same time so I gotta practice my space management skills. "Time to put the bacon wraps in the oven? Great! Now I have free space to lay out 5 tupperware for the vegetables that I'm almost done cooking and need to portion out!" Knowing how to multitask effectively in the kitchen is a big requirement if you are meal prepping multiple dishes, especially if you're cooking on a tight schedule.

Goodbye, counter space.

Now since most of the dishes I made this week were pretty plain, I thought I'd share my modified recipe for the mac and cheese monstrosity that I aptly named Pizza Mac and Cheese because it tasted like pizza... but was mac and cheese. Yes, I know my recipe naming skills are off the charts: 

Pizza Mac and Cheese 

Ingredients:

• Salad Macaroni (you can use regular macaroni, I just had 3 packs on hand that came free with the spaghetti I purchased the other day) - 600g
• Sausages (I had two hungarian and two schublig sausages in my fridge so I just used these) - 4 pieces, sliced or chopped (depends how big you want your sausage pieces to be)
• Red and Green Bell Peppers - 1 large piece each, chopped
• White Onion (please don't use red) - 1 large, chopped
• Frozen Chopped Spinach - About 1/4 of the usual sized bag
• Cheddar-Jack Cheese - 1 block, grated (please don't just cut it up into tiny slices, it needs to be grated in order to melt properly with the pasta)
• Grated Parmesan Cheese - 2/3 of a regular container, basically a crap ton (yes, I know grated parmesan is basically cardboard but I was tired from grating the cheddar-jack so this would do for now)
• Milk - Approximately 4 cups (I didn't have fresh milk so I used -gasp- powdered milk. I'm terrible, I know. You can use whatever you want though)
• Olive Oil - Around 1 tablespoon, enough to sautee the onions and sausages
• Salt and Ground Pepper - Amount is up to you

Instructions:

1. Boil a pot of water with a dash of salt and olive oil. Once boiling, add the salad macaroni. Stir occasionally. After 6-7 minutes, empty the pot of pasta and water in a colander on the sink. Pour ice water (or tap water if you have clean tap water) over the pasta to shock it and stop it from cooking further. Set aside. 
2. Using the same pot where you cooked the pasta (or a different one if you have lots of pots and weirdly want to wash more dishes afterwards), add oil and sauté the white onions until soft. Then add the sausages, bell peppers, and spinach and sauté again until cooked. 
3. Add the 4 cups of milk to the pot, then add the macaroni slowly, until you are able to mix it evenly with all the ingredients. You can add some pepper here for flavor. 
4. While mixing the pasta, slowly add the cheddar-jack and parmesan cheese until all noodles are coated evenly. 
5. Once the pasta has a thicker consistency due to the cheese and milk, you're done! Give it a taste and add some more cheese or salt if it's not tasty enough for you yet. Otherwise, you're all good.

That's all for now! I hope this week's blog was helpful and entertaining for you guys. I sure as heck enjoyed writing it.

Did any of you try the recipe I posted last week? What about this one?

Let me know in the comments and I'll see you in my next update!