Mealtime Mondays

Well if you saw my previous post you know I busted my time budget. I did, however, prep for all 5 meals and 1 side dish (x2). The following describes the prep steps I took and how I plan to store each meal until final preparations:

Monday Night: Crunchy Oven Fried Tilapia and Hashbrown Casserole with green beans. I completed both the Tilapia and Hashbrown recipe steps up until the actual baking. I placed foil on both and will store in fridge until tonight. The two dishes call for two different baking temperatures, however, I will just meet in the middle at 400 degrees and let the hashbrowns get about a 30 minute head start on the fish.

Tuesday Night: Cherry Chicken Lettuce Wraps. I baked the chicken and placed the whole chicken breasts into a ziplock to let it cool in the fridge. I could have went ahead and chopped the chicken but I personally like chopping a cold chicken instead of a warm chicken. I find the chicken tends to "shred" instead of "chop" when I cut it up warm. I placed the shredded carrots, green onion, and almonds in a storage container, and mixed the liquid sauce together in another container (both stored in fridge). Tuesday night I will simply chop the chicken (using my handy dandy Pampered Chef food chopper) and toss the carrot mixture, chicken, and sauce mixture together.

Wednesday Night: BBQ Pork. All I did to prep for this meal was dump the pork into a freezer ziplock and pour the BBQ sauce in to marinate. I then stored in fridge. Wednesday morning I will transfer pork and sauce into crockpot and cook on low all day.

Thursday Night: Eggplant Parmesan. I prepared this meal up until the final baking step. I then stored in Freezer. I would have not stored this dish in the freezer (second to raw egg substitute) had not the recipe called for baking the eggplant chips prior to casserole assembly. I will do my best to remember to transfer this dish from freezer to fridge on Thursday morning so it will be partly thawed before baking Thursday night.

Friday and Saturday Night: Out or Left-overs

Sunday: Mexican Chicken Pizza. I fully prepared this recipe up until the final baking. I then placed foil around pizza and stored in the freezer. I have baked this pizza straight from freezer to oven before and it worked out fine so I am not worried about forgetting to transfer from freezer to fridge before baking.