meal prep

Meal Prep Monday (21/07/2025)

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Not much happened this week by way of meal prep or snack prep or however you want to classify this. I have been sick. The girls have been a little bit on the edge but not too drastic, really. I have felt like I did when I had Covid nearly exactly three years ago, just not as bad, which is not surprising as I’m not currently 35 weeks pregnant. So. Not much happened.

I did manage to make chocolate chip cookies as a preventative measure. For girls, not me. I also made some Everything Balls as a preventative measure. For me, and apparently everyone. I love that this happens. I was halfway through rolling them into balls when S came into the kitchen for something like a third mandarin and just snaffled a ball. Glenn ate one of the mini cups last night and before I had finished covering the tops in chocolate tonight, he ate another. These are guaranteed to be eaten if I pack them in C’s lunchbox, so long as the she has eaten her sandwich (I have passed down certain traits for sure). 

Sandwiches and hard boiled eggs were also made today, but the eggs will have to find another way to be cooked as the best hotplate for them is suddenly cactus and only knows about off and full. Eye roll. 

I am having a good think, but I really think that is it for this weekend. In my defence, apart from the stupid sickness thing, one of my plans had been to use up our unexpected mandarin glut. I was still tossing up between mandarin marmalade and mandarin bread when E decided she was going to eat mandarins for afternoon tea one day and went through four of them and S is a great mimic so she had a few as well and suddenly we have not enough for anything much. Good.

Meal Prep Monday (30/06/2025)

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Last weekend, I felt like a kitchen superstar. I baked SO much. In fact, the whole weekend was so exhausting I didn’t manage to post about it so I have photos just sitting in my phone, reminding me of the achievements if I scroll through looking for something. Sleeping girls, girls outside, random short videos of the tablecloth, work info, girls in pinafores for daycare photo day, row after row of a child’s forehead – pretty sure it’s E – closeup pics of the corner of the sofa, food, food, girls outside, food.

This weekend, I was not a superstar. At all. In any sense. For anything. If you set the bar low – really low – then yay! I did some things. I had all 3 girls dressed and respectable to go to a birthday party on Saturday morning at a not-very-close park. They were well-behaved. There was a present, wrapped in paper coloured in by my girls. We got there and back safely. Pause here while I think. Um. Nope. That was pretty much my achievement. 

But wait. I made pizza on Friday night, with dough made by me. (C asked for this a few weeks ago and it is how I used to always do it and now it is her new favourite way of pizza). This pizza – one (1) pizza – has fed us Friday night, and was added to Saturday dinner, and was lunch today for C because we had no bread and neither of us wanted to go to the shops on the holidays, and there’s still a bit more.

But wait. I made a lemony chicken and vegetable tray bake for dinner for Saturday night, which all the girls ate, and leftovers were my lunch today as well as incorporated into dinner tonight and I think there’s still a bit left for a half-lunch tomorrow. 

But wait. I made pancakes for Sunday breakfast, and because when they were mostly cooked, E came in and scrunched her face and told me she did NOT want pancakes, she wants an eggy – no, TWO eggies – she scored eggs for breakfast and not all the pancakes were eaten so C and I had morning tea pancakes today. They were my favourite recipe (using the Greek yoghurt waffle recipe here), and cooked in the love heart fry pan. A bit of a whim purchase, that pan, but my goodness me it saves mealtimes. S helped me make these, and C had a go at turning them which is rather tricky, I must say, but she did wonderfully. And because there are four hearts and four of us (Glenn had an early, early start), I could cater to all requests prior to the pancake-refusal-in-favour-of-eggs. Plain. Chocolate chip. Blueberry. Blueberry AND chocolate chip. And E ate some after she had demolished her eggs, too, actually. 

To be fair, this week and next are school holidays. We have Anzac biscuits in the jar from last weekend. Still some Everything Balls (I still don’t know what to call them), which are also stopping me delving into chocolate stores in the evening. I mean, not an actual store full of chocolate, like a chocolate shop, or a cellar of chocolate, but … mmm. Wait. Chocolate supply. That’s a better word. We still have carrot oatmeal slice. We still have carrot sultana muffins in the freezer. We still have cottage cheese brownies in the freezer. Our freezer could do with being slightly less full. Ooh, and pizza muffins in there too. So you see, for all my not at all a kitchen superstar thoughts, it was enough. I have to remember that. Enough. 

Meal Prep Monday (16/06/2025)

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Friday and Saturday were fairly light on in the food preparation department. Cornflake cookies were made, which are apparently for me now. C, it turns out, doesn’t like the flavour of cornflakes, and E bit into a crunchy bit and hurt her mouth so apparently is never eating cornflakes or cookies ever again. Sigh. S has eaten some for me, but unless she spies the cookie jar, it will be Milo cereal for her. (Seriously. How do toddlers and preschoolers do this? She seems to eat nothing but Milo cereal and occasionally yoghurt. E had about 2 months when she was nearly 2 when I swear she just ate peanut butter and blackberries. That was an expensive time). To make up for the apparent cookie fail, on Sunday I made nut butter cookies and added chocolate chips to the tops and, guess what, nobody wants to eat them either. Make them without the chocolate chips and half the batch is scoffed as soon as fingers have braved the hot-from-the-oven cookie trays. It looks like I will be living on cookies this week.

Friday I also made a very healthy chocolate mousse then made it less healthy to make it more dessert-y and edible for girls. Thankfully, they had filled up on pizza dinner so I have chocolate hits ready to go in the fridge. Score.

Saturday was yet another flop which I will chalk up as future snacks. E was really wanting doughnuts so I finally made the (ultra healthy) jammy blueberry doughnuts from Jamie’s superfoods book for breakfast. It was a frustrating experience because I had neglected to soak our ordinary, not-expensive-Medjool, dates overnight, and also because we have a mere chopper and not a glorious food processor. I am debating whether I cave and buy one now in the sales or if I wait until the chopper dies then replace it. Hm. Decisions. It is definitely becoming more necessary. Anyway, there were leftovers. I have snacks.

Sunday was spent making the fail nut butter cookies, as well as doing hard boiled eggs, sandwiches, carrot oat slice, and what I think of as “Everything Balls”, or “Use it up slice”. This started off as the Eat This My Friend muesli bars and then I went crazy a few weeks ago and added a bunch of things that were needing to be used. You know. The 1/4 cup of almond meal. Tablespoon of walnuts. Slightly less than 1/3 cup chia seeds. The dregs of 4 different nut butter jars. Some sneaky powders of super greens or berry immunity. I mean, I started with the basic recipe and just embellished a bit. Squashed some into the mini muffin holes. Rolled some into balls. I thought for sure this would be a mummy-only treat, but before I knew it, S had demolished 4 balls. I kept meaning to cover them in chocolate but after not very long there didn’t seem to be much point. This weekend, though, I made sure to get the chocolate hit happening, so the minis are covered in a blob of chocolate and the balls are mostly half-covered, with a few glorious pieces entirely covered.

Delay in posting due to the futility of taking photos after 10pm. I’m glad I did this post, though, as I had totally forgotten about the doughnut snack option. I see there is a slight delay in work starting soooo first snack for the day is going to be a purple doughnut. 

Meal Prep Monday (09/06/2025)

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Three days. Three kids. Husband working. How much can I do.

The whole having kids and having a husband who works retail (so, weekends) has really hampered me getting into a lot of meal prep. All these people who post about their one hour on a Sunday when the dad takes to the kids to the park and the mum gets to meal prep and do the whole look at how much I made in an hour with no kids around and no distractions. Yeah. Good for you. Another factor is that Glenn loves to cook, so me not meal prepping much is fine because then what is he going to cook? Cooking is part of his destress and who am I to interfere with that.

This weekend I felt like I achieved a great deal. But I also felt that I was on my feet the entire time, and the one tiny bit of something for me that I wanted to do when the girls were playing – to sew two tiny bits on my skirt to secure the elastic at the waist – was ruined. I mean, I had to remove the needle and the foot and then do a deep extraction on the material, all because of girls fighting. The fighting that needs a grownup to intervene so we don’t have the kind of chaos and hospital trip that has the authorities involved and asking, where was the responsible adult in this. Ahem.

That said, much of what I did on Sunday – where we didn’t go to church because S was getting to the level of Snot Monster again and clearly needed a rest day – was accompanied by S sitting quietly on the kitchen floor next to me, pulling out the Christmas cupcake cups, lining them up, returning them to the tube, repeating. Or playing with the magnets on the fridge. It was very calming, if a little tripping hazard.

In my chocolate chip cookie post, I said to start it as early as possible. I started my mix last weekend and couldn’t progress with them until Friday. That is, I think, the longest between start and finish for me so far. We also had a three spotty bananas in the fruit bowl, and Glenn and I both held out on buying more bananas while there were spotty bananas. Three bananas is perfect for my new favourite snack, “4 ingredient” peanut butter banana cups. Which, despite the presence of a topping of chocolate chips, are apparently unappealing to my girls so they are all mine. Score. Also on Friday I made a batch of veggie pizza muffins, mostly for me for lunches. Italian herb seasoning has resulted in a very faint suggestion of spiciness so that’s a guaranteed return with grumpy face if I try to pack it in C’s lunchbox. 

Saturday morning I had a dinner panic. I wasn’t taking girls to the shops. We were meeting Glenn at his work in the afternoon and planning a little trip to South Bank.  The South Bank bit didn’t eventuate because everyone was exhausted but still, I knew we would be out and then home needing dinner and I had no idea what to feed girls. I found a recipe for chickpea nuggets. Perfect. Of course, when they were done and cooled and I was looking for a spot for them in the fridge, I found what would be a much better dinner option – chicken drumsticks and rice leftover from a recent dinner hit. Nuggets are destined for the freezer and an emergency meal. 

A new loaf of bread meant a new batch of sandwiches for the freezer, cut into love heart shapes because I love her and she maybe needs to have more reminders of that. And at 2am I remembered that I hadn’t prepped overnight oats so yes, I did that at 2am while everybody else slept, thank goodness. There was so much I didn’t get to do, but seeing all of this really does boost my sense of achievement. 

Top left: chocolate chip cookies. Top right: veggie pizza muffins (large and small). Bottom left: chickpea nuggets. Bottom right: love heart peanut butter sandwiches.

Meal Prep Monday (02/06/2025)

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I am inspired. One of my Facebook friends shares, it seems, everything that she makes for lunches and treats and dinners, and every single photo is terrible and unappetising. A page I follow, on the other hand, shares what she eats and what she makes for healthy everything, and everything looks fantastic and healthy and an Anna Thing To Eat. In my “I can do that, too” mentality, and with the amount of food prep that actually happens Friday-Sunday (usually), I now plan to do a roundup of that on Mondays for you. You’re welcome. Actually it’s also part of me reminding myself of achievements. If I feel like I’ve just been opening yoghurt pouches and doing the washing and chopping up oranges and doing the washing and separating squabbling children and doing the washing and sorting the washing and doing more washing, noting the other things really helps. Yes, I did all those other things too, but now I also have a record of the snacks and other things prepared. Lots of them include chocolate chips.

Friday normally gets me baking something but we had stuff to do so, no. Saturday morning, though, I baked sweet potato and apple oatmeal, sweet potato and banana chocolate chip bread, and “4 ingredient peanut butter banana bars”. That’s in quotes because, as is so often the case with recipes with a small number of ingredients, whoever did the recipe didn’t actually count. Out of bananas, peanut butter, vanilla, oats, salt, baking powder and chocolate chips, some of those are clearly more special than others. I am not, however, game to omit any. And also, I couldn’t find the silicone loaf pan I wanted so as the recipe makes 6-8 bars, I used a 6-hole silicone muffin pan and I will be making these again. New favourite, despite the lack of accountability (ha pun).

You may have noticed a theme with both bananas and sweet potato. We suddenly had a glut of 12 very ripe (black) bananas. Although I love Our Go-To Banana Bread, I had made it recently as bread and muffins and mini muffins and there was only so much I could take. With recent baking and Saturday’s baking, I cleared the build-up just in time for a fresh bunch to start going spotty. Good times. The sweet potato was from our farm box. Not the most recent one. The one a fortnight before that. I didn’t weigh it, but it was about the size of a toddler’s torso. Glenn used some in a couple of meals. I reserved some for baked oatmeal and then had enough to try this bread as well. The bread is fantastic and will be made again.

Less exciting meal prep but very necessary meal prep happens on Sunday evening. If we have eggs, I hard boil four of them. C and I both enjoy them during the day. Everyone else does, too, but E and S are not so adept at peeling or biting without the egg bouncing away. I also do a batch of overnight oats which will do me for three breakfasts. I did not do either of those things for a few weekends in a row and I was really feeling it. Mornings were a bit more rushed. Snacks were a little less varied and less protein-rich. I’m back on track now, though, and much relieved.

Top left: Sweet potato and apple baked oatmeal https://thenaturalnurturer.com/baked-apple-sweet-potato-oatmeal/

Top right: Sweet potato and banana bread https://thenaturalnurturer.com/sweet-potato-banana-bread/

Bottom left: “4 ingredient peanut butter banana bars” https://sammibrondo.com/peanut-butter-banana-bars/

Bottom right: hard boiled eggs. I draw on them so we know they’re boiled and not not-boiled. I am not good at drawing flowers.