Okay, so bare with me. This is my first cooking/ food related post and although I enjoy cooking and am honestly pretty good at it… I don’t usually follow recipes. So creating this post with a recipe for others to follow is not the easiest thing for me to do. I rely heavily on tasting my food and instinct- so hopefully this will end up making sense! Sounds promising… ha!
I plan every meal for my lunch and every dinner for my boyfriend and myself before each week starts. My goal is to have a variety of meals that are easy, healthy-ish (most of the time), and cost effective. This meal is one I ALWAYS come back to. It’s super easy and relatively healthy. I hate reading blogs that give you 10 pages before their recipe- so I promise not to do that 🙂
This recipe will typically yield enough for 3 lunches for myself. All the ingredients together- excluding olive oil & seasonings, because these are things I always have on hand- cost $12.10. I don’t know about you, but on the rare occasion I eat out during the work week, I can easily spend $12 on one meal. With this recipe, you’ll be making 3 meals for about $4. Because I know it will be asked, this meal is about 320 calories.
Ingredients:
1 Large Sweet Potato
1 Large Zucchini
1 Package of Ground Chicken
Your Favorite Buffalo Sauce
Olive Oil
Salt
Pepper
Garlic Powder
- The first step in any recipe I will share with you will always be to get your “mise en place” in order… or for those that don’t live in the food and beverage field or binge The Food Network- get all of your ingredients prepared and ready to be cooked!
In this step I dice up my sweet potatoes into bite-sized cubes: peeling the skin off, dicing the potato into 1/2 inch circles, cutting those circles into 3-4 strips, and cutting those 3-4 strips into 3-4 bite-sized pieces. You want to be sure your cuts are even as possible so everything cooks evenly.
While still in the first step, I will also cut the zucchini into bite-sized cubes as well. Start by cutting the zucchini into 1/4 inch circles and then cutting those circles into 4 pieces.
2. Next, I will spread the sweet potato on a baking sheet, coat with a bit of olive oil, and sprinkle salt, pepper, and garlic powder evenly over the cubes. Once they’re seasoned, I pop them in the oven at 375 degrees alone first because the sweet potatoes need a little extra time than the zucchini. The sweet potatoes will be in there for 50 minutes total. While the sweet potato begins roasting, I will remove the ground chicken from its packaging and get ready to cook it on the stove top.
3. Once the sweet potato has been in the oven for 20 minutes, I will remove the baking sheet and move the sweet potatoes to one side to make room for the zucchini. (You could just use another baking sheet, but…dishes.) I then spread the zucchini out and add the same seasoning combination. These will go into the oven for 30 minutes. After putting the baking sheet back into the oven, you can begin cooking the ground chicken on the stove top.
4. I coat a medium-sized cooking pan with Pam and begin sauteing the chicken similarly to ground beef. I use a wooden spatula to break the chicken into smaller pieces, cooking over medium heat. Cook until there are no longer pink pieces- about 10-15 minutes.
5. Once the ground chicken is completely cooked, I coat the chicken with buffalo sauce- I prefer Sweet Baby Ray’s Buffalo Sauce- it’s not too thick or thin & doesn’t pack too much heat. You’ll use about 1/4 cup of buffalo sauce, but you can coat according to your preference.
6. Once the zucchini and sweet potato have been in the oven for an additional 30 minutes and are beginning to brown you can remove and get ready to begin placing into your Tupperware. Place 1/3 of the sweet potato and zucchini that you made into each dish. For the chicken, I usually put about 1/4 of what I made into each. This will leave you with some leftover, but often I just add these to my eggs in the morning for a little extra protein and no wasted ingredients 🙂
There ya go! You just meal prepped 3 meals for lunch for the week and it took one hour! I usually meal prep another meal at the same time as this, so usually I get 5-6 meals done in an hour, but I’ll start with this for now. If you are vegan or vegetarian I have made this recipe with roasted chick peas instead of the ground chicken and it was just as amazing. I hope this becomes a staple lunch in your house as it has in mine!