Meal Prep #11

Last Wednesday [yes, yes I'm being a very late and lazy blogger] was meal prep time again!

First up, and no picture because it didn't come out well at all, was a repeat of a meal from last week: satay mince on beans, corn and carrots. However, we couldn't get kangaroo mince this week so we had to use regular mince and wow... cooking normal mince  really makes you appreciate how lean kangaroo is. It still tastes good, but it's nowhere near as healthy.

This was salmon and sautéed spinach and zucchini with garlic on a bed of baked potato, sweet potato and carrot. As usual, the sweet potatoes were fresh from the garden. The sautéed greens are absolutely delicious and I'm already thinking of making them a regular addition.

Another repeat from previous weeks: satay celery and beans over brown rice, topped with chicken. Still a great meal. And so cheap! For reals, these work out to maybe $3 per meal which I think is pretty good for something with meat in it.

Lastly we have honey soy chicken and corn on a bed of baked potato, sweet potato and carrot. Simple yet tasty.

The more we do this the more I'm finding that, as a general rule, we need to put one "exciting" thing into each meal. That is to say one thing that makes you eager to eat that meal. If it's just plain meat with plain vegetables yes, it's very healthy, but it's not particularly appealing. I find I'm way more likely to stick to eating just these meals and not cooking up something different if there's something to look forward to in every box.

Meal Prep #10

Anoher week, another meal prep. This is from the day before yesterday because I've been a good girl doing uni work and haven't felt like blogging about it until now. it was an overcast day, so ym photos aren't great, but wahtever.

Above, both served on brown rice, is satay green vegetables and chicken and stir fry mixed vegetables. The stir fry isn't that great but the vegetable mix has been in the freezer for ages so I finally bit the bullet and decided we had to use it up. By contrast, the satay vegetables are amazing! I diluted the sauce more this time so it mixes delightfully with the rice.

This one doesn't look like much, but it is also delicious. Satay kangaroo mince over corn, carrots and green beans. Can you tell we're on a satay kick at the moment?

Lastly we have sausages with beans, corn and broccoli. What's funny is that sausages have featured somewhat regularly in our meal prep... but only because our mums give them to us! Given that the meat portion of one of these preps is easily the most expensive, and we try to keep them as economical as possible, free meat is always welcome.

I was quite happy with this prep and also very proud of myself because I got it all done in 2.5 hours and planned it out in such a way that I used only a single saucepan, a single frypan and a single baking tray. I rock.

Meal Prep #9

Another day, another meal prep. This one isn't technically finished yet, because I need to make up some salads, but the interesting part is done. Picture lettuce, cucumber, celery and cherry tomatoes with salmon on top and then you've go the complete picture of our prep.

Above is beef mince with onion, spinach and peas served with broccoli and baked carrots, sweet potato and [just a little] potato. The potato and sweet potato were fresh out of our garden!

This is a very simple, but tasty, meal. Broccoli, corn and satay chicken thigh. We both like corn, a lot, and broccoli is so good!

Lastly we have chicken thigh and satay green vegetables served over brown rice. This was our first time doing a satay vegetable mix and it turned out really nicely!

Meal Prep #8

Another meal prep, but with very few pictures this time because I finished up quite late at night yesterday. I made six each of  salads, chicken and veggies, lamb and veggies and straight veggies... because I messed up quantities of meat. Normally I'm great at eye-balling measurements and volumes then occasionally I get it very, very wrong.

I did something new with the chicken thigh this time, which turned out rather nicely. Sesame, paprika and lime flavour. Sesame seeds are just divine.

Above is a selection of the finished meals. The mashed potato is mixed with home-grown sweet potato and, even though it's lumpy because I'm not a good masher apparently, it's quite tasty.

Meal Prep #6 & #7

Long time, no meal prep posts. That's because for most of January, we haven't had the time to do a proper prep. We did one on New Years Eve and just did another yesterday and since I never posted about the NYE one here's a double post. And man, is it good to be back into it. I ate one of yesterday's meals while writing this and it is so good to have an easily microwaveable, fairly health bundle of varied foods from fridge to mouth in under five minutes.

This is how our fridge looks right now, meals all taking up one shelf with fruit salad and other bits above. Grainy as hell photo, because it was like 9:30 when we finished up, but wanted to share anyway.

For our NYE prep we made five lots of meals. Salad and stir-fry aren't remarkable enough to warrant photos, but here are the other three meals we made.

This was roast lamb with sautéed mixed zucchini and mushrooms and baked potato and sweet potato. The great thing about this was the zucchinis were fresh from my mum's garden, and the sweet potato came from ours. Super fresh veggies for the win!

More fresh veggies here too, the beans are also from my mum! Roast lamb, corn and beans over rice.

And this meal is the potato and sweet potato mix with sausage and broccoli.

That's what we cooked on New Years Eve, keep scrolling for yesterday's cooking bonanza. Actually, you don't have to scroll far, I just wanted to write "keep scrolling". In addition to a big bowl of fruit salad we made six each of the following meals.

Firstly, canned salmon with a baked potato and carrot mix and beans. In case it's not obvious, baked potatoes is one of the best things ever.

Second, more salmon! This time with cauliflower, corn and fried rice. I love plain rice, but James isn't as much of a fan so I made a simple fried rice to change it up a bit. Just peas, onion, rice and soy sauce but definitely a step up from regular rice with a few herbs.

This lot is the baked potato and carrot mix with lemon herb chicken and corn. You know how I said I was eating one while writing this post? This was it, and it was tasty.

Lastly, honey soy chicken with fried rice, beans and cauliflower. I do pretty damn good honey soy chicken.

So that's the last two lots of meal prep we've done. We're planning to get back into a regular routine with it, so there'll be more posts of this nature. Feel free to share any of yourown meal prep ideas or recipes in the comments ^__^

2015, here we go!

Well. It's 2015 already. Wow.

I suppose it's time for resolutions and such, though I'm of the school of thought that you don't need ot wait for the new year for them, and in fact, it's often better to set goals and resolutions at whatever time is best for you, personally. However, I have made a few lolita related goals lately and since they make for vaguely interesting blogging I thought I'd share.

1. Keep up the blog!

And by this I especially mean coming up with more original content. I do love the wardrobe challenge series, and all the hypothetical I do but I want to focus more on posting real, original, 100% me stuff as well. So expect to see more outfits and such! And also more meal prep posts, even though that's not lolita it's something I like sharing.

Bodyline skirt, Infanta blouse, Metamorphose socks with offbrand shoes and flowers.

2. Spend less on lolita.

I have a wonderful lolita wardrobe. I can pull together outfits ranging from full gothic to full sweet, with most of it sitting firmly in classic territory. So I'm putting myself on a six-month spending ban. My only exception is I can buy things that cost under $50 if it's something I can get a lot of use out of. But I really want to focus on getting the most out of what I have, rather than getting more. I have two things in the mail and then that's it for a while.

3. Sew more things.

This ties in with resolution two, and sewing materials are the exception to my spending rule. This year I made a old-school skirt for my lolita wardrobe and I've almost finished sewing my first proper JSK, and I really want to make more of my own lolita clothes going forwards.

The skirt fabric of my almost-done JSK. It is actually nice, just didn't photograph right...

So the result of all three goals will probably mean that there will be far less reviews on this blog, but more sewing posts, which I think will make for a nice change of pace.

4. Actually attend a lolita event.

I'll be honest here; I'm a bit shy and as a result really don't like doing new things. And lolita meets involve new people and sometimes new places as well. So I always wuss out. But there's a big community about an hour and a half away and a smaller one about an hour away and I do want to try and get involved in the social side of lolita this coming year.

5. Keep up with the meal prep.

I know I said lolita goals, but this is tangentially related. I've found meal prepping has been the best thing for my diet, and the better my diet, the better I fit my lolita clothes so it is kind of connected! It also saves a lot of time, money and effort so I really want to make sure to make this a strong habit.

Did you set any goals or resolutions for the coming year?

Meal Prep #5 and a pre-Christmas blogging update

Wow. I've been a busy little bee lately, and I haven't been able to keep up blogging like I wanted to, and with Christmas coming up I'll probably be a bit sporadic again for a while. But I have some more wardrobe challenges in the works, another $500 wardrobe post, and there'll be some new lolita reviews soon as well!

That's the blogging update part of this post, now onto the meal prep side!

I present to you... a single photo. We didn't really do a proper prep this time around, or at least not to our usual scale and all in one go. James made a delightful pasta which gave us five meals worth of leftovers. A couple of days later I made 9 meals worth of meatloaf muffins, rice and vegetables which is what you see in the picture. I was meaning to make some containers of salad up but just haven't gotten around to it yet so all in all this meal prep was a bit all over the place. But still, even when we don't do as much it's still great to have ready-to-go food, and I'm keen to keep this practise up in 2015.

Meal Prep #4

Meal prep time again and today I was lucky because James did nearly everything while I played LOL and bummed on the internet. So I'm not actually sure how long it took, probably about 3 hours today plus a couple of hours last night to roast a leg of lamb. A usual, we made six each of four different meal types.

First out is roast lamb with corn, beans and baby carrots. I also want to say forgive the shoddy pics, it started storming while James was cooking so the ktichen was dark.

Stir fry vegetables over udon noodles.They don't look so appealing in these photos but they taste so good!

Roast potatoes, carrots and mixed broccoli, zucchini and asparagus with lightly fried chicken thigh on top. Normally we bake all the meats but with the amount of vegetables we were roasting in our tiny oven it was better time-wise to fry it this time.

Same assortment of vegetables with roast lamb on top. So much tastiness!

Meal Prep #3 and a blogging update

Things have gotten a little hectic on my end as I'm approaching my final exam of the semester, amongst other things, so it'll be a little while before my next regularly irregular lolita post. But we've been keeping up with meal prepping so I thought I'd quickly share our newest set of meals.

My individual meal photos turned out pretty dodge, but in the picture above there's two sets of meals. The first is kangaroo mince with spinach served with baked carrots and potatoes, corn and broccoli and towards the back is salmon with baked carrots and potatoes, sautéed spinach and with corn or beans.

In this lot first there is salmon with spinach, corn and broccoli and then kangaroo with beans and cauliflower, both with rice on the side.

And by some fluke of nature we even had leftovers, so these four bowls feature rice, kangaroo mince and a little each of bro coli, cauliflower and beans.

This week's cooking only took about two and a half hours, which was great. We're really getting into the swing of meal prepping. Do you meal prep, or know any bloggers who do? I'm always on the look-out for more recipes to try.

Meal Prep #2

Yeah, I think this is going to be a regular thing now. Today I spent four hours in the kitchen and made 23 meals in total, as well as a new big fruit salad. It was tiring, but it has been so good the past week and a bit to just be able to go to the fridge and pull out a healthy meal that just needs three minutes in the microwave and a fork.

I filled up our big blue mixing bowl with five apples, six oranges, a can of pineapple, a can of peaches and a punnet of blueberries. Apples, oranges and pineapple are my basic fruit salad "recipe" and it's good to add different extra fruits each time to spice it up a little. Last week it was rockmelon, this week, the blueberries. Next week... a mystery!

First meal is mixed baked carrots and potatoes with lemon and herb chicken thigh, green beans and sautéed spinach.

The second meal is very similar: again baked carrots and potatoes and sautéed spinach, but this time with roast lamb and broccoli. We only had enough carrot and potato mix to make five of these, as opposed to what is becoming the usual six.

Third is cauliflower rice, roast lamb, beans and corn. I love cauliflower rice, but it is time consuming and I don't think I'll make it regularly.

And last is rice, honey soy chicken, broccoli and corn. Forgive the shoddy photos in this post, it was stormy outside so I had to use the flash on my phone to get these. But we have another week;'s worth of food ready to go, and it's a great feeling!

Meal Prep #1

And now for something completely different... a really brief post about James' and my first bout of meal prepping. It's something we've been planning on doing for a while and today we actually did. meal prep Monday...on a Sunday ^__^

We made 24 meals in total, six each of four different ones, and have leftovers as well. I also made a gigantic fruit salad for breakfasts and snacks, and am planning on making egg muffins as well. We were intending to make a fifth meal [stir fry!] as well but I'll probably do that in a few days time. All in all we spent only three hours in the kitchen, around $50 each and now have a very well stocked fridge! I think that's not bad at all for a weeks worth of food.

Of course, since it was our first time, I had to document everything we made, and may make that a regular thing as well, because I like looking at other people's food and maybe people will like looking at mine!

First up we have two of James's tasty, tasty salmon cakes with herb rice, baby carrots and broccoli.

Second meal is about a 100g of chicken thigh, lemon and herb flavour, with cauliflower "rice", green beans and corn.

Third, and sorry for the kind of shoddy photo, is honey-soy chicken thighs, rice with a hint of curry flavour, sautéed spinach and baby carrots.

And lastly we again have two of James's salmon cakes with cauliflower "rice", corn and sautéed spinach.

I really liked what we came up with for this week. There's plenty of variety and it's all fairly healthy. Even though it was kind of tiring cooking for so long it was definitely worth it, and I'm looking forward to a. not cooking for the rest of the week and b. doing it again next Sunday!

If any of my regular lolita readers have made it this far, fear not! I'm almost done with the next wardrobe challenge and will resume my regular irregular lolita blogging soon. There just may be a few more meal prepping posts scattered amongst the flounces and frills.