I’m back! Summer vacation is over, sadly. The kids have been back in school for almost a month here, but it’s taken me that month to get into a groove with this new routine. All of my kids are in school all day. This hasn’t been the case since Owen was born!
Before school started, I was super excited about having 7-ish hours to myself everyday. I kept making mental lists of all the things I would accomplish. My house would shine. My blog would flourish. Yeah, neither of those things happened. I felt lost. When you have that much time on your hands and you aren’t so good at being idle, it’s hard.
I’m in a good groove now. I’m teaching my fitness class twice a week, running 2-3 times a week, and chairing a committee that’s planning a 5K fundraiser. I finally feel like the house is coming back together after a summer of neglect.
I have a full plate. At least it’s as full as I would like it to be. So, I like to come up with ways to make meal prepping easier. I’m also trying to clean up my diet after a summer of excess, so I would like easy meal prep, but healthy meals.
Monday was Labor Day. It was a much needed break after three full weeks of school. We decided to pull out the grill and cook a bunch of chicken breasts that we would use for meals later in the week. Instead of seasoning them all the same we chose to to make three different marinades…
From left to right: Tex-Mex, Asian and Greek.
I divided the chicken breasts among three zipper bags.
I like to slice chicken breasts length wise to get thinner cuts. It makes the chicken cook more evenly and it makes portions smaller.
The Tex-Mex marinade consisted of red onion, chopped pickled jalapenos, cilantro, olive oil and a bit of the pickling liquid from the peppers. How much, you ask? I have no clue. I just throw stuff in.
The Asian marinade was a sesame ginger dressing, garlic and soy sauce.
The Greek marinade was lemon juice, sliced lemon, fresh oregano, garlic and olive oil.
I added the marinade to each bag, closed the bags and squished them around to distribute the marinades. I’m sure squished is a real cooking term.
I put them in the fridge for about an hour. Then hubby and I had a cocktail. He fiddled around getting the grill ready. When the coals were ready, we put the first batch on.
Look at all that chicken! We will have plenty for salads and entrees for this week. I will probably freeze some, too.
Yesterday, I made a delicious Thai-style salad. Yum!
Batch grilling is a great way get ahead on meal prep for the week!
