Focus on Nutrition: The Sunday Prep

Y'all! This is not a new idea by any means, but oh, how it has enhanced my life.  What is it, you ask?  Why, it's the Sunday Prep!

Last weekend, I had a discussion with my husband that I had been putting off for a while.  I work until 5 and my husband usually works until around 6 and then heads home from various places ranging from 10 minutes from home to over an hour.  We had been trying to go to the gym together in the evenings.  I prefer to go straight after work because honestly, once I eat dinner and sit on the couch for even a minute-  I am toast!  Completely worthless for the rest of the night.  I'm lucky if I do so much as a load of laundry after dinner time.  It's my wind-down time, what can I say?  My husband on the other hand, is more of a night owl and would prefer to eat dinner and then hit up to the gym the last hour they are open.    Occasionally, this works for me- like if I don't have to work the next day, but honestly, it's not my preferred method.

Also, dinner had been taking a WHILE to cook lately.  I blame it in Pinterest.  I find all these great recipes on there and blindly buy all the ingredients to make them without paying attention to the prep and cook times.  Combine my finishing work later than usual, my husband getting home late, then me taking 1-2 hours just to make dinner, and no one was getting to the gym.  It was an awful feeling.

Fortunately, my husband is the male version of me in terms of brain waves, and he had been dreading having the same conversation.  The fact of the matter was, we needed to make the gym work for us individually rather than trying to go together every night, and just rejoice in the days where we could be there at the same time.  Whew! What a relief!  Also, I revealed to him that I wanted to clean up our eating all while still cooking at home.

Enter the Sunday Prep.  Last weekend I was fortunate enough to plan it all out on Saturday and head to the grocery store on Saturday versus Sunday, but going forward I will probably devote my entire Sunday to shopping AND prepping.  Anyway, first on the agenda was to prep some chicken breasts that I would need for a couple different things- a lower fat version of buffalo chicken wing dip for the Superbowl, plus some chicken salad for lunches.

I used my baby crock pot with only one setting.  It holds 2-3 chicken breasts.  I covered with water and added a smidgeon of sea salt, pepper and poultry seasoning and let it cook from mid-morning until late afternoon.  You can fork-shred it, or use your food processor.  I went the food processor route, which basically made the chicken breast finely ground.  Not to mention it was a lot less time-consuming than shredding by hand.  I'm sure there's probably an attachment on my food processor for shredding meats, but I have no clue where it would be.  Below is a shot of my lunch for the week (Mon-Thurs):

Chicken breast, shredded carrots, red onion, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, yellow mustard.

And here's how it looked as lunch, scooped into a ripe avocado, with leftover Superbowl veggies, greek yogurt dip and a homemade protein brownie, which I made 12 of, and froze half for the following week.

I also made egg muffins.  I've made these before and they are great because they are totally customizable (meat, veggies, cheese) and they keep for up to 10 days in the fridge.  Even my husband the non-breakfast eater loves eating them for breakfast. 

This time around I used spinach, mushrooms and part- skim mozzarella cheese.

 It was my first time using the silicone cupcake liners and WHOA- they certainly don't allow things to stick.  The things were practically popping out when I took them out of the oven!

 And I caught this guy snooping around when they were on the counter...

...so I built a fort to protect them.

 And this was the end result.  I had some plain, some with a little sour cream on top, and one day I made a breakfast burrito and added lowfat chipotle mayo and turkey bacon.  The possibilities are endless.

  I also made high protein turkey meatballs and semi-homemade sauce.  I stored the meatballs in the fridge inside a large Ziploc bag and the sauce separately.  It was our Wednesday night meal, so when we got home from the gym, I just threw everything into a pan and re-heated while the noodles were boiling.  It was delish, and there was enough for me to have one lunch from the leftovers and my husband made a meatball wrap for dinner the following night.

This past Sunday I was feeling a little less inspired, but I did manage to plan two crockpot meals plus leftovers, and I'll be making the chicken breasts in the crockpot this evening to use later in the week for curry chicken and veggies with brown basamati rice (which takes 30 mins, so I will probably make ahead of time and re-heat).  I cut up strawberries and prepped some grapes and baby carrots to have on hand, and secured some Babybel cheese to go with my fruit for a little protein/carb pre-gym snack.  For breakfasts this week I'll be polishing off  the leftover egg muffins and then moving on to overnight oats, which I will prep a night or two ahead of time of the days I plan to have them.  Lunch is going to be tuna salad on leftover wraps and salad ingredients. 

All in all, this is really proving to be a nice, easy way to have good dinners at home without feeling like I'm spending all kinds of time every night cooking.  This leaves more time for the gym, which will be important considering my training for the first triathlon on the list starts next week (yowza)!

If anyone out there is fan of this method and would like to share prep tips, good recipes to make ahead of time or any other tips, please feel free!  I'd love to make this routine a habit in order to simplify during triathlon season!