Meal prep: same same, but different. 

If you HATE meal prep because you can’t stand eating the same thing everyday- check this out. 

6 super easy meals that you can mix and match to ensure variety in your meal prep. You’ll need 3 baking dishes, 2 cookie sheets (with the lips though, I would not recommend the totally flat kind) and then whatever else you have on hand will work. 

Meal 1: chili lime chicken, white rice and mango salsa

Meal 2: spinach artichoke chicken, brown rice and asparagus

Meal 3: BBQ chicken, sweet potato, and broccoli

Ingredients:

1lb chicken breast tenders (about 13ish tendies)

Microwave ready jasmine rice 

Microwave ready brown rice

Microwave ready sweet potato

Microwave ready broccoli

Vegan spinach and artichoke dip (6 tbsp)

Mango fruit cups (2 cups)

Jalapeno (1-2)

Cilantro (one bunch)

Lime (1)

Package of baja lime chicken seasoning mix  

BBQ sauce of choice

Olive oil spray

Salt and pepper

*This cost me 24$ at my local Walmart for everything except BBQ sauce, olive oil spray, salt and pepper. I’ll get about 6 meals out of this, which comes down to $4 a meal. 

This particular prep calls for a lot of multi-tasking, so read through the instructions before beginning and make sure you’re good with the sequence of preparation.  

Instructions:

Start by preheating the oven to 400 then you’ll want to make the mango salsa. This gives it some extra time to sit and let the flavors get all friendly with each other. Drain the juice from 2 mango cups and plop that soft mango goodness into your bowl. Next up is the jalapeno, the amount here is up to your discretion. I removed all seeds and used half, my fiance is not a fan so I tried to sneak it in there. I would also recommend some red onion if you can tolerate it. Follow it with some chopped cilantro (chop a lot here and save some for the white rice). Then squeeze in the juice of half a lime, stir it up and set aside. 

In a baking tray lay out a sheet of aluminum foil down then with 3 smaller sheets, make little boats so your baking sheet has 3 sections to it. Spray with olive oil then separate your chicken equally between the 3 sections. 

Season those tendies based on section, from Left to right I did:

BBQ, spinach artichoke and chili lime seasoning. When the oven comes to temp pop these in for about 15-20 minutes or until they reach an internal temp of 165 degrees. 

After you put the chicken in, prepare the asparagus on a separate baking sheet. Cut the ends off, spray with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Make sure it’s nice and evenly coated and put them in with the chicken. These will go for about 20 minutes. Depends on how soft you like them. 

**Friendly reminder to set a timer** So while your prepping and doing other things you don’t forget about what’s in the oven. You’re welcome. 

Now let’s put that microwave to use. Prepare the jasmine and brown rice to the package instructions. When they’re done put in two separate containers. Then pop in those sweet taters, these should take 5-6 minutes. I did both bags at once cause YOLO.

In the jasmine rice add the rest of your cilantro. I had about 2 tbsp and it was perfect. Along with a sprig of green onion. 

I left the brown rice as is, but if I had nutritional yeast I would have made cheesy rice. Because why not. 

When the sweet taters are done, pop in the broccoli. I chose to take another pan out and bake one of the sweet potato bags to get it nice and crispy, the other bag I mashed up. By this time your chicken should be done, I swapped out my chicken for the sweet potatoes. When the asparagus was done I put them in a container, put my broccoli on the sheet, popped them in with the sweet potatoes and turned up the oven! I love my broccoli crispy but these are obviously optional steps. 

You’re done when you are happy with the texture that’s developed. Ultimately my potatoes and broccoli were in for about 12 minutes each at 425. 

As everything was finished I put them right into my pyrex containers so all I had to do was pop a lid on and put it in the fridge. The best part of this is you can mix it up. You can eat it as I laid it out or mix and match as you please to help create even more variety. 

This took me about 30 minutes MAX. to do all this. Yeah there’s some multitasking that needs to happen but that’s just being time efficient and maximizing your time.