Does it feel impossible to find the time to prepare you meals for the week?
Meal prepping can be a useful tool if you are working on bringing your lunch with you to work or want to make sure you have something ready to go on those days that you get home late for work. With that said, it can sometimes be a little time consuming, and finding time in your schedule to make your meals for the week can feel like a daunting task.
If this sounds like you, the crockpot can be a game changer!
I love using the crockpot on Sundays when I am preparing for my week. It saves me so much time and I can throw on some food in the morning and move on with my day without spending hours in the kitchen.
One thing that I find helpful to set me up for some quick and easy lunches throughout the week is to cook a big batch of food on Sunday in the crockpot and refrigerate/freeze the extra portions.
I always start with a wide variety of vegetables, some dried legumes and a protein. I throw everything together with a lot of different seasonings, put the cooker on low and let it go for the next 6-8 hours!
This crockpot ground beef, lentils and veggie chili tasted amazing and I was able to portion out 8 lunches from this one batch!
Ingredients:
1.5 lbs of lean ground beef
1.5 cups of sprouted lentils
2 cups low sodium beef broth
3 beets
2 medium onions
2 cups Broccoli
2 cups carrots
2 cups celery
Tomato paste
Garlic powder, chili powder, cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, cumin and black pepper.
Procedure:
1) Finely chop onions and place in crockpot
2) Add ground beef and lentils and add 2 cups of low sodium beef broth, one can of tomato paste, garlic powder, chili powder, cayenne pepper, red pepper flakes, cumin and black pepper (roughly 2-4 tbsp of each works really well but you can play around with this depending on the spice level you are looking for).
3) Cover and cook on high for 2 hours
4) While that is cooking, chop the beets, broccoli, carrots and celery and place in a bowl.
5) After two hours, add in the all of the vegetables, cover and turn the crockpot to low, letting the chili cook for another 4-6 hours.
Note: I wait 2 hours before adding the vegetables to allow the lentils to properly cook with a larger amount of liquid available. If you are putting this on before leaving for work and won’t have the time to add the vegetables after two hours, presoak the lentils in water overnight and place all of the ingredients together at once and cook on low for ~8hours!
This recipe is great to combine with rice, more veggies or can be eaten as a meal all by itself!
Getting creative is the best part about using the crockpot. You can try out some different combinations of seasonings, legumes, veggies and broths to keep your meals interesting each and every week!
What are some of your favorite crockpot combinations?