Transcript of Don’t Meal Prep, Do This Instead

Happy new year. Here we are, the time of year when we try and think of all the things we're going to improve on ourselves from last year. Now, I can't help you make better life decisions, but I can show you how to set up your kitchen better to make weekn night meals way easier. In this video, I'm going to show you how I set up my kitchen for the week so that my weekn night meals are quick, easy, and adaptable. Let's get stuck in containers. Kind of a boring subject, but it's not. It's really important cuz this stuff's going to prolong how long your food lasts. So, the other annoying thing about containers is they're kind of expensive. So, we're going to start with the cheapest option, which are these takeaway style plastic containers. In the States, a lot of people use round deli containers. I've done a video about it. I think they're a silly idea cuz you don't get as much in your fridge with them. But same thing applies to these. So, the benefits of these, they're cheap. The negatives is they don't last very long. They break. They're not disposable either. Please don't use these once and throw them out. Let's be responsible humans. So, cost effective, don't last very long. This is my preferred container for storing food on a daily basis. It's got a good sturdy lid. They're airtight. They wash really well. They dry kind of easily. They're BPA free, which is a positive. You know, there's a lot of kind of negative connotations around plastics in the world today. Make that what you will. This is your option if you want glass. These jars are cool. I really like them. However, they're heavy. They're not particularly cheap. You know, they break, right? You drop this on the ground, nothing happens. If you drop that on the ground, it might break. These are the containers that I use for my dry goods only. So, this is what's in my pantry. These are expensive. They're annoyingly expensive, but they have a really great system where the lid comes off really easily and they're super airtight. I would never use these to store food for like a dayto-day basis because these lids are a pain to clean. They're like water gets in them. So, it's great for like storing rice and flour and stuff like that. Really great airtight, super hard. They won't break, but they're a pain to clean. So, I think it's worthwhile investing in some good quality containers like this. You could use these for your dry goods as well. This is my pick for my meal prep. This is my pick for my pantry. These will do just as fine as well. They just break quickly. All right, boring stuff out of the way. Let's crack on. Pantry staples. This is kind of like my bare minimum. With this and a couple of pieces of fruit and veg, maybe some protein, I can kind of make dishes from a few different countries. But spices, super important. I done a whole video on spices recently. Shameless plug. Link above. Go watch that to decipher or decode what's going on down here. Tin stuff. I've always got tin tomatoes and tin beans in my pantry. That's kind of the only real tin stuff that I have lying around. Sometimes there's coconut milk as well, but probably not relevant for this video. And then dry goods. So flour, plain flour, you don't have it here, but by carb soda and baking powder as well. Jasmine rice, sugar. I always have caster sugar cuz if I'm ever baking, I can just use that. And you can also use caster sugar whenever you use granulated sugar. A couple of types of pasta. There's usually some type of rietoni and some kind of orzo as well. The reason I like this pasta because it cooks super quick. If you want dinner up on the table in like 10 minutes, this is your best bet. Corn flour for thickening sauces and stuff like that. And that's pretty much it. There's not heaps to it. Obviously, your dry store or your dry goods pantry will kind of grow over time, but if I've got these basics, you can kind of take food in a lot of different directions. You can make bread with the flour, some real easy flatbreads with just flour, water, and salt. Or you can use some yogurt. You've got rice to make bases of most Asian dishes. You got pastas to make, you know, pastas. Tomatoes are a great way to bulk out sauces, and they're full of great vitamins. And beans. Beans are a fantastic way to get good quality protein in your diet without kind of going crazy. And I ate a lot of beans when I was a broke chef cuz they're kind of delicious and super affordable and easy. And then oils. I always have two oils on hand. I have extra virgin olive oil for finishing and cooking fish. And I have a neutral flavored oil. Usually for me that's peanut. It's affordable and it's doesn't taste like anything which is what you need often when especially when you're cooking Asian food. And salt and pepper of course and MSG cuz it's yummy. And vinegar. Now the truth be told I can't lie to you. I reckon I'm a bit of a vinegar snob and I've probably got I don't know at least 20 tops of vinegar. If I could only have one, it would be apple cider vinegar. I think it's the good all rounder. It's got enough flavor in it to use it in dressings. It's cheap enoughish that you can like if you need some vinegar for poaching eggs, you can do it in that. And you can even use it in some kind of Asian food as well if you if you were stuck and you didn't have rice vinegar. So, apple cider vinegar would be my vinegar of choice if I could only have one. But don't just have one, [music] have 20 like I do. Now, obviously, my dry store is extremely vast. It's way bigger than this. There's all my soy sauces in there, all my fermentss and fish sauces. There's a lot of crazy stuff in there. But if I was to move into a new flat and I was to start from fresh, the first thing I'd do would be go to the supermarket and buy this stuff. And from there, I'd start adding to it. Okay, fridge. Few key things to remember. Make sure you label and date everything. It's so important. You need to be able to quickly identify what something is and also when it was made. Full stop. I use the standard blue tape and a Sharpie. I've used it my whole career and it's done me well so far. Now, how do you set your fridge up? For me, you've obviously got the veggie bin down the bottom, which is for all raw fruit and vegetables. The next shelf up is the raw meat, eggs, and dairy shelf. Above that, we have the food that is cooked but is going to get reheated again. Above that, we have the shelf that is for food that is ready to cook. So, think about all the things that we're making today. They're ready to cook. And then above that, we have food that is ready to eat. So, anything that will go from your fridge into your mouth, that's ready to eat. Once we've made on our lovely meal prep, it's incredibly important that we cool things down fast before we put them in the fridge. Modern fridges are a lot more powerful than they used to be. So, there used to be the saying that if you put hot stuff in your fridge, everything else drops temperature. It's probably not as much of an issue these days, but it's still good practice. Don't put piping hot things in your fridge. The fridge will probably keep up, but there could be stuff underneath or above it that is going to affect the temperature change no matter how good your fridge is. So, cool things down before we put them in the fridge. And it's more important with your freezer. Why? Cuz your ice cream might melt. And that's a sad day if your ice cream melts. One of the best ways I think you can save time throughout the week is by making some base flavors from the weekend ready for the week. So, you think about things like curries, salsas, and like we're going to make now, tomato sauces or sugos. So, every good recipe starts with onion and garlic. First things first, we're going to slice three onions, and we're going to peel about two heads of garlic. Now, hot tip. You can't see it, but under my bench there is always this bowl. And it's my rubbish bin for the sake of the video. I'm going to leave it here today. It's unsightly and ungodly. And usually it's under there, but today it'll be there so you remember to do it. There's nothing more inconvenient than getting a bit of rubbish, taking it to the bin, coming back. If it's there, you're going to work cleaner and tidier. Now, I personally would honestly just hand cut all this. However, there is nothing wrong in this instance to use one of these if you have one. I know a lot of Italian chefs that when they are making their mints for their ragu will just put their safrito through the mincer as well. The reality is we want it pretty finely cut so that it cooks down quickly. This is going to get it finally cut quicker than anybody else is going to be able to do it with a knife. Another hot tip. Shameless plug. There's a reason I sell these. It's cuz they're really, really useful putting things in there, putting bits of rubbish in your handy bowl or rubbish bin. When you're using one of these to cut veg, pulse it. Don't just keep spinning it. You'll make puree. We're not trying to make puree here. Add your peeled garlic cloves. Done. Bit more wash up, but takes literally a quarter of the time it would take me even to cut those by hand. So, we're going to use six tins of tomatoes. I like to use whole tomatoes. And I'll tell you why in a second. In this big heavy based pot, I'm going to put on a high heat. So, we're going to use about six tablespoons of olive oil. 1 tbsp for each can. You could half that if you wanted to. Bring that up to a heat. You don't want it ripping hot, but you want some heat in that. The best way to tell whether oil is hot enough without using a thermometer is if you put a wooden spoon in it and some little bubbles form around the the edge of the wooden spoon, that's hot enough. In with our onion and garlic, season with salt. Really important that when we're cooking, we season all the way through the cooking process. We don't just dump all the salt in at the end. We gradually season throughout the cooking process. Means we're going to get a far better seasoned product at the end where we also can control the seasoning. Make sure we're not seasoning too much. Going to sweat that down for about 8 minutes. We want some color, but we don't want it like crispy. We just want it kind of to start breaking down. So now we're going to add a little bit of dried oregano. Nothing too much cuz we're going to use this in a few different recipes. We don't want to kind of have any dominant particular flavor. A bit of background herbaceiousness, I guess. And then we're going to add tomatoes. Six tins whole tomatoes, whole peeled tomatoes. And don't forget to rinse your tins out with water. We're going to give it a little mix just to get that onion and garlic evenlyish. And then we're going to swap utensils. Oh, I forgot one tin. So we're going to move to a masher. We're going to mash our tomatoes up a little bit. So, why do we use whole tomatoes instead of crushed? Well, you absolutely can use crushed, but here's my weird theory. Don't know if it's true or not, and I don't really know where I heard it. My theory is that if you use whole tomatoes, they're better quality. I think they'd only use the whole nice tomatoes to tin hole. And the diced ones are probably the not so nice tomatoes that they've kind of had to take a piece off for whatever reason they end up dicing. I don't know if it's true or not, but that's my theory and I'm sticking to it. Another kitchen tip with Andy. have a plate hanging around to store your dirty spoons or what we call a bamarie. Saves your counter getting dirty. We're going to cook that now. Lightly simmer it. We're not cooking it for ages. We're not trying to like reduce this. We're not trying to, you know, you just have to cook the tomatoes. It's like once it comes to a simmer, 20 25 minutes, stirring often, tasting as we go, and we should be good to go. All right, it's 25 minutes later. We're going to give it a good stir either with the spoon or the masher. Give it another little season of salt. Not too much. Now, remember, this is the base of a bunch of meals that we're going to have in future Andy's life. So, we got to make sure it's balanced. To taste it, you want it seasoned, but you don't want it like bang- on salty. Why? When we reheat it, when we cook with it, we're going to add more salt anyway. So, we want it just baseline seasoned. The other thing to think about is tasting whether it's sweet enough or not. A lot of controversy online whether to put sugar in your tomato sauce or not. The reality is if you have to put sugar in it, cuz the tomatoes are sour, you have to put sugar in it. So, taste it. If it tastes a little bit sour, just add a little bit of sugar just to balance it out. That one tastes good to me. Let's cool it down and get it in the fridge. So, storage. Now, I like to use a couple of different sizes container. Smaller ones for if I'm by myself, bigger ones if I'm cooking for more than one person. And then hot tip, I often use these big ice cube things as well, and I'll freeze them in those. Full the containers up. Don't fill them right to the top either. A little bit of space at the top. Then you'll notice that I've got all these containers on a rack, and that's going to help us cool down faster. We got a bit of air flow underneath it. Really important that we get these down to not necessarily room temperature, but you know, a lot cooler before we put them in the fridge. We also don't want to put the lids on until they're pretty much at room temperature. And the reason being because if you do put the lid on before they're cool, you're going to have condensation build up on the top, which isn't great, especially not necessarily so bad with this type of thing, but if you're doing anything that has texture or crisp to it, it's going to make that food go soggy. Now, we just need to get these down in temperature. Leave them out at room temperature for an hour. We're going to put the lid on. We're going to label them, date them, and put them in the fridge or the freezer depending on when we're going to use them. And stick around because later on I'm going to show you some incredible dishes that we can make from these. There you go. So you go in the fridge for 5 days or in the freezer for three months. So as well as preparing base flavors, I'm going to show you how to meal prep some protein. One of the most underutilized techniques of cooking when it comes to meal prepping protein, I think, is the braise. And I don't know why. I think people maybe feel like it's a little bit intimidating, but it's honestly not that hard. It's really, really easy. So here I've got a big piece of chuck beef, a really affordable cut of beef, and it's perfect for brazing. It's got lots of interconnecting muscle and tissue and things that make it delicious and rich and beefy and a little bit of fat in it as well, which ensures that the beef doesn't dry out. Pretty easy to do. Big piece of beef. We're not even going to cut it. We're going to cook the whole thing and we're going to pull it down and make pulled beef. Season it generously with salt on all sides. This is a big piece of meat. You're not going to overseason it. Trust me. Actually, you probably could overseason it, but hey. Okay, big Dutch oven. Heat on. I'm using some beef tallow. If you don't have beef tallow handy, just use some neutral oil. Don't use olive oil. It's kind of a waste. You can use olive oil. It's fine, but you won't taste it. While waiting for that to melt, we'll talk about murupa. I have one brown onion, roughly diced, one carrot, peeled and roughly diced, and a stick of celery. I got three bay leaves, four cloves of garlic, and about half a liter of beeftock. So, we're going to seal this piece of beef really hard on all sides. We're going to get really good color on all sides. Then, we're going to remove it and set it aside. Followed by adding the murup, our carrots, onion, and celery. We're going to cook that out a bit. Then, we'll add our beef back to the pot. So, if when you're adding your veggies, you get too much color on the bottom. Just use a little bit of stock to deglaze the bottom and get all that fond off it so it doesn't burn. If it burns, no good. And we don't need to get heaps of color on the carrots and onions. Lastly, we're just going to add the garlic in the bay. Going to add our beef back to the pot on top of the mirror. Nuzzle it down in there. Then add our stock. We don't want the stock to completely cover it. We just want it to kind of cover it about halfway. We let that come up to simmer. So, other fantastic things to braze. If you don't have chuck, you could use brisket works really well. You could braise or slow cook chicken works fantastically. Chicken legs, like whole legs on the bone, do them in the slow cooker. They pull really nicely and stay really lovely and moist. Or lamb shoulders. They braze beautifully, really slowly. Other options other than brazing, the classic grilled chicken or cold smoking fish works fantastically well. Lid on in the oven, 140° C for like 4 hours. We'll check it after 3 and 1/2. All right, 4 hours later. Just joking. We already made this one. There we go. Beautiful braised beef. So, from here, we're going to pull the meat out and just let it kind of get to a temperature that we can actually handle it. And then we've got all this lovely stock. Don't throw this out. We're going to pass this. You can freeze it and use it next time you want to brace some beef. You can make soup from it. You can use it in the base of a curry. Just use it anywhere you would use stock. You can use it in your ramen. H shameless plug. Stocks and sauces video above. This is another amazing thing. You can prep ahead. We will use a little bit of this to keep this beef lovely and moist. So, this meat should just fall apart. Oh, look at that. Break it down. pull it into nice small strands and into a bowl. So, the reason I like brazing for meal prep so much is because I think it's far easier to control the moisture content. Feel like if you grill stuff, it's really hard to heat up without it drying out a little bit. I also love the fact that you can use kind of far more economical cuts. So, you can use chucks, you know, chuck bake or or oyster blade for this as opposed to like, you know, chicken breasts or or sirloin steaks if you were just doing steaks. So, if you get these big pieces that have really long strands and you don't, you know, sometimes they get a bit hectic. Just chop the whole thing in half and then pull that. Look at all that protein. Okay, I'm going to pour like two later fulls of stock over that. Just toss it through. Going to go another one. Just try and stop me. I'm crazy. That's just going to cling to the meat and make it lovely and juicy. All right, let's pack this down. Get it into the fridge and then I'll show you some things we can make with it. So, same as before, a couple of different sizes. I wouldn't suggest freezing this. I'd only really suggest keeping it in the fridge. So, that's about enough for a single portion. I'm going to call that like 200 g. That's a pretty generous single portion. The truth is Caitlyn would probably eat about 120 100 g. I'll probably eat 150ish as a guide. Everyone's different in here. Let these cool most of the way before we put them in the fridge. And we're just going to label them, date them, and that's protein sorted. And shout out to the homie H. Woo who gave me this thing. I absolutely love it. There's easy 9 10 portions of protein there. That took about what 30 minutes of actual work and the rest of the time was just cooking time. Pretty good if you ask me. So, slowcooked beef like this was going to last 5 days in the fridge as long as it's stored in a nice airtight container and your fridge is nice and cold like 2°C. So, let's actually make something from all this prep that we've done. And the first thing we're going to make is a real simple white bean and beef stew. It takes literally minutes to pull together and it's absolutely delicious. It's way more delicious than it probably sounds even. So, maybe I should come up with a better name. Anyway, we're going to sauce the air pot here on. You can just use a saucepan instead. I got one red onion. We're just going to take the core out. And then we're going to slice it nice and thin. About a tablespoon of oil into your pot. Onions in. Come back in. Not in there. In. Silly duffer. Pinch of salt. Some pepper. Let them do their thing. Going to add our tall beef. Get some heat through that. Once our onions start to soften, we're going to add a bit of spice. So, just a little pinch of chili flakes or a big one if you want it real spicy. And some ground cumin. Maybe half a teaspoon ground cumin. I got one can of butter beans that I'm just going to drain and give a little rinse. Doesn't have to be too crazy. And they go. Now I got some of the cooking liquid from our brazed beef. Pour that in. Bring it to a light simmer. We don't want this sauce to completely evaporate. If it does, just add a little bit of water just to kind of let it down again. All we're trying to do at this point is to make sure that our beans are heated all the way through and so is our beef. All right, the last minute of cooking. Just got some clean baby spinach. And that goes. We just want that to w. We're not trying to get this to completely cook through. Just to wilt down. Done. There you go. Delicious white bean and braze beef stew with some baby spinach and delicious red onions. Honestly, what was that? Like 5 minutes. All right, let's have a taste. It's great. That stock's got heaps of depth of flavor even though it only took us 5 minutes to cook cuz of all the work we did on Sunday. Next up, one of my favorite things of all time, especially when you don't have much time. Quesadilla. Two flour tortillas. Don't at me. I know. Should be corn. Into a hot pan. a reasonably well seasoned like cast iron or carbon steel pan like this. Just let it toast a little bit on both sides first. And then we're going to add our pulled beef. Make sure it's not too thick or it won't get hot. And then diced white onion. I like a lot of white onion cuz I'm an oniony boy. That's like a half a white onion there. That's probably too much. I'd never give Caitlyn that much onion. She'd hate me forever. And then a lot of mozzarella or if you had like a a good Mexican cheese alternative or not really alternative. I guess mozzarella is the alternative. I put my fresh coriander in here again cuz I'm a little bit lazy when I'm eating this one. This is like one of my lazy meals and I eat it on the couch. And then another one on top. Now you're thinking, Andy, there's not enough spice in that. The spice comes from the sauce after. We'll toast that both sides. It'll take about 5 or 6 minutes. We don't want it super hot cuz we want to take our time to get a nice even toast and to make sure that that beef's hot and that cheese melts. Now, the truth be told, I would just eat it on the board, but we'll be c today and actually put it on a plate. Whatever hot sauce you like to use. I like to make my own. onto a plate. Done. Delicious beef quesadilla on the table in like 10 minutes and you haven't even broken a sweat. And the best part, you can just wipe that pan out with a piece of paper towel. Hardly any dishes. And that beef is super versatile. Like I've just shown you two dishes to use with it. But you could also just heat some up and put it over some steamed rice with like some cut tomatoes and hot sauce or some cut tomatoes, cucumber, and hot sauce. You could use one of those Japanese curry cubes. Use the beef as your protein. So many options. This is delicious. All right. So, how do we use this delicious kind of sugoey number we've got going on here? First thing I'm going to show you is chicken ru. So, worth mentioning all these recipes I'm doing one portion. You could easily double or quadruple it if you've got more than just you eating. We need two chicken thighs or around 150 g. We're going to slice it up. A little tip here. This big board that I've got is my kind of ready to eat board. So, I only like cut veggies and stuff on there or things that I'm comfortable that I can ready to eat. If I'm doing raw meat, I always use this board. So, when using a board at all, make sure you put something underneath it. So, I've got one of these mats here. You don't even need to use one of these. You could just use a wet paper towel or a wet tea towel. Put it underneath your board. That way, it won't move around and it's much safer when you're cutting. We're going to cut our chicken thigh reasonably small. The reason we're doing it small is cuz we want it to cook pretty quickly. It's Wednesday night. I want dinner on the table quickly. I don't want to wait for my chicken to cook. That's all the chopping we need to do for this whole recipe. Actually, that's a lie. I need to cut this in half later. I'm going to go wash my hands. Actually, I'll put that there. and then I'll [clears throat] go wash my hands and my knife and my board. So, I got a small saucepan over a high heat. Going to add about a tablespoon of olive oil. Let that get hot. We're going to add our chicken. Just spread it out and then leave it alone. Just leave me alone. Pinch of salt. Little bit of pepper. While that's going, we got our roni into boiling water. That will take like 5 minutes to cook max. All right. Going to stir our chicken. Scraping off all the fond on the bottom. Doesn't matter if it breaks up a little bit. We're going to add our little suga number. Now we just need to make sure that that chicken's cooked through and we're laughing. We're going to add the zest of a lemon, green olives. That's it. That's that chicken done. Honestly, that took like 4 minutes in the pan. That's good to go. Going to turn the heat off that. Put a lid on it so it stays warm. We will finish it with some lemon juice. I just need to pass this roni and we can plate. So you can just put the roni straight in the plate. I prefer to put it in with a sauce. Means you can just sit on the couch with one spoon. Little bit lemon juice. Stir your roni through. There we go. Stunning. Super quick braised chicken dish. Some lovely rzaroni, green olives and lemon. You could make that for someone who you love and tell them it took you all afternoon. I guarantee they'd believe you. Big fan of all that lemon juice and lemon zest in there. Super light, delicious, perfect meal on a summer's night. Delicious. Okay, baked eggs went down a thousand times, but this is a perfect example of how to use the sugo. We're going to dice up half a goes. Little bit of chili flake. Also not going to use a name for this dish. There's many names for it, but it doesn't matter what name you use. Someone's always going to say that you've done it wrong. So, now we're going to add our sugo. We just need to warm this through. We're not trying to cook anything. It's all cooked. It's all seasoned. Now, I've got an oven safe dish on a tray. Once this is hot, carefully pour it in. Give it a tap so it's nice and flat. I'm going to make a couple of wells. Just kind of pushing the shitzo around. Add some eggs and whole thing in the oven. 180°. It's probably going to take about 10 to 12 minutes. There you go. Out of the oven onto a plate. Some toasted jabata. It's not cha at all. It's ficasha, but any bread will do. Done. And hot tip. Don't try and eat this straight away. It'll be nuclear hot right now. Just relax it for 10 minutes. Yum. It's a classic for a reason. And finally, we're going to do like a lamb version of the rietoni and vodka sauce, which is a recipe I've never actually done. Not really too sure why. Maybe I just resisted the uh virality of it. Lamb mints into a hot pot. Break it up a little bit. Give it a season with salt. You could leave the lamb mints out of this all together. In that case, I'd just heat up the sugo sauce that we made and add a little bit of vodka to that. Or you could do it with beef mint. Or you could do it honestly with any real mints really. But I think lamb adds a nice flavor. Although I do understand that some people not huge fans of lamb. All right, I got some boiling water here. Just going to get our riatoni cooking. That'll take about 10 minutes. Going to add just a little bit of chili flakes. And if you didn't drink alcohol and or you didn't have any vodka around, you don't really need to add the vodka at all. It's kind of an inert flavor. However, if you do get a bit of fond on the bottom that you want to release off the bottom, you could just use a little bit of water to help that fond release before you add your sugo. All right, time to add your vodka. Be very careful. This is good chance it's going to flombeay, make a big flame. Don't panic. It'll burn out very quickly. All right, once that's put itself out, we're going to add the sugo. Going to bring that back to a simmer before we add a little bit of cream. Again, don't have any cream. You also don't have to add this. All right, we're going to add a little bit of thickened cream cuz America. Stir that through. All right, pasta is good to go. Give that a drain into our sauce. Some parmesan. Some torn up fresh basil. There's a reason why people say and chefs say tear up your basil. And it's cuz it kind of bruises it a bit and gets some of those oils out there and permeates your sauce a bit better. Time to plate. A little bit more basil. Odd numbers only. Stunning. Guess we better taste. See what all this fuss is about. There's no way that's not tasty. It's really good. And I like the addition of the lamb. Adds a great savoriness to it. It's so easy. You literally can cook that sauce faster than you can cook the pasta because all the work's done already. So, there you go. I hope that helps you organize your kitchen and get you ready to smash your goals in the new year. We've got an incredible year of content coming up and we can't wait to bring it to you all. Happy New Year.