Big Batch Cooking

The secret to sticking with a CLEAN EATING plan is a simple as learning how to become a rockstar at BIG BATCH COOKING

Stop Chasing Wellness is an online wellness coaching company founded by two Holistic Health Coaches, Gina and Kristin. Be sure to check out all of our offerings including our book, Stop Chasing Wellness; Create It, and our growing catalog of Hormone Specific coaching courses. All of our courses and offerings are designed to help you feel and live your best life in a simplified way that works for you. You can find Stop Chasing Wellness on Facebook and Instagram

Transcript

Hello there. Welcome to the Common Sense Nutrition Podcast. This podcast today is going to be
all about big batch cooking.
My Common Sense Nutrition Podcast, I'm really excited that you're here with me today, says
a lot about the fact that you want to learn a little bit more about ways to improve your
health and hopefully I'm going to share some tips and information with you today that will
help you just make that one little tiny bit easier. And today, like I said, we're going
to be talking about big batch cooking. I'm going to share some really great ideas with
you guys, just some benefits of it we'll discuss, share with you some places that I go to find
ideas to help inspire me when I'm looking to do some sort of a big batch something.
And I'm just going to share some tips and some ideas for just my top big batch meal
ideas. But before I get started, I wanted to just remind everybody to go ahead and check
out my website, commonsensenutritionaz.com for more information on what I do as a health
coach.
I'm excited about this topic. I feel like it's really important for us to get our heads
around this because part of what I do as a health coach is I teach a clean eating program
where I lead a program every month for 10 days every month where we're really trying
to teach people to make some changes to their lifestyle that become habits. And those habits
are the things that contribute to the long lasting change in people's lives. And one
thing I really instill in people is that every meal that you make does not have to be like
you're reinventing the wheel and you're not Julie a child in the kitchen unless you want
to be, but most of us aren't. And most of us just don't have the time for that. So big
batch cooking is something that I really feel like it's just going to help all of us if
you embrace it and get better at it. I hear so many people say that they don't like to
cook or that they can't cook. And I think it's maybe because they're just making it
too difficult on themselves. Like they maybe have envisioned sitting down and having to
like search for and find all these recipes and come up with this crazy list of ingredients
and it just then it becomes overwhelming. And then, you know, when we are in overwhelm,
we shut down, right? It's just how our brains work. So if I can encourage you to do things
that are making life a little bit easier for you, this is one of the top tips that I have
is big batch cooking. And I really feel like it's really pertinent right now. I'm recording
this a couple days before Thanksgiving. And, you know, that's a humongous meal. And one
of the things I love about Thanksgiving is that I know that when I cook that meal, I'm
not going to have to cook really I'm not going to have to like make, you know, go grocery
shopping and come up with another menu. My hope and goal is to have that meal kind of
get us through the weekend, right? Thanksgiving's on Thursday. I'm going to make some leftover
I'm going to make soup out of the leftovers. We're going to have sandwiches. We'll probably
just, you know, heat and eat some of the leftovers. We just use it up as much as possible. So
I just I think it's been on my mind because of Thanksgiving. So I just wanted to share
some other ideas with you. Because if it's like just like, let's talk about some of the
benefits. For example, first of all, like I said, it's a time saver. And one thing I
love about this is that it will I mean, Thanksgiving meal aside, we know that's not the healthiest,
right? But it but big batch cooking in general, really can help you stick with healthy choices.
We know that, you know, a failure to plan is a plan to fail. You've heard that cliche
line a million times. But when you have you when you have something that you've already
cooked, and then you're going to reheat it or reuse it or repurpose it, it just helps
you stick to your your healthy meal plan, your clean eating plan. Because something's
already cooked, or at least partway done for you. So we make bad choices when we don't
have options in front of us, and we get desperate, right? You know, you just then you're like
eating everything that's not nailed down because you're just hungry, and you haven't planned
anything. So it helps you stick to those healthy choices and really stick to a clean eating
plan. And the simplicity of it like big batch cooking doesn't have to be difficult or cumbersome,
it doesn't have to take hours or all day, it can really just be it can be a grand scale
like Thanksgiving dinner, or it can be just simple things like, you know, cooking extra
of, you know, if I'm cooking a chicken breast, I might as well cook two or three chicken
breasts, things like that. And we'll talk a little bit more in detail about that. And
one of my favorite things is less mess. I just I love that. So over the weekend, I cooked
up some I we grilled some chicken. And I had some leftover. And last night, my Monday nights
are usually really busy. I've got a conference call and my Mondays are just kind of nuts
anyway. And when my day ends with a conference call, that means I don't have a lot of time
to think about dinner, but I really love dinner and I don't want to skip it. So I was like,
Okay, let's take this leftover chicken out of the fridge. I chopped it up and used a
mixture of just a homemade taco seasoning, which you can look up online anywhere. And
I put it in a skillet, added some taco seasoning to the chicken, and we made homemade tacos
out of it. Super easy. And it was in that you kind of feel like you're cheating when
you like you've hit the you found the cheat code button, which is it's awesome. And it's
just it's less mess and less time. It's just awesome. Such a time saver. And I mean, you
guys, so many of you guys are busy, busy moms, working moms, you have kids, kids have sports.
I mean, there's just so many reasons why we're being pulled in so many different directions.
And big batch cooking is a lifesaver for, you know, busy people and maybe not even so
busy people alike. But I'm gonna tell you guys a little bit. I want to tell you how
I how do you guys find these ideas? How do you come up with, you know, where do you find
the recipes? Where do you find the inspiration? One of my favorite and I've said this before,
one of my favorite resources is Pinterest. I have Pinterest account. I have a couple
of Pinterest boards. You can find me on Pinterest. Common Sense Nutrition on Pinterest. And actually
probably should put together a big batch, a big batch cooking board for all of you guys
to follow. And I'll start working on that. That sounds kind of fun. But when I'm in Pinterest,
I typically like you can search do a Pinterest search for big batch cooking, big batch meals,
big back, big batch, you know, breakfast, lunch, dinner, search by category can even
do big batch snacks. In Pinterest you can pretty much put any title in there and something's
going to come up. You can also search in there for sheet pan dinners. And you can search
things like lunch for a crowd or dinner for a crowd, breakfast for a crowd, or make ahead
meals kind of thing. And I really like to search for those ideas. You know, add the
word vegetarian or vegan to it. I actually like the word vegan better because typically
I find that when you're searching for vegetarian in the category, in the search field, you
get a lot of vegetarian meals unfortunately are high. You get a lot of pasta, you get
a lot of cheese, you get a lot of just stuff that's not really healthy. It just technically
isn't from animal protein. So I really like the term vegan better. But I'm not a vegetarian
or a vegan. So when I'm searching and trying to prepare big batch meals, I actually like
that I can do, you know, animal protein in bigger batches so that I can like kind of
cook it and freeze it to have it so I don't have to do that every single time. It's a
time saver like we said. So I want to tell you guys a little bit about some of the, just
to throw off some big batch meal ideas and things that you may want to search for. Like
I love any type of meatball. And when you search for meatball, you can do meatball in
any ethnicity. So you can search for like Asian meatballs, Italian meatballs, Greek
meatballs, Mexican meatballs. And when you make meatballs, it's kind of, it's work, right?
You got to get the ground meat and you got to put all this extra stuff in it and you
got to mix it up and then you got to put them into balls and bake them or cook them somehow.
I love doing meatballs. Anytime I have a recipe that calls for them, I usually make a double
batch because I can put them in the freezer even before the cooking process. If you, one
of those retractable cookie scoops, I have a couple different sizes which is awesome
for meatballs. And I scoop them out, put them on sheet pans like on wax paper or parchment
paper on a sheet pan and put them in the freezer. When they're frozen, just pop them off the
sheet pan and put them into Ziploc bags, label the bag, put them in your freezer. Those are
great for anything. You know, I mean, if you're going to cook them in or, you know,
redo that, whatever that recipe was over again and the meatball part's already done. So that
saves a huge amount of time. I'm an Italian New Yorker. I love making big batch spaghetti
sauce and freezing it. If I'm going to make spaghetti sauce, it's really not an all day
process either. It's super simple. But if I'm going to make spaghetti sauce, I make
a double, triple, quadruple batch. And I put that also, once it cools, I section it
off into one cup or two cup scoops or whatever into, you know, Ziploc bags and also put that
in the freezer. And then I label the bag whether or not I put them, sometimes I put the meatballs
right in the sauce, sometimes I don't. So that's a time saver. And if you got your meatballs
already done, I mean, that's the simplest dinner already. Meatballs in the freezer,
sauce in the freezer, done. And when it comes to, you know, spaghetti sauce and meatballs,
you don't always have to serve it over pasta. You can serve that over, like maybe all you
have to do is heat up a spaghetti squash and thaw the sauce in the meatballs and that's
dinner, right? Or you could put your spaghetti sauce, you know, do like some sort of like
a chicken parm kind of thing and put it in the oven to bake with, you know, bake it in
the sauce. That's a great idea. Soups are just one of the easiest big batch meal things
you can make. If I'm making some sort of a soup and I don't like to make like cream
based or a potato based soup and freeze it because they don't really freeze well. They
don't thaw well and the potatoes kind of fall apart. And anytime I'm making soup to put
in the freezer, if there's pasta in it, I always leave that pasta out for the freezer
portion so that as it thaws, because, you know, think about that pasta is just going
to kind of fall apart as it thaws. So, but anytime any vegetable based soup or anything
like that is just, if I have a recipe for soup and I'm going to go through the trouble
to make it, if I think it's going to freeze well, I will make a double batch or more and
freeze it and just use those. Like you can buy containers, put it in in bags if it's
cool. But I think bags can get a little leaky with liquids as they thaw. But I love putting
soups in just quart sized mason jars and store those in my freezer. Breakfast is really great
also. I know my son is a swimmer and when he was in high school swimming and he had
to get up early in the morning for early morning practice, breakfast, use a muffin tin and
make like little egg type omelet things. And those are super easy. Just line your muffin
tins, like spray them, put whatever you would put in a scrambled egg or in an omelet in
the muffin cups. Like you can put ham and broccoli and cheese and whatever, spinach,
whatever bell peppers are great, what other vegetables you would put in a scrambled egg
and then scramble basically like one egg per muffin cup and pop them in the oven, you know,
350 oven for 15 minutes or so, check them and take those out and put those in a bag
in the freezer. Pull out a couple each week so that they're thawed. I mean, cause those
are actually great just to eat them at room temperature on the go. Those are a great grab
and go breakfast or any of those. Like if you search for a recipe for like those baked
oatmeal cups, those freeze awesome and that's a great grab and go breakfast even if you're
not really, you know, reheating it. I also love to just do big sheet pans of oven roasted
vegetables like root vegetables, carrots, potatoes, onions, you know, beets and parsnips
and rutabaga. Toss them in olive oil and salt and pepper or any kind of seasoning blend.
Throw it in a sheet pan in the oven and roast them and then you can have them for your meat.
Like maybe that's part of your dinner tonight, but then save that because those are great.
The leftover veggies are great just to throw on top of a tossed salad the next day. And
I mean with, you can even use like if you, if you have meatballs or you have leftover
protein, like maybe you have cooked extra chicken breast or you have, you know, maybe
roasted a whole chicken and you have some of those leftover roasted veggies, pretty
much anything you have leftover, you can turn into like, you know, like a Buddha bowl. One
of those bowls, everybody, it's kind of the latest craze, right? Everybody's doing bowls
and you make it a theme. You make it a topic. You, like I, like I said before about the
meatballs, make it an ethnic, like make a, you know, an Asian Buddha bowl or make an
Italian Buddha bowl and make it a theme. So maybe do some rice at the bottom and some
Italian meatballs with some, you know, uh, you know, roasted zucchini and bell peppers.
Just make it an Italian theme. Maybe take some of the spaghetti sauce and put that over
the top. Super great make ahead ideas. And you have all these things, you can repurpose
them. So it's not like you're eating the same exact thing, you know, meal after meal that
can get really boring, but you know, even that is okay too. It's better than, better
than resorting to the junk food. Um, really any type of stew or chili of course is great.
I love using my instant pot for things like that. And again, just freeze your leftover
portions, pretty much any, um, you know, any meal that you're making for dinner. Like
I love to make sure on purpose that I have leftovers so that my tomorrow's lunch is covered
for myself, my husband. It's great to just have that like, okay, we have extra, put it
in a container, put it in the fridge, here's lunch for tomorrow. So that is a huge time
saver. And, um, I do have a Pinterest board for sheet pan meals, which is also, I love
sheet pan meals. Throw everything on a sheet pan, do a Pinterest search for that and see
what comes up. Tons of ideas. Throw everything on a sheet pan, throw it in the oven. And
that is a great way to just do extra, do two sheet pans worth and on, you know, then section
it off as you pull it out of the oven. Like here's some for dinner tonight and intentionally
section off a container of that for, you know, for your lunches for two or three days.
So, um, you know, like I said the other day, I did the chicken, I did chicken and I made
tacos out of the, out of the leftover chicken. So these are such, I hope that these are some
helpful ideas for you guys and, um, that you can, that you find this to be, you know, helpful
and, um, save you guys some time. Cause this is definitely stuff that we do promote when
we are, when we're teaching people our clean eating program each month. And it's stuff
that making these little changes, thinking like this, as you are planning your meals
each week is a really great way to just help you stay on track. And these are the things
that we try to teach people in that plan. So, um, you know, hopefully we've, we've covered
some and given you some compelling reasons why this is a great idea. Really just, you
know, the time saving aspect of it, the less mess and helping you stay on a clean eating
program are huge benefits. It's easy to find these ideas. Honestly, just search Pinterest
or Google, but Pinterest is my favorite searching for big batch, you know, meal ideas. And you
know, when you are in the mode of planning your meals and making your menu and your grocery
list, if you can ask yourself if this can be doubled or frozen, then do it and, and
then save time because maybe once a week you make a big batch something, but then the following
week you have stuff to take out of your freezer and your freezer becomes this like rotating
door of, of different options for you. So, um, I am, I'm hoping that that was really
helpful and I would love to know your thoughts and you know what, um, if you guys also have
other big batch cooking tips, tricks, and ideas to share, I would love to know what
those are as well.
Wrap things up here for us today, but let me give you guys just a really big thank you
and I'm so appreciative that you guys took the time to listen to this and, um, I hope
that you really got some value out of it. So thank you for joining me and listening
and I hope you found it to be a value. And if you do like what you hear, I hope that
you'll share this with a friend and I hope that you will subscribe to my podcast so that
you never miss any of the tips or information that I share. And in the meantime, if you'll
be sure to please check out my website at commonsensenutritionaz.com and while you're
in there, feel free to shoot me a message. Let me know what you'd like to touch on in
future podcasts or anything that you'd like to know more about. I'm always interested
to know what you need and what support I can help you with. So, and while you're in there,
be sure to check out that programs button in my website to learn more about that clean
eating program that I lead each month. I've taken my knowledge of holistic nutrition and
health coaching and preventive health and I combine that with my knowledge of different
dietary theories. And I use this to help coach you through that lifestyle program with
that 10 day monthly jumpstart. So I'm super excited for you to check it out. Message me
through my website once again, commonsensenutritionaz.com to get started. And until next time, this
is Kristen Peterson. Thank you for listening to my Common Sense Nutrition podcast.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai