Image source: Merlina McGovern
Yes, I’ve fallen prey to the TikTok meal-prepping algorithm. Every day, I see mesmerizing videos of perfectly fit folks happily prepping a week’s worth of meals. Meals that have tantalizing crunchy chicken bites, roasted broccoli, and just the right amount of rice. Like a little platoon of health marching into their refrigerators, the organized Tupperware containers promise a week of healthy eating and living.
That promise poked at my mind as I’ve been feeling a little sluggish lately. In my earlier weight-loss journey, I had taken to writing down every single calorie I ingested. Over time, that task became much too onerous, and I just gave it up. And, as I did, I could feel myself overindulging and eating poorly. Now, I’ve developed a rhythm. I don’t have to journal every single day, but when I find myself feeling sluggish and out of sorts, it’s OK for me to start journaling again. And I’m journaling not to track every single calorie, which is honestly soul-sucking and apparently not very accurate or useful according to this Scientific American article, but to just keep track of the meals that I eat when I eat them.
So, with pen in hand, I was ready to start journaling. Sadly, there weren't any easy meals to eat in my fridge, so I hopped online and started searching. One of the first recipes that popped up was this one from Healthy Fitness Meals: Easy Honey Garlic Chicken Meal Prep | Healthy Fitness Meals.
Now, the picture in that link looks so much more enticing than how my dishes actually came out. I’m sure I’m like most people, and I don’t have a ton of perfectly matched food containers — Where did all my lids go? Probably the same household hell where all our missing socks go. I also swapped out rice for quinoa, but otherwise, I kept everything in the recipe as is.
My chicken came out almost neon orange, and the broccoli was a bit bland. I did add a bit of soy sauce to the broccoli to help with the blandness, but there were some other things that were a bit off about the recipe.
The recipe calls for you to dip 1-inch pieces of chicken breast into a scrambled egg and then lightly coat them with corn flour. The result, after I pan-fried the chicken, was not super crispy, so I think next time I’ll leave the egg out and just coat the chicken in corn flour.
The chicken breast was also not as flavorful as I’d like, so next time, I’ll swap that out with chicken thighs. Next, the recipe just calls for salt and pepper to use for your broccoli, but this recipe just screams out for soy sauce. Finally, I used white jasmine rice instead of the quinoa listed in the recipe because that is what I had. Next time, I’ll use my favorite Trader Joe’s frozen brown rice. My mother (who used to cook a big pot of white sticky rice in the morning so that we could have it all day long with any meal, including breakfast) hates brown rice, but I’ve grown to really like this particular variety. It’s softer than other types, though still chewier than white rice, and while it doesn’t soak in sauces like its more refined cousin, I like the texture a bit better.
I actually had the second batch for lunch today, and I was surprised that it tasted a bit better the next day. The flavors seemed to have soaked into the chicken, and the sweet, salty, and spicy mixture of the sauce with the broccoli and chicken was quite palatable. I think with just a few substitutions, this could be a regular meal-prep dish.
What are your favorite meal-prep recipes? List them in the comments below.
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