A number of the meals we made last weekend were simply a matter of taking fresh meat (chicken breasts and legs, pork roast and pork chops) and putting them in a marinade of some sort. I did a little bit of research into marinades. I’m not a brilliant cook, but once I figured out the basic combo, marinades aren’t that hard. Basically you use some sort of oil (extra virgin olive oil for me) and some sort of acidic fruit juice (lemon, lime, grapefruit, pineapple). Then you spice it how you want it.
At first Ken and I stuck with recipes. Italian dressing with spices added or olive oil, lemon juice and a list of spices. Then I realized we have all these great Penzey spices, why are we trying to figure out what we want, let’s just use them. We already knew some combos we liked so we did a bunch of those. Then we looked at what was left and figured out what would work good for the meat we were putting in the marinade.
I have no idea whether they will be good, bad, or somewhere in between. It will be fun to try and see. This week we’ve had three of the meals we prepped. I think Ken has enjoyed the quicker prep time. Tonight we had very delicious chicken legs with fries.
Next time I want to plan out more of what we do. I feel like we could have worked more efficiently had we done things slightly differently. This was a trial run though and it went well. Most importantly, so far the food has turned out really good and prep has been faster.
Next step for me is to look for recipes which can be easily prepped ahead like this and try them out. It would be nice to add to our array of meals and step away from what we always have and into some new favorites.