Meals for a week! :)

Have you ever watched Food Network and the cook is making a week’s worth of meals from one main dish and thought  “yeah, right”? I have many times. So, when I set up last week’s meal plan, I decided to arrange it around that idea. The result: I LOVED it! It was sooo easy to do AND made making other meals easy too.  There was 0 temptation for ordering out- yes, I do that at times.

Here’s how it went:

 Sunday, I bought a whole chicken at Giant Eagle. At BOGO, I wasn’t going to pass it up; plus, I needed to use my foodperks before they expired.

Monday was roast in the crock pot. I figured since we were going to have chicken 3 days in a row, we’d want some red meat first.

Tuesday morning, I rinsed the chicken off and took out the giblets inside- making sure to rinse the cavity really well.  Threw it in the crockpot with about a cup of water. I wanted to have some broth for chicken soup on Thursday.  Got home, the house smelled scrumptious and we had chicken, long grain rice and green beans. Delish! The hardest part on this day was getting the chicken out of the crock pot. It’s really tender and falls apart easily.

  How to remove the meat from the bones…. Just lift the chicken out of the pot! Literally, the bones fall out. I simply took the bones out and put them on 1 plate and the meat on another. Some pieces were a little messy but it didn’t take terribly long- say 15 min total.  I then shredded the chicken and separated it evenly into two 1 qt bags that were labeled according to the meal.  You could freeze it at this point if you wanted, but I knew I was going to use it so I just put it in the fridge.

Wednesday:  Grabbed the bag of chicken for enchiladas and tossed the chicken into the skillet with the spices, salsa/tomatoes mixture and anything else. When it was warmed, I put it in tortilla shells and then wrapped it, placing it neatly in the pan seam side down. I poured the enchilada sauce over it and then baked it for 15 minutes. The whole meal took 25 minutes to cook- including beans.  We had some left for 2 lunches (a total of 8 enchiladas- depending on the size of shell you use you could get more or less).

Thursday: Took out the bag of chicken and added it to the ingredients for homemade chicken noodle soup. Bought nice crusty French bread. Let everything cook for about 25 min (start to finish) and all was good.

Thanks to my friend, Anna, who brought me some of the most delicious zucchini bread. It was a perfect dessert!