fresh thyme

Meal Prep: Balsamic Glazed Grilled Chicken

March 21, 2017 by Dana

Happy first day of Spring! My heart is happy!

What better way to welcome the first day of spring then to do some healthy meal prep with this Balsamic Glazed Grilled Chicken! This is an easy, simple, and delicious way to not complicate eating healthy. With just a few ingredients you can have meals for the week, which means plenty of time to get outside and enjoy the Spring weather!

Truth: Everyone can meal prep. EVERYONE. You don’t need to be a super healthy, fitness guru to meal prep. You can be a Mommy like me who is tired of eating your children’s leftovers for lunch. You could also be a working 20-something who is sick and tired of spending so much money on eating out. Or a middle aged man who takes lunch to the office. There are a million scenarios here, and the bottom line is everyone can meal prep to make their lives easier.

For me personally, I need structure to my eating habits to maintain my healthy eating goals. If I have an open-ended day with no plan, sure enough I find myself snacking on everything in sight. I’m not “dieting,” rather I’m just trying to find a nice balance between foods I really love, and foods I should be eating more of.

Should be eating more of = greens, lean protein, fruits

Foods I love = Mac n cheese, cheese fries, cheeseburgers, anything with sugar

See how this could turn into a serious problem!?! Creating a balance for me is just making plans, like this Balsamic Glazed Grilled Chicken. It took me less than 45 minutes from start to finish. 45 minutes! Now I have lunch for the rest of the week. That means no reaching snacks to fill me up. I am armed and ready with a plan of filling half of my plate with these beautiful greens and fruit, and the other with a protein.

LunchBots for Storing Meals

I mentioned on my Planetbox vs. LunchBots review that I love these little boxes! What I love the most is that they are not plastic. Secondly, they are super easy to load your food in, and stack up in the refrigerator to store without taking up a ton of space. For this meal I would suggest using the uno or duo. I used both and they worked like a charm! Amazon has a nice variety of their products, so here is the link to the uno that I used. For a larger portion, they also have their Bento line, which is fabulous too! If you don’t have any reservations about plastics, there are also a ton of meal prep containers on Amazon that work just like the LunchBots.

Products from Amazon.com

The Recipe

The best part of this recipe by far is the balsamic glaze! It is simply just balsamic vinegar and a bit of sugar reduced to a thick glaze. This takes about 15 minutes and will make your entire house smell like vinegar (warning). It is so good though, I didn’t even care!

When the chicken was just about done grilling, I brushed each piece with the glaze, then removed from the heat. The glaze will run off of the chicken when it is piping hot, but after it cooled a bit, I re-brushed with glaze to make sure it was nice and glaze-y.

Each container contains:

1 grilled chicken breast
2 cups dark leafy greens
1/2-1 cup strawberries/grapes
1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese
additional balsamic glaze for drizzling

If I were packing this to-go, I would use a LunchBots dips container for dressing or additional glaze.

Pennsylvania Dutch Chicken Pot Pie

March 13, 2017 by Dana

This Pennsylvania Dutch Chicken Pot Pie post has been a long time coming! I haven’t mentioned too many times on the blog that I am from a small town in Central Pennsylvania. I grew up about 45 minutes north of Harrisburg. I’m no world traveler, however I do know a lot of people think of chicken pot pie as a literal pie with chicken and vegetables in it. I always thought of Chicken Pot Pie as the Pennsylvania Dutch version. I like to call it the “soup kind.” 🙂

Truth be told, growing up we really didn’t have any family recipes. My parents weren’t the kind to make dinner and have the family sit around the table. I have no idea why, but I do cherish these moments with my own family now. I wish I could say this was a generational type of recipe, passed down from my Grandmother, but it really isn’t! My grandmother is Polish. What I remember her making were traditional Polish dishes. Very few times have a seen her cook anything else, mostly because we see her at large family gatherings where family members expect the good Polish stuff!

So the cat is out of the bag. This was not passed down to me by anyone. This is my own recipe that I created as an adult who wanted to eat traditional PA Dutch pot pie. I grew up eating it in the elementary school cafeteria, and it was awesome! This is a quicker version of some traditional recipes because I am not making my own noodles and stock.

Around here most grocery stores carry these noodles, however I have no idea if grocery stores elsewhere carry them. You can purchase them on Amazon here.
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Recipe Tips

If you have ever made a homemade soup, you will be very well prepared to make this because the recipe is pretty much identical to a soup recipe. I do cook the noodles in the broth, which helps all of the flavors come together, and thickens up the broth a bit.

For the chicken, I just roasted my chicken in the oven prior to making the pot pie. I have in the past, boiled my chicken and made a homemade stock, then prepared the pot pie from the stock. I’ll just be honest and say I like this version better. It is easier and tastes the same, if not better to me. Slow cooking broth all day is a great thing to do if you have the time, but lately I haven’t. I wanted to share a chicken pot pie recipe that tastes great, but doesn’t take hours upon hours to make! To make this even quicker, you could pick up a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store and cut out the roasting step. Your family will never know!

Homestyle Sweet Potato and Chicken Soup

October 8, 2014 by Dana

Sweet Potatoes. Nutritious. Delicious. Cheap. Versatile. AMAZING!

But seriously… this soup. The perfect balance of sweet and savory in a big, warm mug waiting for you on the table with a pretty fall decoration in the middle and a pumpkin spice latte on the side! In my house you can go ahead and just throw that pretty fall decoration on the floor and rip it apart because if you haven’t noticed I have 3 boys. They do that. A lot. Well, basically I should just take my pretty decorations and throw them in the trash myself because that’s where they’ll end up. That will save me the hassle of having to clean anything up, right? Boys!

One thing I LOVE about this soup is the color that comes out of the carrots and sweet potatoes to make it the perfect fall orange. Of course, being the only woman in my house nobody else cares about the beautiful color of my soup, so I have to make pictures like the following to bask in my orange glory while others cheer. Is this happening? Please… anyone… someone out there in internet-land, do you care that my soup is orange? Please say yes! 🙂 Please give me a big *nice soup* while we both glance at that pretty bowl!

Thanks, you just made my day! Now I can get over the fact that I will not be displaying any pretty fall decorations on my table until the baby is 18. That’s 17 years of decoration-less fall’s I have yet to endure. But hey, at least I have my orange soup!

And can we talk nutrition for a second because this soup ain’t no rice cake (thanks Blake Shelton for that one). Sweet potatoes = one of the most nutritious foods in the world. That’s right, it tops many other foods labeled “super foods” so I think that makes it even more acceptable to eat numerous bowls in one sitting while burning my mouth because I’m too impatient to wait for it to cool down. Totally acceptable! Until I’m old and have no taste buds left. Then I’ll have to go to restaurants and asks the cooks to heat my soup up over and over and over again until it is boiling in the microwave and my old ass is finally happy. Sound like a real life scenario? That’s because it is! I know, I know, the old people always get a bad rap but seriously I can’t even tell you how many times a day this happened while I was cooking in restaurants. So remember folks, wait until your food cools down or you’ll be THAT old person some day!

*No old people’s feelings were hurt in the making of this post. 🙂

And one more thing.. I found these crackers today. TWO ingredients! 100% whole wheat and salt. Ummm helllllooo healthy cracker I’ve been looking for forever. Thank you for coming into my life today so I could dip you in my soup and take pictures of it. Things always work themselves out perfectly, don’t they?

*I used my Homemade Chicken Stock in this recipe.