One of my favorite hacks to save money is cooking at home. Cooking is a passion of mine and it helps with my healthy living passion. This leads me to my secret weapon of meal prep.
For this weeks meal prep, I choose a simple chicken and vegetable meal.
Ingredients
- Chicken
- Broccoli
- Mushrooms
- Carrots
- Green Onions
Now let’s get right into the seasoning and how I cooked this weeks meal.
As far as cooking goes let’s break down this by steps…
- Put thawed chicken in crockpot on high for 4 hours.
- Place chicken on baking pan after it’s done in the crockpot.
- Put the chicken in the oven on 380 degrees for about 12 minutes or until desired crispiness. As you put the chicken in also put the broccoli, carrots, and mushrooms in the oven on a separate baking pan.
That’s really all there is to it as far as cooking goes. The seasoning is super simple as well.
Seasonings
- Pepper
- Mrs. Dash Onion & Herb
- Great Value Parmesan Garlic Wing Sauce
- Italian Seasoning Packet
- Kraft Shredded Parmesan Cheese
I will also break down how I seasoned this step by step…
Chicken
- Once the chicken is placed in the crockpot add the parmesan garlic wing sauce (I only put about half the bottle if that in with the chicken).
- Add Italian Seasoning packet before you cook the chicken in the crockpot.
- Add the Mrs. Dash Onion & Herb and pepper right before you place the chicken in the oven.
Vegetables
- Place vegetables in a bowl and add oil (this is so the seasoning sticks to them). I personally use avocado oil.
- Place vegetables on the baking pan and add Mrs. Dash Onion & Herb and the Kraft Shredded Parmesan Cheese.
It’s really just that simple for the seasoning and cooking of this meal. Here is what the final product looks like…
Now I’m sure this would be a great read just for a new idea on an easy to make at home meal. Yet I think I can make this even better by breaking down the costs. This, of course, is just an estimate. This is due to some things are hard to calculate like the seasoning that lasts me for many weeks at a time.
Costs
- Chicken – $5
- Vegetables – $6
- Seasoning – $3
Totaling right around $14 for eight meals. Or about $1.75 a meal.
All of this is great to know but the real question is “How does it taste?”. Let me tell you I was a little skeptical on this weeks flavor for the chicken. I must admit to my surprise it’s fantastic!
I thought it would be fun to now do a cost comparison to eating a meal out. Why compare costs? Because comparing things often gives me the biggest impact on finances.
Comparison Cost
The above meal is from Subway and cost me $5.87. Maybe not the best comparison because of the drink added to it yet I believe the overall impact is there. I can make three of the above meal preps for the cost of this one Subway meal. What I’m saying is I could feed myself for an entire day for the cost of this one meal at Subway. That’s a huge impact on my bottom dollar every month. That’s a huge impact on my ability to feed my money making machine. Remember every dollar we spend is a dollar we can’t save or invest. Every dollar we invest in the market (hopefully in the form of low-cost index funds like the S&P 500 fund) historically has had roughly around a conservative 0.07 cent return. Well, I think that covers comparison costs very nicely.
Let’s wrap this up with a few final thoughts. I’m not preaching to anyone to never eat out. By all means, I obviously eat out and everyone is entitled to do what they want with their money. I hope this post will give my readers some new ideas for quick, easy, healthy, tasty and relatively cheap meals they can make from home to save time and money. It’s certainly saved me time and has allowed me to invest more money because I spend way less on food. I love sharing my wins and loses with everyone as learning points to hopefully impact others lives as lessons learned. I’m not sure how often or how many of these meal prep posts I’ll be making. I already have been slacking on my writing for my blog. Yet I like the idea of doing them once a week or every other week until I run out of new meal ideas.
Hopefully, everyone enjoyed the read and tries this meal out. What are some meal ideas you use that you would like to share?