Freezer and Slow Cooker Friendly! Healthier version of Indian Butterchicken.

Hi guys! 

Are you ready for some more freezer meal ideas?

In my last blog post I had made mention of my Indian Butter Chicken Recipe as part of my freezer meal stash. It's one of my favorites. Easy to make, easy to freeze, delicious to eat. So I'm sharing!

This recipe is dairy free, using coconut milk instead of heavy cream, and simple enough to add veggies. I added sweet potatoes to the last batch I froze. Besides the taste, I love this recipe because it is so easy to throw together in the morning and slow cook all day. It also freezes well so you can toss all the ingredients in a freezer bag or container and you have a meal ready to throw into the slow cooker without prepping freezer meals all day. You can also control the heat. The more spices you add, the richer the spice and flavor. You can back it off some by just putting enough to get the flavor in there. Either way it is simple and inexpensive. The only thing that can get pricey is buying the spices if you don't have them already. I always have these particular spices on hand because I use them so much. Walmart has a good deal on their organic brand of spices.

I usually use boneless skinless chicken thighs but this last time I used boneless skinless breasts. Whether you are dumping this recipe into the slow cooker, or dumping it into a freezer bag, it is just everything all together...dump it.

You can make this recipe smaller or double it. Once I had made some in the slow cooker, not previously frozen, and ended up with a ton of the sauce left over so once it was cooled, I poured it into a freezer bag and added more frozen chicken. Then I had a whole meal in the freezer for another night.

Let's get started!

1.5 lbs Chicken Thighs or Breasts, tenderloins are good too (boneless and skinless)

1 can of Coconut Milk

1 can of Tomato Sauce

3 T Garam Masala

1 T Curry Powder

2 t Corriander

1 t Turmeric

1/2  t Cinnamon

Salt and Pepper to taste

(Remember, I don't measure my spices, so this is my estimate. Don't be scared to play around and add more or less. I just take a sniff of mine and test out a finger dip to see if it is where I like it)

Pot of rice to serve over

Use organic if you can!

Place chicken in your slow cooker. About half of the typical 2.5-3 lb bag from the grocery store. 

In a large bowl, stir together cans of coconut milk and tomato sauce.

Add all spices and mix together gently.

Pour mixture over chicken and cook on low for 8 hours.

Chicken will pull apart easily with a fork when done. Serve chunks of chicken and your sauce over basmati rice (or any other rice). Sweet potatoes and squash would be a great addition to this, or even broccoli and potatoes. 

You can make big batches to feed company or smaller batches if you are a smaller family. I would suggest to just double the recipe. You can use the whole bag of chicken and you just need an extra can of coconut milk and tomato sauce plus the extra spices. You will be happy you did when you freeze one and have dinner ready for a busy day next week. I love that you can freeze it after cooking or before and it is faithfully there waiting for you on a busy or just lazy weeknight.

Look at these gorgeous left overs! Tender chicken, beautifully rich sauce.

Simple, delicious, dairy free.

Let me know if you try it!

Weekly salad and juicing prep in less than an hour, plus some other tips!

This post is a mix of things, but it is all things food prep related. We have some lunches, some dinners, some sauces, and some stashes of veggie scraps for later use.

This morning I was able to prepare 4 days of salads for lunch, along with 4 days of juicing while the kids were getting dressed and ready for school. I'm gonna say it took about 35 minutes. I only did 4 days due to it being Wednesday already. I can start over on Sunday with something new.

Meal prep really saves me in more than one way. When I don't do it, I always wish that I had. I typically prep lunches like salads, quinoa and sauteed veggies, or a spicy veggie soup. The obvious reason is that it saves time. You don't have to make those particular meals that day, it is already done for you. You either pull it out of the fridge and enjoy, or heat and eat! The other benefit for me is that it makes it easier to eat better. If I already have a healthy meal or juice ready to enjoy, I'm not going to pull out a frozen burrito and eat it while I wade around in the waters of food guilt. Plus, you feel organized, which for me brings a little spark into my day.

Let's start with this week's lunch. It all started when I was preparing make ahead freezer meals yesterday.

I spent a few hours cooking a few meals to freeze. Keep in mind, I am a veggie loving fool, but the rest of my family won't eat them! My oldest son will eat most veggies, but when I make wonderfully healthy and delicious meals, they are usually just for me. So dinners are usually pretty plain. Any recipe I share you can easily add veggies too, if you're lucky enough to live with veggie lovers. I made 2 nights of Ground Turkey Chili, 2 nights of Indian Butter Chicken, and a night of Enchilada Casserole with homemade Enchilada Sauce. When the time comes, all I will have to do it pull it out in the morning to defrost and heat later. I can make cornbread waffles for the chili and make rice to accompany the butter chicken. The Enchilada Casserole is great with beans which are easy in the crock pot. Here's a little peek at how the freezer stash is coming along.

This is 3 nights worth of butter chicken (which I will share in another post). You simply thaw on the counter and dump the bag into your crockpot. Serve over rice and add some naan bread and you have a delicious Indian cuisine. This time I added large pieces of sweet potato to the bag, it should be a healthy, taste of sweet added to the recipe.

I have 2 bags of chili where I used half ground turkey and half organice grass fed beef. I have a bag of white chicken chili and a bag of enchilada casserole.

Here I have some things I regularly freeze so that I can either salvage them before they go bad or I've made extra of something.

I like to grate zucchini and freeze it. Remember I told you that my family won't eat veggies? Grated zucchini is perfect for hiding in meals. I use a peeler first to get rid of the dark green color, I swear to you that they will see it and it will blow my cover. I grate it like cheese and freeze it flat in a baggie. These baby bella mushrooms I got at Costco are delicious but I could not use them all in time when it's mostly just me eating them. So I cut up what I had left and tossed them in the freezer. These can be hidden well too if you dice them up small enough, they can blend in with meat and sauce. Then we have the hummus, also bought at Costco, too much for just me, so I took half of the container and froze it for later. The enchilada sauce I had made with a dinner one night and had doubled the batch. Now I have sauce ready to rock if I want to make enchiladas. Little by little the freezer will fill up.

In the midst of the cooking the freezer meals, I decided to put on a pot of lentils. I figured I could add some of them to the chili I was making and save the rest for other meals during the week (like lunch).
Lentils are easy, they just simmer. I added some chili powder and cumin, salt and pepper and the tiniest bit of ground ginger. They are a healthy and versatile addition to any meal. If you don't use all of them in the week, you can always freeze those too!

On to lunch!
I cut up some romaine, topped it with left over ground turkey (yes, we use a lot of that) that I had seasoned with lemon, garlic, and pepper, and topped it with green onions and the lentils. I stuck a wedge of lemon in the container so that I can squeeze it on the salad when it's time to eat. I kept the lentils on top of the ground turkey to avoid the greens from getting soggy. There you have it, 4 days of healthy lunches and it took about 10 minutes or less to throw together due to cooking the lentils a day before and utilitzing the left over turkey from last night's taco dinner.

Juicing! 

I love juicing and I can feel the difference when I fall off the wagon. It can get expensive when you start buying all the extra produce for juicing on top of the produce you already buy for eating. Just keep it simple. People often ask me to share juicing recipes. I'm not sure I have ever followed a juice recipe. I've always enjoyed just throwing together a few veggies and a fruit or two. I always add lemon, and I love to throw in some ginger root and turmeric root when I have it. I don't typically mix root veggies besides those too. For example, If I juice beets, I don't use carrots. It's one or the other, but this is not a rule, this is my taste buds. If you haven't tried juicing I would highly reccomend it. Contrary to what some poeple think, it is nothing like making a smoothie. For me it feels like drinking liquid vitamins. It's almost an instant high, but a healthy one.

So this morning I cut up these bad boys.

Beets, celery, green apple, and lemon. Don't toss your beet stems and leaves! You can juice those too! I kept the leaves separate, because my baggies were getting full, but I cut up the stems and they are included in the prep bag. When it's time to juice, I can throw in a leave or two along with some spinach or kale to green it up. Be careful with the beets, they will stain anything they come in contact with, including your hands, so rinse everything right away. Celery will add a little spice to your juice, so the apple is nice to put some sweetness back in. Don't be scared, cut some shit up and juice it! You will probably like it. I suggest using an apple or orange along with whatever veggies you juice to add a little sweet sauce.

I have one more tip to share. Whenever I am cutting veggies, I always save the scrap pieces. The ends of zucchini, tops of bell peppers, ends of green onion, lemon peel, the butt of a romaine heart, etc. I keep them all in a gallon freezer baggie. I just add scraps to the freezer as I cut them. Once the bag is full, it is this wonderful bag of veggie pieces wating for you to make broth out of it. Perfect and custom veggie broth, or add it to a pot of chicken broth you might be making.

It may take you months to fill up the bag, but they are frozen so they will patiently wait for you.

Meal prep doesn't have to entail a month's worth of meals and hundreds of dollars in supplies. I would love to take a stab at prepping a whole month's worth of meals and when I do I will definately share it here. A week's worth makes a huge difference though. With dinners I like to cook a double batch of whatever I'm making when I can so that I can freeze one. Or when you find something on sale you grab it and throw together a recipe to freeze. There are lots of ways to squeeze freezer meals into your week little by litte and end up with a nice stock pile of ready to go meals.

Thanks for reading about this week's meal prep!

I'll be over here staying caffeinated and freckled!

We made the move! CA to UT

Well, we did it. We made the move. We lifted our born and raised roots from California and planted them in Utah soil.

This is more like a journal entry, so if you want to hear me ramble on about my experience so far, keep reading. :)

I have to say I would have never in a million years thought I would end up in Utah. I worried a little that I was a pinch too liberal for Utah. What if I found myself drowning in heavy duty conservative sauce? (I love everyone, I am just not always so conservative when it comes to my beliefs) Was there going to be creative outlets for me that are a little "different"? Was it going to be culturally diverse enough? This is important to me. I grew up surrounded by diversity, it gifted me tolerance and openness, along with a thirst and appreciation for learning about other cultures and I want the same gift for my children.

Our first week here in our new home was giddy. I love the house, I love the yard, and I love the neighborhood. There is usually something romantic (in an organizational way, if you're into that) about unpacking a house. You either love it or hate it. I found joy in it. A week of deciding what would go where, what I no longer had room for, what I could use differently, and so on. There is still some excitement left in that area as I still need to buy a desk and a few dressers. I had welcoming family members and a dear friend, (we will call her Cookie) nearby. I was full of energy and smiles.

The second week morphed into something completely different. It started off exciting, Beeb started at her new elementary school and Bub started at his new Junior High School. They both had a great first week and made friends and I still had a week of little man Booski home with me before he started kindergarten. I was so happy for them that they were adjusting so well and jumping right in, so what was my problem? I felt lethargic. When I say lethargic, I mean I felt like I absolutely HAD to lie down every day. It was as if my legs were dragging behind me. If I didn't have the change in altitude to blame, I would have thought there was something seriously wrong with me. This lasted for almost two weeks! I felt exhausted, I felt down and depressed, and I felt lonely. It's not that I wanted to be around anyone either, I wanted to be alone because I felt lonely and shitty. I know and trust my feelings enough to know it was just my way of adjusting to a big change. It was confusing at first, why would I feel like shit when the change was my choice and I felt so positive about it? I had to remind myself that change is change. Good or bad, change can be rough. It can be ugly. A butterfly goes through a mess of shit before changing into such a beautiful creature.

Another dear friend, my "bosom buddy", reminded me that I can look at this change as a brand new start. I could do anything. I could be excited about it! She was right, I have an opportunity right now to do what I want with my time, to an extent. I have a few hours to myself during the day (2 hours and 45 minutes to be exact) while little Booski is in school, my classes haven't started up yet, so besides the regular busy-ness of day to day errand running, cleaning, yelling at dogs, cooking and all that fine stuff, I could start new and do new things with my time. I miss my breakfast with the bosom buddy, I miss coffee dates and walks, I have to start over and do things for me, with me. I also knew I needed to get active to help this lethargic state. I want to get in shape and lose weight and I want to have my energy back and there is no excuse not to.

First things first is trying new things. Here I was worried that I wouldn't find my kind of "things" out here. I live only 30 minutes from Salt Lake City, there is everything! There is diversity, there is natural food stores, there are meditation groups, kundalini yoga classes, there are groups that meditate and eat vegetarian dinners in the park, there are kick ass coffee shops, and brilliant restaurants. I want to try it all! These are some of the things that I wanted in California, but being in the central valley, some of these things and ideas were a distance away making it difficult to be a part of it. All of this goodness right at my fingertips!

Here's what I did first. I signed up at the gym. I'm not really a gym-girl. It easily feels intimidating, or testosterone-y. Plus my hip is still partially fractured so I'm not always sure what my limits are. The gym in town though, has a few things I thougtht I could really benefit from. First, daycare. I can leave Booski to play while I do something for myself. Second, classes. They have a ton of classes. I have craving a new sense of community, especially in the health area. So far I've done the yoga class, Pilate's, step, and I plan on trying kickboxing and zumba. It turns out the step class was advanced. When I left there, I felt like I had just done crossfit. Crazy intense, not what I expected. I plan on going every Friday and letting it kick my ass. Third, a sauna. Come on, a sauna. Tons of beautiful moist heat wrapped around your tired muscles. Love. Love. Love. There is a pool and a hot tub, and a steam room too but I mostly dig the sauna. Anyway, I'm becoming an exercise class junky and it has fixed my lethargic ways this last week. Now when I'm tired it is because I worked out, not because I'm depressed and in a higher elevation. It lifts my mood, my energy, and my motivation. Utah's slogan is "Utah, life elevated." It certainly is elevated, the inside of my nose is dry and bloody and I have to use my inhaler more often, but I will take that slogan and run with it on a more personal level, as if the inside of my nose wasn't personal enough for you.

Next I signed up for a meditation class in SLC. I have been meditating at home for a few years but I have always wanted to try a group meditation. This was a particular type, Sahaja Meditation. Anything to help awake the kundalini sounds worth a try to me. I invited Cookie to come along and check it out. It was more instructional than I had hoped for, was looking for more meditation than instruction but I did learn a lot more about the chakras and the history of Sahaja and how it relates to yoga and unity. The group setting is definitely a great addition to my practice. I already found some other meditation classes Cookie, so get ready!

I've set aside time for my kundalini yoga practice at home, my sacred cup of coffee with a side of mountain views, a gym class a few days a week, and quality time with Booski before he goes to afternoon kindergarten. By the end of week three I was feeling more balanced. I've been back to making freezer meals to make life easier. There is something about looking in the garage freezer and seeing meals ready to thaw and cook that makes me fill up with joy. It makes me feel like I have my shit together or something, I'm prepared, I'm ready, and I don't really have to cook.

The more I browsed around on Meetup, the more I could see that while being a conservative state (there are plenty of conservative things about me, just not as a whole) there are a multitude of groups and activities to get involved in. I felt less alone already.

Let's talk about the white people.

Were my children going to be constantly surrounded by white people and forget about how beautiful it is that the world is full of different poeple and history and cultures? It started to weigh on me much heavier than I thought it would. At the end of my second week here, as I was leaving Costco in Salt Lake City, I heard a woman speaking to her children in Spanish. My eyes immediatly filled with tears. It felt like the woman was hugging me. One of those deep, cleansing hugs that only some poeple know how to give. I felt like I was at home, hearing a Mexian woman speak to her children in Spanish. It may sound silly but it meant the world to me. I talked to my best friend since 7th grade (we will call her "my Janet") on my drive home. She reassured me that it was normal, that she went through similar feelings when she moved from our hometown to an area that was pridominently white. 

During week three I got out a lot more. Trips to Salt Lake City and errands in town showed me that there was more diversity than I had first thought. It made me feel more at peace with the whole thing. It makes me realize just how diverse and differnt California can be. A piece of my heart will always be there in CA, but I am embracing Utah with open arms and as of week 4, with more normal energy levels and motivation.

So here we are at one month after moving in. After a roller coaster of feelings I feel the balancing taking place. I feel like I am exploring and settling in. I feel happy about everything there is to offer here. All of the outdoor fun, the classes, the education, the family and sense of community. It's all here.

I have to say that our family here is amazingly supportive and loving. They regularly show that they want to help and support us, they want to spend time and make memories with us, and that they love us and our children. It's absolutly heart warming. It makes a big change that much easier.

What ever change you are going through, remember to be paitent with it. It could be big lifestyle changes, moving, a new job, starting school or even small changes. Small changes can affect you more than you think. Grief stricken changes like death are probably the most challenging, but you will get through it. You will not be the same afterwards, but you will get through it and figure out the new you. Allow yourself to feel like shit, really. As long as you are aware of what is going on with you, you will be able to move past it and take something with you. Just about everything can involve self discovery. Through the good and the bad, keep doing you.