Cooking Your Protein | Meat Prep Part Two 🥩🍗
What’s that? Ground beef on a baking sheet? 😮🥩
I’m not a conventional chef, I do stuff that simplifies my life because I don’t have time to be slaving over a frying pan cooking up half of a cow each week and I know you don’t either!
This is part two of my three-part series on meat prepping. In this series, I’m showing you how you can take a variety of high-quality, lean meats cook them up in under 30 minutes, and store them in individual portions so you can have easy protein for weeks to come!
Let’s get the meat on the pan!
Here’s what we’ll be working with today:
Ground beef
Chicken breasts
Chicken tenders
Trout
Ground Beef
Starting off with the ground beef, I take a couple of pounds and throw it on a sheet pan as you see in the picture above. This allows me to cook a large amount of beef in a fraction of the time. Don’t worry, you can still get some good browning on the beef by cooking it this way!
When seasoning ground beef, I keep it super simple but flavorful! This allows me to use the beef in a variety of different dishes. For example, if I’m craving a South-of-the-border cuisine, I can throw some hot sauce on and call it good! But if I’m craving more American or Italian cuisine, I can easily switch up the flavors when I keep the base layer more basic.
Chicken Breasts
A lot of people steer clear of cooking with chicken breasts I find. This is because a lot of flavor is lacking when we choose a less fatty piece of meat. However, I believe that the breast can still be flavorful and tender!
Since these are typically bigger pieces of meat, don’t skimp on the salt! It takes a lot of salt to reach all the nooks and crannies of the breast. This time, I chose to use a really strong taco seasoning blend from Thrive Market. This penetrates the meat and allows the flavor to reach every bite. Although it’s a taco seasoning, these chicken breasts will still be very versatile!
Chicken Tenders
I typically don’t purchase chicken tenders as they’re usually more money per pound, however, these were on sale at my local store so I took advantage of that! 💵
Since we have quite a bit of tenders and I don’t want to season them all the same because I know I’m going to get bored of eating the same flavors and I might cave in to some cravings when that happens. In order to make my future self proud and on track with my health and wellness goals, I’m going to separate the pan into two sides. On one side, I chose to use seasonings that were two different colors so I could still tell the chicken apart after the cooking process was finished.
I used the Kick It Up Chicken rub from Thrive Market — get $40 off your first order here! Additionally, I used a Dan-O’s seasoning blend!
How easy is it to have these smaller tenders to throw onto a salad or snack on throughout the day? I won’t pay extra to have my chicken pre-sliced, but when these tenders are on sale again, I will definitely be purchasing them!
Trout
I love to eat a fattier fish throughout the week for the Omega’s to lube my brain and joints. This week, I’m working with trout. I oiled my trout up so it didn’t stick to the pan and used salt as the first point of contact on the fish to ensure that penetrates through the protein and creates a really nice flavor profile. Then I really switched it up 💃 and used a Jamaican Jerk seasoning!
I think a lot of people get stuck in ruts when seasoning their proteins, like using only a seafood blend, or garlic and citrus, but I say F that! Use seasonings that are going to keep your brain and taste buds interested!
Now it’s time to cook
I had my oven thoroughly preheated to 350 F and I threw it all in! I set my timer for 20 minutes then checked on my trout and chicken tenders, first. The trout was done, but my chicken tenders weren’t quite to 165 F, yet so I threw them back in with the broiler on and rotated the pan because one side seemed to cook faster than the other.
After about 5 minutes, I removed the tenders and checked the chicken breasts to find they were at the perfect temp! I left the ground beef in a little bit longer to get rid of any pink that was happening at the bottom of the pan and increase any browning on the top of the meat.
Just a couple minutes later and my ground beef was done and that completed the cooking process! Check out the video below to see what my proteins looked like after the cooking process! 🍗
In the third and final part of this series, I’m showing you how to individually portion your proteins and store them so you can maintain freshness and eat on them for weeks to come!
