What's in the lunch box? (January 28, 2018)

Hello friends!

Hope you had an awesome week and you're refreshed after this weekend for a brand new week :)

Meal prep week #2 didn't turn out as I hoped - good and bad I guess. The bad is that I didn't meal prep as much this week. I know I wrote last week that I would try making 2 different meals a day, but this week I only made one. Which brings me to the good part: we had a lot of food in our house this week, that I ended up taking leftovers to work. Less work for me!

So I guess I should preface in saying that I didn't end up cooking two meals during last weekend. It's not because I couldn't or that I could foresee that there would be a lot more food in our house this week, but just because I was going to cook fish and I wanted to be more fresh. So my meal prep works sometimes as actually I'm cooking every single thing this weekend for next week and other times as I know exactly what I'm going to cook this week and I have all the ingredients, but I'll cook it in two parts: one earlier in the week and the other part way through the week.

So I've decided to play it by ear and see where it goes. Sometimes I'll cook everything and other times I won't! Stick around the next couple of weeks and you'll see where this takes me.

So for this week I will share with you my go to spaghetti recipe. Super duper easy - you can either make it using pre-made sauce or make the tomato sauce yourself! You can also change up the pasta! This week I used up the penne that I bought for last week's meal prep.

Grocery Ingredients for Sauce:

• 1 prepackaged container of ground beef (the ones you can get in the meat section of the grocery store that is already nicely portioned out)

• 1 large onion, diced

• 4 cloves garlic minced

• 2 cans of Ragu Original Tomato Sauce*

• 1 package of sliced button mushrooms

• S&P

• EVOO

*Note this recipe makes a large potful of sauce. I like to keep the sauce and the pasta separate in the fridge and then when I want to eat it/serve it to others, I'll just put the sauce on top of the pasta then & there. This recipe will give you more than enough sauce for a week and plenty leftovers to freeze. You can also cut down the ingredients to make half - use half the ground beef and just 1 can of sauce.

Cooking Instructions:

1. In a large pot, first sweat the onions in 2 tbsp of EVOO until the onions are translucent.

2. Throw in the garlic into the mix and wait until it gets a wee bit golden

3. Add in your ground beef. I also added sausage in there this week (you know the one leftover from last week and I froze?).

4. Once your beef is cooked a.k.a it's dark now, not red like when you first purchased it, throw in the mushrooms.

5. Once the mushroom is soft, add some S&P into the mix.

6. Add in the tomato sauce and let the sauce come up to a boil. And tada you're done!

Note - if you want to make your own tomato sauce, all you need to do is get a can of crushed tomatoes and tomato paste instead of the pre-made sauce. Once the mushroom is soft, add in your crushed tomatoes and 1tbsp of the paste. Stir and bring it up to a boil. Give it a taste to make sure it's has the right balance - add more S&P if needed!

Cooking tip: If you are buying whole mushrooms and cutting it yourself, do NOT wash the mushrooms. You will end up with very rubbery mushrooms. Instead, take a damp paper towel and wipe the caps of the mushrooms to clean it off!

Hope you enjoy today's recipe!

Cheers!