- Hi, I'm Erica.
I'm a personal chef,
otherwise known as a professional meal prepper.
Today I'm going to be making enough food
for one week in under 90 minutes.
I'm going to be making enough food
for me and my spouse for dinners for the week,
which comes out to 12 to 14 portions,
and I'm gonna be doing it in a family style format.
On the menu today, we have seared salmon for a main.
We also have a chipotle balsamic
roasted chicken thigh, another main.
And then my last main is going to be a delicious
rice and bean casserole with a little secret ingredient
in there to up the nutrition content.
I'm also doing for a side, some sweet potato fries,
a black bean salad.
And finally, I'm going to be doing
some cumin roasted broccoli.
I'll finish all of that off with just a bed
of romaine that I can have prepped and ready
to add a little bit of veg to each meal.
I'm really excited to get cooking,
and start timing myself.
Just as I'm getting started here I just wanna show you,
I've got my regular setup,
my cutting board that's stabilized,
my sharp knife, my towel.
I've got another towel hanging here, and then my scrap bowl.
All of these things are super important for efficiency.
Here are the groceries I picked up for my quick meal prep.
Here are the items that I pulled out of my own pantry
that I'm going to use today,
including some already made rice,
that I'm gonna work into the meal.
And just to timestamp myself,
I am starting right at 12:40 PM.
Because I want to have something in the oven,
on my cutting board, and on the stove top at most times,
I'm getting started with the sweet potato fries,
just so I can get something into the oven right away.
Right now I'm about to work on two things
that are gonna speed things up for me.
One of which is grouping my like tasks with like,
I need onion for both my bean salad, and my casserole,
so I'm going ahead and cutting the onion
for both of those things.
And I'm using knife skills that are gonna speed things up.
My knife skills are far from perfect,
but being deft with your knife is going to make
things go a lot faster for you.
One of the main things you can do is practice.
The other thing I recommend is just YouTubing knife skills,
to properly dice an onion.
Okay, I have one dish all done.
It's the bean salad, it's very simple.
It just marinates in the fridge, and gets better over time.
So I love this dish and it comes together super quickly
because I'm mainly using items that are canned,
that I can just dump in
and it gives you a good amount of volume.
We're still close to the beginning of the session,
about half an hour in,
and I've got my chicken marinating here.
I like to get my meats marinating earlier
so that they have a little bit more time
to hang out in that marinade.
I am prepping my rice and bean dish right now,
my casserole.
I can see some cheese,
black beans and corn,
and then my little secret ingredient.
I have some drained cauliflower rice hanging out
down in there to add some veggies to this dish,
along with some ready-made brown rice,
it's all gonna get tossed together
with some store bought salsa.
I think leaning on a store bought favorite is totally fine.
I like to do this with like pesto, and marinara sauce.
If they're not the star of the dish,
you can get away with using store bought.
Okay, so I have a lot of things going on
at this very moment.
What I like to do to make multitasking most effective,
I highly recommend you start with an order of operations.
On my phone I do have a list
of all the things that needs to get done
for this meal prep to go successfully,
down to like mincing cilantro.
I have ordered that in a way that I am working
with something on my cutting board,
working with something on my stove top,
and in my oven all at once.
Right now on my list what I have going on
is I actually have two things in the oven,
I have my chicken roasting,
and I've got broccoli roasting in the second one.
On my stove top, my pan is heating up
so I can start searing off the salmon.
On my cutting board, a head of romaine
that I'm about to cut so that I can have it
as a base for salads throughout these meals.
So again, I just wanna stress
the importance of multitasking.
And if you can give yourself a list,
or a task sheet to make that more feasible for yourself,
you're gonna go a lot faster.
All right, I'm over here getting ready to do my salmon,
which is not so much a recipe as it is a method.
So I've got my smoking hot pan here,
it needs to be an oven safe pan.
I'm adding 'bout two tablespoons of oil,
you want a high heat oil,
otherwise you're gonna get a yucky
oil tastes on your fish.
This is my favorite way to cook salmon,
it's super simple and super tasty.
(sizzling)
And it's very fast.
(sizzling)
My sweet potatoes are out of the oven,
and all packaged up because they've cooled.
All I did for these is cut them into planks,
and they get tossed with olive oil,
and salt, and pepper if you want.
For the broccoli I did similar,
cut them into bite size florets,
and both of those got roasted at 400.
Then popping them in the oven,
you can be doing a lot of different things
as those things roast.
All right, it is two PM.
I just pulled the chicken out of the oven,
and that was the last thing I needed to finish up.
So I came in under an hour and a half by a few minutes,
which is great.
Here we have our finished prep.
What we have is two servings
of this balsamic chili roasted chicken thigh,
two servings of the seared salmon dish,
at least four servings of this bean and rice casserole.
We've got two to three servings of sweet potato fries,
same for cumin roasted broccoli,
quite a few servings of this bean salad.
And then I've just sliced some romaine,
so that we can add it to our meals as a little veggie side.
But this is gonna give us enough food for the week.
Just like for me,
for you, practice is what's going to help you
get faster in the kitchen.
What I highly recommend is starting out
with a menu that feels very manageable to you.
As you work on a volume of food,
or a menu that feels manageable,
you're gonna increase your speed,
and your confidence in general.
I'm active on Instagram,
so you can check me out there,
or you can find me at my website, fresherica.com
where you can find my ebook.
You'll find even more tips on gaining speed.
That's it for me,
thank you so much for cooking along with me.
I look forward to cooking more with you in the future.
(classical music)