Portioning & Storing Your Protein | Meat Prep Part Three 🥩🍗
You’re looking at a month’s worth of prepped & packaged, high-quality, lean protein for me. 😎
You can do this for yourself, too! This whole process — from prepping, seasoning, cooking, and portioning out after the meat has all been cooked — took me about an hour and a half. 😳
Damnnn Gina, if you can prep 24 meals to set you up for wild success for the month ahead in 90 minutes or less, why wouldn’t you?! Let me show you how.👇
Here’s the protein that we’ll be working with today:
Ground beef
Chicken breasts
Chicken tenders
Trout
Ground Beef
When I seasoned the ground beef, I kept 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.
When portioning the ground beef, I took a wooden spatula and chopped it to the size of my liking. If you like bigger chunks of beef, don’t chop as much, OR if you like smaller pieces, chop away! 🔪
I chucked away a portion of beef to eat on throughout the week. If I’m hungry for beef, I can throw in an egg, put the beef on top of a bowl of lettuce, or easily make some tacos.
The rest of the beef, I have portioned into an approximate fist sized portion and stored in ziploc bags. Be sure to squeeze as much air out of the bags as possible to preserve flavor.
Chicken Breasts & Tenders
As far as chicken goes, I’m going to make it simple and talk about these together.
I typically don’t buy chicken tenders, however, when I went to the store this time, the tenders happened to be on sale so I picked them up. When portioning & storing the protein, it doesn’t matter what cut of chicken it is, I just chop it up into cubes and stalk it away.
Depending on how you cook your chicken, you can also pull or shred your chicken to throw into soups, salads, enchiladas, etc.
How easy is it to have cubed chicken to throw onto a salad or snack on throughout the day? I eat a lot of chicken because it’s so easy to store in a container and take with me through the day. If I know I’m going to be super busy, I might not have time to sit down with a fork to eat my protein, but I feel pretty comfortable grabbing a piece of chicken with my fingers while driving to my next destination. 😋
Again, with the chicken I chopped it up into bite-sized pieces and stored an approximate fist-sized portion of meat. When we seasoned the chicken, we used multiple blends so I made sure to keep one of each flavor to keep in the fridge to eat on this week. Keep the meat separated in your bags if you want to distinguish the flavor you eat as the month goes on.
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 don’t get an insane amount of trout for my meat prep, but I did get four different portions. Depending on the size of fish, I’ll keep this in mind so I can decide if I’ll have fish once or twice a week.
I roughly tore the trout apart and stored it in glass containers. They are freezer-safe as well, so I stored one portion in the fridge and the rest went in the freezer. You can decide if you want to keep the skin in your meat prep… I’m not big on the texture of the skin so I save this for my pups. 🐶
