Sunday RESET | Ingredient/Meal Prep, Organize | Staying on Track | Healthy Mcgriddles, Pasta Salad

Hey everyone and welcome to my channel. I'm Nikki. In today's video I'm sharing my Sunday reset with you guys. These are always really helpful for me. I don't always feel the most motivated to do them, but when I get them done I always feel so much better after. Not only the day of, but also throughout the week when I've got ingredients prepped, stuff organized around my house and cleaned up. I just always am thanking myself later throughout the week. So today I'm going to be sharing some different ingredients that I prepped to stay on track with my weight loss throughout the week, as well as a couple organizing tasks that I'm excited about. But if you enjoy this video or find it helpful, please go ahead and give it a like and subscribe to my channel. I really appreciate it. I hope this gives you maybe a little motivation or even just some inspiration in the kitchen with creating some different ingredients, not just meals, but ingredients that you can prep ahead of time to have prepped for the week to assemble into different meals and stuff like that. Again, having them just ready in the fridge makes it so much easier to avoid getting takeout throughout the week and just having more excuses that I don't have time to cook and stuff. This makes it just a little bit more simple. Really quickly, I'm going to run through what I'm making today. But before I even start anything, I am going to eat something. I'm feeling very hungry right now and if I don't fuel myself, I feel like it's one of those things where then stuff just starts going wrong. I'm kind of just hangry. So I'm going to make sure to fuel my body before I do my reset. I've got a bowl of jasmine rice here with some leftover stir fried veggies. So it's red bell pepper, mushroom and pea pods or snap peas. And then I also got some chicken cooking in the air fryer. So I will add that to this bowl, drizzle some sauce on top and that's going to be my meal before I even get started with everything. I need some fuel to my brain as well. And I did make myself a protein coffee that I've been sipping on. So this is a quest salted caramel protein shake with some espresso. I did espresso today instead of the cold brew concentrate, but that's my coffee. That'll be my meal. And then I'm going to get started making a bunch of stuff. So what I'm making today, I've got my egg molds for breakfast sandwiches with these large ones I have. I actually have two different sizes. I've got like the smaller and the larger ones. I prefer these for sandwiches and then the other ones for more like egg bites. I've got two of these. So I'll be doing 12 eggs. I do one egg in each one and six of them are going to be for English muffin breakfast sandwiches. And then the other six will be for McGriddle breakfast sandwiches. I'm making an entire box of this protein pancake mix from Aldi. I'll just make as many pancakes as I can out of it. I want to say it's supposed to make like 27 or so. It's got nine servings makes about three pancakes. And usually with that size, then it comes out to like three points for two pancakes, which is what I will add to the sandwiches. So they'll get two pancakes and then either center cut bacon or turkey sausage. And that'll be the breakfast sandwich with the egg patty. And then for the six English muffin breakfast sandwiches, I'm going to use these multi-grain Thomas muffins. These are two points for one of them. I will also add some Canadian bacon actually is what I'll do for the English muffin sandwiches. And then I don't think I have enough for six of them. So I think the other ones I will just use some turkey sausage, but we'll see when I get there. I just need to make sure to get the eggs baking in the oven and it's kind of an extra step. You could mix all 12 eggs together and then just pour them into here. But I find it's easier to just crack one into a small bowl, whisk it first and then add it. And I just do each one at a time. So that's what I'm going to do because I like that they're mixed up, but I also don't want to have to portion them out after putting them all in one big bowl. I just find it's easier to do each one in each slot at a time. I'm also going to be making some kind of copycat egg white bites from Trader Joe's. And that's what I'll be using this mold for. I never buy cottage cheese, but I did for this. So this is the low fat cottage cheese. Although I think it works better if you do the whole fat, it's still will work. I'm going to blend this with some eggs and cheese in my blender and then mix in some frozen spinach and add some seasonings. And then I'll just portion those out into the egg molds and bake them in the oven. I do have my griddle set up, so I'll start heating that to cook the pancakes on. And whenever I do this ingredient prep, it's kind of just like doing everything at once and multitasking, but it makes it go faster. And it's pretty nice how much I can actually get done when I'm just going from one thing to the next. The other thing that I'm making is a pasta salad. I'm going to start boiling the water now and then I'll just cook a box of Barilla protein plus pasta. Once it's done, I'll just toss it into the bowl to cool off with a little bit of the dressing I'll be using on it, which is this bolt house classic balsamic. So that's just so it doesn't stick together. But I do like to let it cool down before I add in the vegetables, which will be broccoli, bell pepper and cherry tomatoes. And then I also add some turkey pepperoni. Sometimes I add cheese, but I'll see how I'm feeling when I get to it. But those are the foods and ingredients I'm prepping. I will definitely have some extra pancakes than just the ones I need for the sandwiches. So for those, I'll just let them cool and pop them in a bag or a container in the fridge or the freezer. And then I can just reheat them as pancakes throughout the week too. But I am going to assemble six of the McGriddles and just have those ready as well. I'm not going to be grilling them today, but I've got three pounds of chicken that I need to add to a marinade mix. So I've got the zesty herb one here and the Asian barbecue and I'm just going to get those prepped to keep in the fridge overnight and then I'll be grilling those probably tomorrow. But that's everything I plan to prep today. I've got some things that I want to get organized as well. Before it starts raining today, I need to get outside and clean up the garden for the year. It's pretty much hit the end. We've had some frosts and the garden's done producing. So we just need to clear the bins out, pull down the actual covers that we have and just get that cleaned up today. And then I also did order some Ikea shelves that I'm really hoping actually come in time because I want to set them up in the room where I have my walking pad and my desk. And I just want it to be more of an area that I can use for filming and like an office space. So hopefully that gets here in time. I can assemble those and start setting them up, get some organization in there because it's kind of been a mess in that room. And then I think I had one more thing on my list was just going through the dog toys. So we'll see how it goes. But I'm first going to eat my meal and then I'll get started prepping some ingredients. I wanted to make sure to get the pasta cooked first so that it could cool enough for me to make the pasta salad out of it. And I just cooked an entire box based on the instructions. So it was about eight minutes. Then I poured it into the separate bowl that I'm going to be making the pasta salad in and added two tablespoons of the balsamic dressing. I'm going to add more dressing later when I make the actual pasta salad, but I just wanted to make sure the noodles don't stick together. Then I do have the oven preheating to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I'm going to be baking the eggs in the oven, so that's why I preheated it first. But to the silicone molds, I just spray them with some nonstick olive oil spray and added one egg to each section. Sometimes I'll just crack the egg directly into each mold, but I usually prefer when they are actually scrambled together like this. So you can do it either way. I add a little bit of salt and pepper to each one and then I just pop those in the oven. I check on them every like seven minutes or so and rotate them until they're no longer jiggly in the middle. Like I said, I'm not going to be actually grilling the chicken today, but I wanted to get these marinades ready and they sit in the fridge overnight with them. So in the Asian soy one, I did add some soy sauce. The packets call for more oil than I usually use. I usually just add a splash to each bag and then the rest water and I mix it together with the seasoning until it's kind of combined. Then I just evenly divide the chicken breast into each bag and I get the air out of it and kind of just mix them together like you can see so that I'm getting the chicken coated. And then I just pop them in the fridge until I'm ready to grill the chicken. Then next up I'm getting the pancakes started. So I use an entire box of the Aldi protein pancake mix. I did add a splash of vanilla. Sometimes I'll add cinnamon and brown sugar to sweeten them up or even egg. But today I was just mixing water and the actual mix and I find it's easier to just add the water a little bit at a time to get it to the consistency that I want. I didn't actually measure how much I used. I've had my griddle heating up. So once it's ready I just spray it with some nonstick spray and then divide up the pancakes which I just use a scoop so that it's even portions. It definitely makes it faster and the pancakes more uniform that way. Then once they've cooked for a couple minutes I flip them over with a spatula and then once they're done I just stack them up on a plate. I just continue doing this in rounds and a lot of the time I can let them sit for a minute while I go do another task. So I scooped on another batch and then chopped up the Swiss cheese for the egg bites I'm going to be making. And I think that the spinach kale egg bites from Trader Joe's that I'm basing these off of usually have Monterey Jack cheese in them. Today I'm using Swiss just because I had a lot of extra slices of them and I wanted to use it up. So I just chop it into smaller pieces and set it aside until I'm making them in the blender which is what I'm doing here. I crack 8 eggs into my blender. And it was just easier for me to use my food scale to weigh out a cup of cottage cheese in grams so that's what I'm doing here. Then I added the chopped up slices of Swiss cheese, some onion powder and garlic salt as well as pepper. And I just blended it together for a little bit. I did about 30 seconds and then I added in the frozen spinach. And I didn't want to over blend the spinach so I just kind of pulsed it until it was combined. Then I've got the other silicone mats that I'm using for these egg bites. I spray them with the nonstick olive oil spray and then I pretty much fill them to the top with the egg bite mixture from the blender. It works well to just pour it directly out of here like this. And I did end up having extra more than 12 bites so I used one of these dishes and just poured the rest in there. I would say it's equal to about 2 of the bites. I popped those egg bites in the oven at 350 and let them bake while I started chopping up the veggies for the pasta salad. Whenever I make a pasta salad the one vegetable that's always my favorite to include is broccoli. So I always chop up some fresh broccoli like this and today I did an orange bell pepper. I got a little distracted while I was chopping the veggies because my Ikea package arrived so I wanted to bring that inside right away and it was pretty heavy. I ordered two separate shelving units that I'm going to be setting up and adding to my office area and I'll show you guys that later in the video. But back to chopping vegetables for the pasta salad. Then I also have some grape tomatoes that I'm chopping up. I usually just like to cut them in half but you could cut the vegetables into smaller pieces if you like. Even for the broccoli I kind of left them as bigger florets. Then to add a little extra protein to this I chopped up some turkey pepperoni. I just quartered it and then mixed it to combine with the pasta and vegetables. It's also really good with grilled chicken but I think I'm going to make that fresh and just add it to the actual portions of pasta salad I have prepped. But to that I add the balsamic bolthouse dressing and I just make sure to really coat everything. If it does absorb the dressing a lot sometimes when I actually eat the serving I'll add some extra dressing but I just check how it is when I go to eat it. But now that the eggs are done baking in the oven I can start assembling the breakfast sandwiches. So I like to just wrap them in foil to keep them in the freezer. They're the easiest that way for Adam to bring them to work. You can also add cheese to these sandwiches. I'm not going to be doing that today because Adam didn't want cheese on his but I'm adding the egg patties as well as the Canadian bacon I have. And then there were only eight slices of Canadian bacon so for the last two I just used some chicken sausage links that I had in the freezer. For these sandwiches each English muffin is two points on Weight Watchers. The Canadian bacon serving is a point and then the turkey sausages are two points. So it's definitely a lower point option than the freezer Jimmy Dean breakfast sandwiches Adam buys sometimes. I'm also making six of the McGriddle sandwiches prepped ahead so I start with a pancake on each foil and then I add an egg patty. I definitely prefer bacon and sausage as my meat for McGriddles so I just did three of each. I had already had bacon prepped in the fridge so that worked out perfectly. And then these are just some two point boar's head turkey sausage patties. Then the egg bites were done baking as well so I just popped them out of the mold like this and put them on a plate. You can see they come out nice and easily and it's pretty quick to clean up the mats as well. I was just going to put the pasta salad in one bowl in the fridge but I actually decided it would be easier to portion it out this way Adam can just grab one to bring to work and again it's easier to have the points when it's evenly portioned like this. I ended up getting ten containers of the pasta salad making each serving four points on Weight Watchers. And honestly my favorite part is when I finish up I just lay out everything that I prepped. It helps me to see first of all how productive I was but also what I have ready for the week to stay on track. So we've got everything done. I've prepped everything and now we're really quickly just going to do a taste test of one of these Trader Joe's style. Definitely not as tall and fluffy but I used a different mold for them but we're going to see how they taste. Cheers. Cheers. They taste almost identical. Right? I was going to say they are like kind of fluffy still though. Mhmm. They honestly taste like a combination between spinach squares, the Trader Joe's egg bites, and then the veggies made great ones. Yeah. It's like a perfect mix. Yeah those turned out really good but we're going to go ahead and go clean up the garden now. Okay right as I went outside to start doing the garden it started raining but I can't put this off any longer so we're just going to get it done even in the rain. So a quick end of the year recap. We've got our zucchini plant which didn't do very successful at all this year. If anything we got the most tomatoes I would say. So here's our big tomato plant. You can see there's still a couple that didn't get to finish and then we started getting frost and we just haven't had success with them anymore but I've got a bunch of habanero peppers. Some of them kind of went bad. I need to take a couple of them off though they're still good. Back here we did get a couple sweet peppers. Is there anything on there? Oh there's a couple that started over there on the left that we didn't get. My basil has completely died. I really have not done a good job checking on this since everything's stopped growing but what is a red jalapeno? Okay I do have some jalapeno peppers that I'm going to take off that are still good and then this was our other zucchini plant that also wasn't successful. So I'm going to grab these peppers really quick. So weird that there's a red one on here. I never noticed that. We'll get that and then we're pretty much just going to go take these and dump them over along there. So we still have the soil and we might use it later to fill some holes in the yard but we've got to take these screens down as well and just stack up the pots get them out of the way for the winter. We definitely had the most success with the jalapeno plant this year. I got so so many which was really nice. I definitely will do them again. I was definitely disappointed that my sweet peppers never really worked out. I only got like two or three from the plant and in previous years I've had better success with them. Same with the zucchini. It was so unsuccessful this year. I had really really great luck with the tomatoes and habanero peppers but it really does just feel like a learning process that every year I learn something new. Something new goes differently and it's just the fun of having a garden I guess. It's always sad cleaning it up for the year but I'm excited to see what next year will bring and it'll be nice to have some space cleared out in the back when it starts to snow. Okay so we emptied out all the pots and we're actually just going to leave them. I'm going to rinse them out but for now it's raining so that can take care of them a little bit but I'll get those cleaned up and put in the garage and then we also still have to break these down but again we're getting poured on right now so we're going to go inside. I'm going to do the shelving thing that I wanted to do and I'll come back to this later. When I came back inside from cleaning up the garden Trevor had already gotten started on the shelving units. We've actually got three of these in the basement as well and he assembled all of those so he knows what he's doing. So while he's working on that another thing on my list was to quickly go through the dog toys and clear the spin out at least a little bit. I like to have a lot of options for them because honestly throughout the day they will just come and grab different toys. They like having a variety but there were some in there that just had no life left to them so I needed to at least clean out those and of course the dogs wanted to help me. They were so curious about what I was doing but I was kind of just holding up different toys to them to see which ones they wanted to keep even though I know which their favorites are. And they have so many of this one because I accidentally had it on auto ship from Chewy so that's one of their favorites and they've got like six of the same one but they're all in good enough condition for me to keep them for now so I cleared a lot out and they were happy. Pluto was giving me some kisses at the end but another task done. I wasn't much help actually assembling these but I did get the boxes open and lay the parts out so that Trevor could help me put together this last one. Like I said I got two shelving units. This is also the same one that I have in my family room. I just really love that it has drawers at the bottom and then a few shelves that are perfectly spaced out. I think they're just the perfect size and I've just needed some extra organization with stuff like my YouTube filming equipment and stuff like that so that's where the drawers will be perfect and then the shelves I've wanted to display some stuff on for a while so I'm also very excited about that. And I'm not sure if I'll end up rearranging them or rearranging everything in this room but for now this is where I decided to stick them and I was able to put the shelves in and decide where I wanted them spaced out. Then they were fully assembled so this was the fun part. I have been wanting to display my play button for so long and I finally have a spot for it so I was really excited about that and of course had to put it next to my Maggie and Pluto pillows. I've got so many different Spongebob decorations and stuff like that that I really need to go through and decide which ones I want on here so I don't know if this will fully last but I just wanted to fill it up while I could. I've got a good amount of Funko Pops so I added some of those to the top. Some of my favorites being Blossom the Powerpuff Girl, Annabelle from Conjuring, and my Anastasia one that I recently got. But like I said, I plan to rearrange this and just see what I like. Just wanted to get some stuff on it now because I was excited. I put these Spongebob stuffed animals up top and I don't know if I'll keep them but they're there for now. And as excited as I am to display all this, I'm also really excited about the extra storage in the drawers. Okay, so I finished up everything for my Sunday reset. It feels good to have so much food prepped in the fridge and ready to go. It makes it so much easier, especially in the morning. I feel like I like to prep more breakfast things ahead of time because I struggle the most in the morning to just start the day, get some food, and even just like have a taste for anything. But I'm excited for my McGriddles and to just have some extra pancakes and stuff prepped. As well as the pasta salad and it feels good to also have some organizing done. So every time I've looked outside in the backyard I've thought about that garden and how I needed to take it down so it feels good to have most of it done. We still have to put the netting away but that won't take too long. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this video and found it helpful. Hopefully you found it a little motivating or got some inspiration to prep some ingredients as well. It really is a key to success just in the long run and just making things easier on yourself. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this, please go ahead and give it a like and subscribe to my channel. I really appreciate it. I'll see you guys next time.