5 Thai Coconut Chicken Meatball Meal Preps

Today we're making Thai Red Chicken Meatballs, a fantastic recipe, it's great on macros, it stores and reheats incredibly well and best of all, it tastes delicious. For the recipe we're going to need all of the ingredients laid out in front of you plus the additions of oil, salt, pepper, rice and water. We'll start this off by grating one zucchini, also known as courgette, on the larger side of a box grater. This is going to go into our chicken mince and we are going to need to squeeze out the excess moisture otherwise our chicken mince will be too wet to be able to roll into balls. You don't have to add this in there but it's a great way to incorporate a little bit more vegetables. Get it into some paper towel or a clean cloth, wrap it nice and tight and then just squeeze out as much moisture as you can. Like I said, the drier this is, the better it's going to mix through our chicken mince. So once you have as much as you can squeezed out, just pop this aside for the time being. Grate six cloves of garlic and 40 grams or 1.4 ounces of peeled ginger on a microplane. Both of these can be mixed together but we do want to split these half and half as they're going in two separate parts of the dish. One's going in the sauce and one's going in our meatball mix. So make sure you scrape all of that out of there, mix it together, make sure you get an even amount of both ginger and garlic and then we can split this in half, saving it for two different parts. Using one red bell pepper or capsicum, slice around that core to minimize the amount of pith and seeds that come along with it and with that bottom piece you can use that as well so just slice that off. Once you have them cleaned up, go through and slice them into thin strips. The thinner they are, the quicker they're going to cook and obviously the thicker they are, the longer they're going to take. Try and keep them nice and consistent as well, that way everything cooks at the same rate. Thinly slice three spring onions or scallions, you can do this into small thin rounds or you can do this on an angle to create those diamond or oval shaped pieces. We'll use the white root to go into our meatball mix and a little bit of that green stem can be saved for a garnish at the end or you can just add it all into your meatball mix, it doesn't really matter. For even more vegetables, I've got 250 grams or 8.8 ounces of broccolini, also known as tender stem. I'm just going through and chopping this into those small pieces, doesn't have to be perfect, you just want it slightly cut up. An optional ingredient is one long red chili, just take off the top and then what I'm going to do is slice this in half lengthways. I am going to remove the pith and the seeds. Once you have it cleaned up, just slice this into thin strips and go through and dice this into small little pieces. Like I said, it is completely optional, you don't have to use it and these ones aren't even that spicy anyway, you can increase the heat even further if you wanted to use bird's eye chili or something like that. Another optional ingredient is 10 grams or 0.3 ounces of coriander or cilantro, which I'm just going to go through, give a rough chop, just make sure there's no large leaves or stems and I'm going to keep it on the larger side, it doesn't have to be super fine, nor does it have to be perfect. All I'm going for is something that looks like this. So into a bowl we'll add 700 grams or 1.5 pounds of lean chicken mince, add in our squeezed zucchini or courgette, add in the red chili if you're using it, half of that garlic and ginger paste, the coriander or cilantro if you're using it, add in two thirds of the spring onion or the whole lot if you don't want to reserve any for a garnish at the very end, crack in one large egg, increases the protein and helps bind everything together, two and a half tablespoons of light soy sauce, add in some salt, just keep in mind that we've added soy sauce so don't go overboard with the sodium, use clean hands, just mix all of this together, make sure everything is evenly combined, all of that zucchini or courgette's broken up as well and that egg is evenly distributed throughout. You can let this marinate up to 24 hours or you can use it straight away, there's enough flavour in here right away anyway so we're not going to miss out on anything. Now with these we want to wet our hands, it's going to make handling these a lot easier otherwise it's just going to stick to your fingers and we want to weigh out the whole amount and then divide it by the amount of meatballs that you want per serving. As for me it works out to be roughly 40 grams per meatball. So once you have them weighed out just gently roll them in your hands, they are a little bit delicate so just make sure you're nice and gentle with them and once you have them rolled out we can place them onto a tray. You definitely don't need to see me do this, the amount of time this is going to take, so I'll see you in a minute when they're all rolled out. So with that done you should have anywhere between 24 to 25 meatballs depending on how many meatballs you wanted to have per portion. Now into a saucepan add 300 grams or 10.5 ounces of washed jasmine rice, add in 550 millilitres of cold water and then bring this up to a boil. I like to add salt to my rice so I'm going to add in a small pinch. When it's come up to a boil just place it on a lid, reduce the heat to low and cook this for 12 minutes undisturbed. After the 12 minutes turn it off the heat and then just leave that lid on for a final four to five minutes to finish off steaming. Now into a large pan add in about two teaspoons of any neutral oil. Using wet hands again just gently place in our meatballs and if you need to do this in batches then definitely do so, don't overcrowd the pan. Sear them for about a minute, minute and a half on each side just until you have a really nice golden colour forming, just be very gentle with them because like I said they are very fragile. The searing is going to do two things, it's going to lock in that flavour and of course hold them together. In total we want to cook them for about five minutes until you have a nice golden colour on all sides and then we can remove them, they're not completely cooked through here we just wanted to get that initial sear on them and I do recommend turning the pan off at this stage just so they don't colour any further. The good thing about these now is you can be a little bit more rough as they're now firmed up and that sear has locked all of that flavour in there. Back into the same pan add in another two teaspoons of neutral oil, keep this over a low heat at this stage and add in three tablespoons of Thai red curry paste. Add in that second bit of reserved garlic and ginger paste, if you've still got some spring onions or scallions you can add a few of those in too, I am just going to add the rest in, I'll cut a little bit more for garnish. Keep this over that low heat, spread this out, just let this cook for a minute, breaking up that garlic and ginger paste and that curry paste, this is going to get the fragrance out of it and really flavour the whole dish just so that initial sear can release those oils. Add in one can which is roughly 400 millilitres or 14 ounces of coconut milk, this looks really thick just because it's quite cold here at the moment and it's firmed up. We need one cup of chicken stock and I'm just going to pour a little bit of this into that coconut milk and just swirl it around just so we have no waste and then tip that in and add in that remaining chicken stock. Add in one and a half tablespoons of fish sauce, I know a lot of people don't like this, you don't have to use it but it really does change the flavour and make it that authentic taste. Add in one and a half tablespoons of light soy sauce and we can add in our red bell pepper or capsicum. Increase the heat to high, just mix this around, make sure everything becomes nicely combined and break up any of that capsicum that may be stuck together. You are welcome to add more coconut milk if you prefer to this, I've just reduced the amount because it does add quite a bit of calories to the dish. Bring this up to a gentle simmer just until it's lightly bubbling and then reduce the heat to low and cook this for about five to six minutes until those bell peppers soften up and our sauce slightly reduces, intensifying the flavour. After six minutes give this a good mix, the capsicum or bell pepper will have softened up really nicely, exactly what we want. Let's gently place in our meatballs, just mix these out so they're not sitting on top of one another and they're all coated in the sauce. We can also get our broccolini or tender stem broccoli in there as well, just spread that out evenly. Again, just make sure everything is covered in the sauce. Let this come back up to a simmer, we're going to cook it for another five minutes just to soften up that broccolini, we want it to still be al dente and of course to finish off cooking those meatballs. So after about four or five minutes that broccolini's softened up slightly, still has that nice al dente bite and those meatballs have firmed up slightly which means they're perfectly cooked. We can turn this off the heat. An optional step is to add a little bit of lime juice here, don't have to do this, you can just serve these with a lime wedge if you prefer. Gently fold all of that together, mix that lime juice through, just double check everything for seasoning and then what we can do is remove this from the stovetop. Fluff the rice and then serve it to one side of your meal prep container, this recipe makes five 750 milliliter portions. Get your meatballs into the container alongside the rice, add over the vegetables as well, just get an even amount for each container, then with the sauce just make sure you go through and give each the same amount. You can also serve the rice and the meatballs separate if you don't want that sauce to absorb into the rice. For garnish you can use spring onions or scallions or a little bit of coriander or cilantro and a lime wedge if you wanted to. Do this four more times and you're left with five even portions of Thai Red Chicken Meatballs. These look and smell incredible and the macros are really good per portion. Let these cool down for about 15 to 20 minutes, place on the lids, they'll go in the fridge for up to four days and in the freezer for up to three months. Just allow them to thaw in the fridge overnight before you go to reheat and the best bet is going to be a microwave but you can do it in a pan, just adding a little bit more stock or even a little bit more coconut milk just to rehydrate, especially if you've kept the rice in a separate container. If you enjoyed the video, please do hit that thumbs up button, it really helps me out and helps the videos be seen by more people and consider subscribing, there's only one thing left to do and that is of course, we can then dig in. The meatballs have so much flavour and there's a lot of moisture going on in there as well because it's a lean protein, it can't dry out but adding all of those ingredients definitely change that and change the consistency of the meat. The sauce is fantastic, the vegetables are nice and al dente and then the rice just soaks it all up. Thanks for watching.