Cook Once, Eat All Week

In this episode of Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel the Body, Mind and Soul, Martha and Peter discuss the benefits of cooking once and enjoying meals throughout the week, focusing on turkey breast as a versatile ingredient. They share various meal ideas and recipes that can be made using turkey leftovers, emphasizing the ease of meal prep and the importance of healthy eating.

Key Takeaways

Cooking once can simplify meal prep for the week.

Using a slow cooker helps keep turkey moist.

Leftovers can be transformed into various meals.

Turkey can be used in sandwiches, soups, and casseroles.

Meal planning can make healthy eating easier.

Cooking on Sundays can set you up for the week.

Versatility in cooking allows for creative meals.

Using turkey in different cuisines adds variety.

Healthy eating doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

A little pre-cooking can save time during the week.

Video Podcast

Video Transcript

Martha McKinnon (00:00)
Hi, welcome to Simple Shifts: Conversations to Fuel the Body, Mind and Soul. I’m Martha McKinnon from the blog Simple Nourished Living and with me is my brother and partner at Simple Nourished Living, Peter Morrison.

Peter Morrison (00:13)
Hello, Martha McKinnon.

Martha McKinnon (00:15)
Hello, Peter Morrison, how are you?

Peter Morrison (00:18)
I’m doing well today, how are you today?

Martha McKinnon (00:20)
I’m doing really well. Thanks for coming back for another conversation.

Peter Morrison (00:24)
Thanks for inviting me.

Martha McKinnon (00:27)
So today I thought it would be fun to explore how you could cook once and then eat all week by cooking off a turkey breast. Mom mentioned that she had just cooked a turkey breast and that she had shared some of it with you. And it made me think of my favorite way to cook, there’s lots of ways you can cook a turkey breast, but my favorite of course as the slow cooker lover is in the slow cooker.

Because I find it, again you have to worry less, it’s less likely to dry out. That moist, slow heat keeps it moist and you can flavor it however you want with different seasonings and spices. I love the concept of cooking off a significant amount of an item and then just finding different ways to play with it. And I think during the week, you’re kind of set up. You’ve got something to start with just to make eating during the week much much easier to the point where it almost becomes like assembly.

So turkey breast again and we’ll link to these recipes here and I’ve also put together a meal plan that includes this that will be available. We can link out to that in the show notes here as well onto our website.

So we start with turkey breast and so again you’ve made the turkey breast and then you can serve whatever you want for that first meal to make a meal out of it. You might make mashed potatoes, you might bake potatoes, you might cook some rice, you might cook some stuffing, roast some vegetables, whatever you want to do for that first meal.

So that’s one. And then you can use the turkey in lots of different ways. And this is the thing I think that lot of women used to do pretty regularly. Like they cooked a big meal on Sunday and then they had leftovers to start the week and to roll from. So you’ve got this turkey and so what are some other things that you can do with the turkey?

I love turkey sandwiches. So you could clearly make all different kinds of turkey sandwiches. A cold sandwich, a simple sandwich, a panini, a warm sandwich, you know, with gravy over it. So sandwiches wrap. You could make a wrap or a sandwich as another meal on another day.

What else might you do with some of that turkey? We’ve got lots of recipes on our site that we can link out to that use chicken. And again, you can substitute turkey for any recipe where you would use chicken.

Peter Morrison (02:57)
Soup.

Martha McKinnon (02:59)
So you could make a soup and we’ve got several soups that use cooked chicken on our website. So you could make again a simple vegetable soup, you could make a noodle soup, and again you could flavor that noodle soup differently. You can take it in an Asian direction, you can take it in just a simple American direction, you can take it in an Italian direction, so we could do soup.

Another thing that we always love is sort of you could take mixed vegetables, chopped up turkey, and some gravy or some other creamy. You could make a creamy white sauce if you want it from scratch or you could use a can of soup and you make a creamy veggie turkey concoction that you could then put on rice. You could put on toast. We love it on a baked potato for another meal. Casseroles. We have a casserole on our website.

Again, as I was working to put together our meal plan, we’ve got a really tasty recipe that calls for chicken and stuffing and apples. And so that’s a really nice dish that you could make using the turkey. You could add the turkey and make a salad. Again, just chunks of the turkey with chopped up apple and cranberries. We also have a salad that would use yogurt and mayonnaise. So more like a tuna type salad, but with chicken or turkey.

You could make that to use on a top of greens or in a wrap. So again, these, just goes on and on the fact that you have this, turkey that you can use now on all of these ways. I love, it was classic growing up where we did chicken or turkey with broccoli and then like cream of chicken soup and maybe a little cheese, a little bread crumbs on top baked in the oven.

And that was something we were at friend’s house recently for a birthday party, and that was served in a huge quantity. It’s something that’s one of their family favorites through a couple of decades. That’s another favorite.

Any other things that you might do with that? So we’ve got casseroles, we’ve got a topping for toast or rice or baked potatoes, we’ve got salads, you could do quesadilla, you could do turkey enchiladas, you could do enchilada casserole, you can take it in a Mexican direction or southwest direction. So much versatility.

Turkey, Spinach and Goat Cheese Enchiladas

Peter Morrison (05:13)
You could add it, chop it up and add it to scrambled eggs or an omelet.

Martha McKinnon (05:18)
Yep scrambled eggs or an omelet or frittata. Yep. Absolutely. Pizza or I particularly like turkey with a little barbecue sauce and some maybe green onion mushroom on like a flat bread or tortilla as a really simple pizza.

Peter Morrison (05:39)
Making me hungry.

Martha McKinnon (05:42)
That’s a lot of ideas and I’ve made you hungry. I mean, again, this is the power of just, think, just thinking about cooking off, you know, a significant amount of a dish. In this case, a turkey breast that’s going to weigh in probably at least four pounds. And again, then setting yourself up to be able to make all kinds of quick and easy and varied meals. It doesn’t feel like you’re eating the same thing every night, which some people don’t want.

So I hope that’s a you know I hope that people find this helpful the fact that there are lots of ways to just make healthy eating easy and approachable and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming if we just do a little give it a little thinking and just a little a little pre-cooking. I know I find a little cooking on Sunday like that can just met again set me up for a whole week of making it easier at dinnertime.

Peter Morrison (06:31)
Great ideas, thanks for sharing.

Martha McKinnon (06:34)
Absolutely. I’m happy to share.

Peter Morrison (06:42)
Well, thank you for watching. If you’ve got other ideas for either items you like to not really batch cook, like cook like that, whether it’s a big roast or vegetables.

Martha McKinnon (06:55)
And we can do that in a future episode. Yeah.

Peter Morrison (06:58)
Yeah. Let us know below and please share this with anyone you might think might also find it helpful. We’ll be back again soon.

Martha McKinnon (07:08)
Thanks Peter, I appreciate it.

Peter Morrison (07:10)
Okay, have a good day. Talk to you soon. Bye.

Martha McKinnon (07:13)
Bye bye. See you soon.