Lately, I’ve been attempting to either meal prep my lunches for the week at one time or cook enough portions of our weeknight dinners to take leftovers to work multiple days a week… so as not to be enticed with the world’s greatest styrofoam box Chinese joint just a few blocks away from my office.

Sundays is great for meal prepping because I can take my time. On a typical weeknight, I don’t start dinner until after III’s bath while G is giving him his bedtime bottle.  That puts us eating dinner sometimes as late as 8-8:30PM depending on what I’m cooking. On Sundays, though, I get started before bath time – doing all of my chopping, preheating, etc before so once I’m ready to get going in the kitchen, I can whip things up quickly.

Last night, I made healthy(ish) burrito bowls and cooked everything in larger quantities so I would have enough for dinner and 3 lunches prepped for the week (because – let’s be honest – I’m not eating at my desk every single day. I just can’t).

I’m sharing the recipe below. As you’ll learn, I don’t really measure so, um, sorry about that.

1 bag of Mexican rice (because a burrito bowl with brown rice is… meh)

1 can of black beans

1 can of corn (or Mexicorn)

1 can of Rotel

Chopped onions and  bell pepper

2 large boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or 3 smaller ones)

Taco seasoning, olive oil, red wine vinegar, limes

Lettuce (I used a mixture of arugula and spinach but shredded iceberg is probably more appropriate for this type of dish)

Marinate chicken in olive oil, red wine vinegar, the juice of 2 limes and taco seasoning. Cook rice according to packaging.  While the rice is cooking, chop your fresh veggies. I mix the beans, corn and rotel (all drained) directly into the rice once it’s cooked. Cook chicken breasts on med-high heat in a non-stick skillet. Mine were on the larger side so it took about 9 minutes on each side (which actually gave them a nice little char on the outside).  It might have been smarter to slice the chicken before browning it but, you know, whatever. Throw in chopped onions and peppers with the chicken for the last 5 minutes.

Combine in bowl, top with cheese. cilantro, salsa, whatever floats your boat!

This made enough for two healthy adult dinner portions and three lunches for myself.

Things I could (and probably SHOULD) do differently… use less canned ingredients (that would definitely take the healthy up a notch), use healthier rice options (but I kind of think that would take all the flavor out of this). I did, however, go low sodium on everything else to make up for the salt in the Mexican rice. Watching your sodium is always a good thing but it’s a habit I’m really trying to enforce around our house. III has a kidney disorder so once he is eating what we are eating for daily meals, we will really have to be in the habit of staying on a low sodium diet.

I got a pack of these bento boxes on Amazon to take my lunches to work. It always seems that I’m taking multiple ingredients that I don’t necessarily want sitting on top of each other getting soggy so I love these  as an alternative to traditional tupperware.