Double-Duty Dinners, Featuring Buffalo Chicken Macaroni & Cheese and Pizza

This is a sponsored post by Challenge butter, but the text and opinions are all mine. Thank you for supporting brands that make Kylee's Kitchen possible!

As much as I love to cook, I don’t necessarily like to spend every night in the kitchen preparing dinner. When I’m hungry, I want to eat now. If you feel the same way, one of the best ways to make sure you have food available is by meal prepping. There are different forms of meal-prepping, but one of my favorite ways is making “double-duty dinners.”

The idea behind double-duty dinners is to prepare one big meal with plenty of food so you can transform the leftovers into an entirely new meal the following night. This is great for picky eaters who don’t like to eat the same thing for dinner every single night.

The Buffalo Chicken Macaroni and Cheese featured on this blog post is a great recipe to transform into a double-duty meal. Normally, if I was preparing this meal for just one night, I would only use about one pound of chicken. But since I plan to use the leftovers for another day, I should double the protein and add about two pounds of chicken (or more) to the slow cooker. When the chicken is done, I remove all of it, shred it, and return just half of it to the slow cooker.

I store the other half in the refrigerator for my dinner the following day, which I can use to make salad, pasta, or pizza (as you’ll see below)!



I chose to make pizza as the other half of this double-duty meal because it used a lot of the same ingredients as the Buffalo Chicken Macaroni and Cheese. The only new additions were pizza dough, tomato sauce, and butter. So not only did I save time, but I also saved money. Now I don't need to go out and buy ingredients for an entirely new meal!

Some other ideas for double-duty dinners that I featured in the segment on FOX59 are:
Pulled pork used to make sandwiches the first night and pork quesadillas on the second night.
Fish, specifically tilapia, use to make a rice dinner on night one and fish tacos on night two.

One thing I need to point out — it’s important to always use the best ingredients available. That’s why I used Challenge cream cheese in the macaroni and cheese and Challenge butter in the pizza. I choose Challenge over every other brand because I know there are no hormones, additives, or fillers in their products.The taste is also superior to other brands because they use real cream.

NOTE: In the recipes below, I’m posting the regular version, not the double-duty version, in case some people saw the picture of the pasta and scrolled straight to the recipe. But if you want to make the double-duty version, just double the amount of chicken as discussed earlier.



Buffalo Chicken Macaroni and Cheese
Yield: Makes about 8, 1-cup servings
Ingredients

• 1 pound chicken
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 3/4 cup buffalo sauce
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 pound macaroni pasta, uncooked
• 4 cups shredded cheddar cheese
• 1 (12-ounce) can evaporated milk
• 1 cup milk
• 4 ounces Challenge cream cheese
• Green onions and blue cheese for garnish, if desired

Directions

1. Add chicken, chicken broth, buffalo sauce, garlic powder, paprika, pepper, and salt to slow cooker. Stir until combined and cook on high for 2 to 3 hours. (Could be more or less time depending on your slow cooker. My chicken was done right at 2 hours)
2. Remove cooked chicken from slow cooker, shred, and return to slow cooker.
3. Add pasta, cheddar cheese, evaporated milk, milk, and cream cheese to slow cooker.
4. Mix and cook on high for about 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until pasta is cooked
5. Garnish with blue cheese crumbles and green onions if desired and serve 

Buffalo Chicken Pizza
Yield: Makes 1 pizza
Ingredients

• Pizza dough
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup tomato sauce (depending on whether you like a lot of sauce or not)
• 3 Tablespoons buffalo sauce
• 1 tablespoons Challenge butter, melted
• 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
• 1 pound chicken, chopped
• 1/4 cup blue cheese crumbles
• Green onions for garnish, if desired

Directions

1. Preheat oven to the specified temperature for your pizza dough (I set my oven to 425)
2. Combine tomato sauce, buffalo sauce, butter, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic powder and spread on uncooked pizza dough
3. Add half the cheddar cheese on top of the sauce and layer it with the chicken, the rest of the cheddar cheese, and the blue cheese crumbles.
4. Bake pizza for about 14 to 18 minutes — keep an eye on it so it doesn't burn!
5. Remove from oven, garnish with green onions, and serve

Recipe adapted from the Food Network

How to pack healthy lunches every single day and save money in the process

Ever since I posted a photo of my organized refrigerator a few months ago, I’ve received numerous questions about how I meal prep and plan healthy lunches for the week.

I decided to write this blog post to share my method of packing lunch and share some tips to help motivate you to pack lunch!

So why do I pack my lunch?

I work in the news industry, and when I enter the station I work non-stop until I leave. There is absolutely no time in the day for me to leave to buy lunch. Heck, some days I’m so busy I don’t even have time to heat my food up in the microwave. So personally, packing a lunch is absolutely crucial to me eating that day.

I understand most people aren’t in the same boat, and they get an hour to leave the office and eat lunch. So in that case, why bother packing lunch?

Packing your lunch has a long list of benefits, but in this blog post I’m just going to focus on the two most significant benefits: eating healthier and saving money.

If you bring your lunch to work, you won’t be tempted to order a pizza from the Hot Box down the street and you don’t have to worry about that bag of corn chips and package of mini donuts from the vending machine becoming your next meal.

If health benefits aren’t enough to motivate you to pack your lunch, maybe extra cash in your pocket will.

Packing your lunch probably costs about $5 per day at the most. Compare that dollar amount to what you spend eating out (probably around 10 bucks, right?) and the savings are really pretty shocking!

Now that I’ve covered WHY you should pack your lunch, let’s focus on HOW to pack a healthy lunch!

I would say without a doubt, the key to packing a healthy lunch is planning ahead.

So I’m going to share what I pack for lunch and how I pack it so that it stays fresh several days later.

This is what my lunch looks like just about every single day – turkey sandwich, salad, grapes, clementine, carrots, nuts, and SkinnyPop popcorn.

On Sunday, I prepare all of my turkey sandwiches for the week. I use sandwich thins for the bread, and I’ve never had any issues with it becoming soggy. I wrap each sandwich in Saran Wrap to keep it fresh and also store it in a plastic container to keep it from getting squished in my refrigerator.

For my salads, I put the spinach and cherry tomatoes at the bottom of a Tupperware container, and then I wrap the veggies that get soggy (cucumber and red peppers) in little Saran Wrap packs so they stay fresh. I also put a paper towel on top to collect any extra moisture. I’m not kidding you, this method keeps your salads fresh for like a week and a half.

By Sunday night, I make sure my grapes are cleaned, taken off the vine, and placed into individual snack bags. I divide my carrots into individual snack bags as well. For me, I know that if I don’t do this before Monday morning, I’ll be too lazy to bother doing it later, and they’ll go to waste.

I like to pack a small pack of nuts because the protein helps keep me full and gives me a little boost of energy in the middle of the workday.

Also, I love packing 100-calorie bags of SkinnyPop. My favorite things about SkinnyPop are the fact that you get a lot of popcorn for 100 calories so you can munch on it for a while, and also the flavor is incredible—it tastes freshly popped like it’s homemade.

The only downside with this style of meal prepping is that I end up eating the same thing just about every day for lunch. Personally, that doesn’t bother me one bit! But I can understand where some people may be turned off by that. If that is the case, my suggestion is to swap out the sandwich with dinner leftovers or make something like Mexican Chicken or Lasagna that reheats well.

I realize this looks like a lot of food, but it’s all pretty healthy and the calorie and fat content aren’t very high—especially when you compare it to a greasy fast food lunch. Also, since I’m going back to school, I’m gone from home for about 13 hours, so I need to fuel up when possible because otherwise I’m famished by the time I get home to eat dinner around 9:30 p.m.

I hope these meal prepping and lunch packing tips helped! Let me know if you have any questions!