Rotisserie Chicken & Zucchini Casserole

(source: the Lazy Dish website)

Hi! Welcome to my blog!

My name is Gabriella and I hope you will enjoy looking over my meal prep posts. As the title of my blog suggests, this will be a crazy cooking adventure. I have cooked in the past, but haven’t been able to become super proficient at it. Since graduate school started, the need to have meals readily available for the long hours at school has dramatically increased. In order to become proficient and stay time efficient, I decided to make meal prepping my new occupation. I have already picked out a couple week’s worth of recipes. So far, I have stayed with fairly easy recipes to avoid spending a lot of time in the kitchen, and to not bite off more than I can chew 😉. My first recipe I cooked was a zucchini, chicken, and stuffing casserole. Being a casserole, it was easy to combine all the ingredients and then throw it into the oven. I had most of the necessary kitchen tools, and ingredients at my house. However, there were a couple of things I had to buy. The most challenging part, initially, was coming up with a recipe that was budget friendly and not completely unhealthy. I hadn’t realized how difficult that could be until I tried to plan multiple meals in a row that were both healthy and had variety. My goal going forward is to plan meals that use ingredients I already have, that are somewhat healthy, and offer variety of flavor. 

In the article Conceptualizing the role of occupation in the production of space, we learned that occupations are contained within space but they are also producers of space (Delaisse et al.). For me, doing meal prepping has caused me to carve out both a time and space for myself, in the kitchen, that I hadn’t before. Deciding to cook at home caused me to create and organize my own cooking space in the kitchen, and even buy an apron. In the past, I haven’t  done very much home cooking at my house. Instead I ate a lot of processed food or ate with my family. I decided to prepare meals on the weekends, and came up with a cooking routine within the kitchen space. My routine for cooking is putting on music, my apron, gathering all my ingredients from my pantry and fridge, getting out all the cooking utensils I need, and then cooking.

I have a lot of memories of my family cooking in this kitchen. My father loved to cook, and would experiment with all kinds of dishes (mostly unhealthy according to my mother). On the other hand, my mother would often spend hours cooking a lot of healthy dishes for the family. One tradition my whole family shares is listening to music when preparing food. For me, it just feels right to listen to music when cooking, and to at least attempt to make some healthy dishes. While this place is a “container of experiences” for many family memories, I also think I am creating my own place in the kitchen now as well (Hasselkus, 2021).

(Rotisserie Chicken & Zucchini Casserole pictured above)

Taste rate 6/10 

I am not good at taking pretty pictures (but am learning), so it looked a lot better than shown here. I forgot to take a picture of the whole pan when it came out, sorry. I will have more pictures next time! There is a link to the recipe below. Its super quick, easy, and tastes pretty good!

References

Anne-Cécile Delaisse, Suzanne Huot & Luisa Veronis (2021) Conceptualizing the role of occupation in the production of space, Journal of Occupational Science, 28:4, 550-560, DOI: 10.1080/14427591.2020.1802326

Hasselkus, B. R. (2021). The meaning of everyday occupation (3rd ed.). Thorofare, NJ: Slack

https://www.thelazydish.com/rotisserie-chicken-zucchini-casserole-dinner-recipe/

https://www.thelazydish.com/rotisserie-chicken-zucchini-casserole-dinner-recipe/