- [Announcer] Welcome back
to What's Matt Cooking?!
(applause)
(audience cheers)
With your host, Matt!
- [Matt] Hey, thank you, thank you!
Oh my God, please stop,
Jim, you're too much.
Hey, guys, welcome back
to What's Matt Cooking?
I'm your host, Matt,
and today we have a truly delicious meal:
butter chicken with basmati rice.
You can see right there on the package,
it says that it's authentic.
This episode is brought to you
by my friends at Squarespace,
but we'll talk about them later.
Step one: remove tray from the box.
Next, for step two:
put the tray in the microwave.
And finally, step three:
remove from the microwave and eat.
If you wanna get more recipes,
(applause)
you can go to whatsmattcooking.com.
Thanks so much for watching,
and I'll see you guys next time.
ugh, I hate my life.
(upbeat music)
Okay, so maybe I'm not that
good around the kitchen.
But I do understand the
value of cooking from home,
and truth be told,
I do have three solid meals under my belt,
if you count pancakes as a meal.
As many of us are adapting our diets
to living and working from home,
there's one thing that remains obvious:
either you plan out
your meals for the week
or you face the insatiable urge
to rummage through your fridge or pantry,
snacking all day long.
If you wanna save time,
money and eat healthier,
you might think about meal prep.
And so with my lack of
experience in the kitchen
and to get the most out of meal prep,
I knew I had to ask an expert for help.
Kev.
- [Kevin] What up, man?
- Thanks so much for being here.
This video was filmed over two months ago
before lockdown in California,
so please don't get upset,
write in the comments
or to your governor that I'm
violating stay at home orders,
I've only left the house a
handful of times for essentials,
and yes, I do consider
ice cream essential.
- Thank you for having me back, bro.
- [Matt] That's my friend, Kevin Curry,
also known online as Fit Men Cook.
- Kevin Curry!
- Kevin Curry.
- Every day home cook,
you have like a million followers.
(laughs)
- [Matt] He's got a passion
for creating healthy meals with a kick.
His specialty?
Meal prep.
I invited Kev over to get his advice
on how to better meal prep
and to also challenge him to make me
the simplest meal prep
recipe he could think of.
So the brief was to create
a minimalist meal prep.
- [Kevin] Right.
- What meal did you choose for us today?
- So, I thought about it
and I think I'm gonna choose fried rice.
It's one of the most
minimal ones out there,
it's just five ingredients,
and it's customizable,
it's really affordable,
and takes just maybe about
15 - 20 minutes to make.
And that's important
because when you select
a meal prep recipe,
have something that you
can make really quickly,
so that way mid-week, if
you wanna make it again
and swap in something
else, you can do that.
And guess what?
No food waste.
And it's food that you
actually want to eat,
it's variety.
- [Matt] So before Kevin came over,
I went grocery shopping.
I messed up the brief a little bit
and got fresh veggies.
Obviously, totally fine
to make these recipes with fresh veggies,
but to keep things simple
and to speed up the cooking time,
Kev recommends using a bag
of frozen carrots and peas.
Kev also recommends
eco-friendly meal prep
containers that I picked up,
there's link in the description
if you're interested in getting them.
The recipe, as Kevin mentioned,
includes just five ingredients:
eggs, scallions, day-old rice, because...
- Because it gets really nice and crispy.
If you use fresh rice,
it can get really soggy.
- [Matt] A bag of (clears
throat) frozen carrots and peas,
and chicken.
I think one of the interesting
challenges here for you
is going to be cooking
in a minimalist kitchen.
(laughing)
I mean, I tell you, I've got a pan,
I've got a knife--
- Oh my God, you just have
one thing of each thing?
- Yeah, pretty much--
- Oh my God!
- I've got one pot.
(laughing)
So let's just see how we
navigate through this.
I'm gonna do what I do good,
which is just stay behind a camera.
- Okay.
- I'll let you do what you do good.
(laughs)
- Sweet.
- Let's get to it.
- All right, man.
- All right.
(instrumental music)
So first up, we need to
prepare all of our ingredients,
by cutting up our
vegetables and our protein.
- [Kevin] This is so satisfying.
(laughs)
You know, when you're looking
at the minimal recipes,
I don't really count things
that you're probably gonna have
already inside of your
pantry or your fridge.
So garlic is one thing that
you should definitely have.
Mm, look at the flavor!
Mm!
Hey, Matt, this is a
really sharp knife, man.
- [Matt] I actually
sharpened it before you came.
- Oh, you did?
All right.
(laughs)
It's like butter!
- I was like,
I'm not gonna get called
out on having a dull knife,
(laughing)
not today.
- [Kevin] All right, so
just take off the top here,
I like to just pull out
this chicken breast.
- [Matt] So what are some of the mistakes
that people make when
they are meal prepping?
- I think the biggest one
and the most common one
is that people do way too much,
and they see the
Instagram photos of people
and their entire counter is filled up
with all these containers of food
and being like, "Yeah,
I'm prepped for the week!"
And they know darned well that by Friday,
or actually, Thursday or Wednesday,
they're throwing that food away
because they're tired of it.
So the number one thing
is don't prep too much,
because that's gonna lead to food waste.
We're gonna take off the skin too,
just so we can save a
little bit on the calories.
Are you gonna eat that?
- [Matt] Yeah.
- You eat cold chicken skin?
- [Matt] Yeah, man.
(laughing)
- I've gotta give you
a fist bump for that.
- [Matt] After we're done
prepping, we're ready to cook.
I offered Kevin my microwave
but for some reason, he declined.
- We're gonna keep the heat
just a little bit lower than usual.
So I'm gonna spray in a
little bit of coconut oil.
You're free to use just regular oil.
I'm gonna add in some garlic
and this is the part
where you wanna add in
some of the aromatics, so the green onion.
There we go.
As soon as you hear that
sound, just start stirring.
And this'll look different
if you actually pour in some oil
rather than using the spray.
Now, when we cook with too much oil,
we burn out all the
nutrients in the food too.
So that's what we also don't want.
And then here, when you add the rice,
you can boost it up just
a little bit, to medium,
a little bit between
medium and medium high.
We wanna toast the rice
and we get all that fragrance before
from the garlic and the onions,
we want this just to
get juice inside of it.
We won't have to cook this long too,
for about two to three minutes.
- [Matt] I mean, it's
obviously a very short recipe.
But while you're in it,
it's just constant moving with the pan.
- Yeah, constant movement,
especially with this type of skillet
because it's stainless steel
and we're not using a lot of oil,
so it has the tendency
to go ahead and stick,
and that's why you wanna really watch
the heat of the skillet too.
Next, we are going to add in our chicken.
You don't have to wait for the
rotisserie to be cold either,
you can actually buy it
fresh, when it's already hot
and chop it up and put it in here.
I'm gonna drop the heat just a little bit
'cause we're gonna add in some eggs.
Just make a hole right
here in the skillet.
If you need to, only if you need to,
you can spray it just a bit more,
and what we're gonna do
is we're gonna crack in some eggs.
Scramble this up right here
in the middle of the skillet,
and then just go ahead
and just move everything together.
You can scrape the bottom of the skillet,
get all of that,
because that is really good goodness too.
We're gonna add in some frozen peas
and then our fresh carrots,
and a little bit more of the green onion.
And then as you're folding
everything together,
don't worry about the peas
because they will thaw out
under the heat of the rice.
And as it's cooking,
just add in some flavor.
Get your soy sauce or your aminos.
This hasn't even been 15 minutes yet.
That's why it's such an
easy one to do mid-week
if you want something else
or if you just want a fresh batch of it.
I'm gonna take this off the heat.
Ah, here's what I'm
looking for: sesame oil.
Ooh!
This is a great add-on,
this is gonna make everything
just really super sexy.
(romantic music)
Add a little bit more of the green onion
and then some toasted sesame.
Now, remember, this stuff is not required,
so I know people are gonna write me,
"That's not five
ingredients, that's not it."
We know, and I know.
(laughing)
So there you go, boom!
Simple recipe.
- Beautiful.
- Less than 20 minutes,
less than 15, technically.
I'll let you go ahead and go first.
- Okay.
- You're gonna be the best
actor in the world now,
(laughs)
you're gonna be like,
"Oh my God, this is the
most amazing thing ever!"
- It's killer, unbelievable!
(laughing)
No, it's really, really good.
I'm gonna eat this everyday.
Now, this tastes phenomenal.
But no matter how good something tastes,
like you said, if you overdo it
and you do it too much,
you might not finish that seventh
or eighth meal prep that you made.
So I love that you can
just add some variety
to swap out the protein.
- You can swap out the
carrots for some bell peppers,
you can swap out the protein,
get some shrimp, some tofu,
if you've got someone that's plant-based.
- [Matt] And that right there
is how to make a versatile, minimalist,
affordable, quick, family-friendly,
multipurpose meal prep.
If you wanna get the recipe
and try it for yourself,
I've left a link down in
the description below.
Dude, thank you so much for coming.
This was a whole lot of
fun, I really appreciate it.
I learned a lot,
I love just finding these simple ideas
and recipes that help us
live a healthier life.
So, I appreciate it.
- I appreciate you having me.
- Cool.
- Thank you, bro.
- Hey, friends, it's Matt
from What's Matt Cooking?
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Thank you, guys,
(applause)
so much for watching this video,
I so appreciate you,
(audience cheers)
and I'll see you next time.
