Are you tracking your macros?

No doubt, it is so much easier to keep food simple while preparing your meals. There is so much room for error when you start to add ingredients. In the hope to add more flavour, you can easily blow your calories and stall your progress.

I am a big fan of basic poached chicken and steamed rice for lunch. Not only is this a really satisfying dish, it is super easy to prepare and very easy to track. This week I thought I would experiement in making a paella inspired dish, where the rice and chicken are cooked together. I could not be happier wth the end product.

Before cooking this meal, I ensured that I had my marco portions and ratios right.

First I weighed my chicken breasts to determine how many meal portions this big batch of chicken should yeild. At 1.2kg, each portion should have around 150grams of chicken and this would give me 8 meals.

I then worked out how much rice I needed to add. I have 50g of uncooked rice in my current meal plan, so I worked out that i needed 400g of rice.

After picked my veggies, I was then ready to cook.

Ingreients:

• chicken breasts (1.2 kg)
• white rice (400g)
• bottle of passata
• 2 cups of stock/water
• 1 yellow capsicum
• 1 red capsicum
• 2 small read onions
• 5 garlic cloves
• 1-2 tbls of paprika
• 3 sprigs of rosemarry
• 1/2 chilli flakes
• 1 tbl butter
• 1 cup of peas

Method

1. In a heavy sauce pan, heat butter. Add chicken and sauté until cooked on all sides
2. Add onion, capsicum, and garlic. Cook for a few minutes, stirring occasionally.
3. Add passata, rice, chicken stock, thyme, spices and herbs.
4. Bring to a boil. Cover and reduce heat to medium-low. Let simmer until the rice is tender and most of the liquid is absorbed, about 20 minutes.
5. Season with salt to taste. Stir in green peas. Optionally, garnish with chopped parsley.