Last week I got back on my meal prep game and I went hard. I ended up making 12 meals that will last me over two work weeks because I tend to eat my meal preps for lunch at work and not so much for dinner. This ground chicken, sweet potato, black bean skillet is a revival of a recipe that I made last year when I first started IIFYM and I was experimenting with throwing together different whole foods to find new recipes.
This year’s recipe is different because I’m now eating chicken so I instead of using Morningstar ground crumbles (which you can absolutely use if you’re a vegetarian and I still keep on hand) I used ground chicken. I shared a bit of why I decided to start eating chicken again in this post, but after following flexible dieting for six months I was starting to get bored with my food options and I wanted more flexibility in what carbs I was eating. Adding seafood and chicken back into diet allows me so many more options and honestly I don’t regret it for a second.
This recipe is ideal for meal prepping because of it’s simplicity. This whole recipe is made in one pan for easy cooking and cleaning. After you cook the ground chicken, you just let the rest cook while you’re preparing your other meal preps or cleaning as you go which I recommend for any meal prepper. Check out my other meal prep recipes for more ideas!
What You’ll Need
- 16 ounces raw ground chicken
- 151g sweet potato
- 112g canned black beans
- 1/2 T. olive oil
- chili powder
- cumin
- optional: green onion, sriracha
Peel the sweet potato and cube into 1-inch pieces for quick cooking in the skillet. Set aside the amount you’ll use. Weigh the amount of black beans you want to include in the recipe. This can vary based on your macros. Beans are a great source of fiber so you’ll want to include some, but if you’re cutting also keep in mind how many grams of carbs you’re adding with the beans. I personally like having more carbs from the sweet potato so I used about 3/4 of a serving of black beans which is less than half a cup.
Heat a skillet over medium heat and add enough olive oil to prevent the chicken from sticking to the pan. Add the chicken to the skillet, along with cumin and chili powder, and cook thoroughly until brown (internal temperature of 165 degrees). Next, add in about a half a cup of water and the sweet potato cubes. Cover and let the water come to a slow boil. Remove the cover, stir the chicken and sweet potato mixture, and lower the heat. Continuing cooking, occasionally checking the sweet potato. When the sweet potato is nearly done, stir in the black beans for the rest of the cooking time for the sweet potato and until the water has cooked off.
In total this recipe prepped four meals with one serving being 252 calories/14C/24P/11F. You can easily bump those carbs up by adding in more beans or sweet potatoes. I stored these in simple meal prep containers (similar to these) in the freezer until the night before I packed the meal for work. Feel free to garnish this recipe with green onions or sriracha is my personal favorite.
Be sure you give this recipe a try for your next meal prep – you’ll love it. Check out my other meal prep recipes for more inspiration. Thanks for reading!
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