ashleyo.photo: Freezer Cooking Round 2

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Freezer Cooking Round 2

My friend Melanie and I have started on an adventure together. The destination is a months worth of meals prepared all in one day.. thus began our freezer meal marathon! If you're on pintrest I'm sure you've seen links about freezer meals. We felt that a lot of the posts made it sound easy and super cheap, and although we find it cost effective, we spent more than 3.95 per meal as one post declared. Our first attempt was successful, but a bit stressful while trying to cook 20 meals with 4 kids little around. We learned some lessons and enrolled our husbands for kids duty last Saturday, our second time to cook. We still have some improvements to make, but feel that this round was much smother. Here was the game plan: Pick meals, make recipe cards and grocery list. Grocery shop for all ingredients on Wednesday night. Cook 16 meals each (32 in all) on Saturday while our husbands keep an eye on the kids. We actually ended up with 18 meals each (including dinner for Sat night) for a total of 36 meals in 8.5 hours! We even took a lunch break as I scurried over to a friends baby shower and Melanie got a much needed Dr. Pepper. Yes, that's a full day of cooking, but it's great to know that for the rest of the month, dinner is planned, cooked and prepared, all we have to do is throw it in the crockpot! We still have ways to refine the process (write instructions on bags beforehand, save and reuse grocery list, create a cut list for easy preparing. We also have several friends intrested in joining us, we'll see where it goes! But for now, here's some snap shots of our day.
The dry goods