My Cooking Adventure!

On Saturday, I took my first stab at freezer cooking! It worked out great and I'm thrilled to not have to worry about what's for dinner for at least 20 nights! I have been following the Once A Month Mom blog for a while. In fact, I started talking about doing this about a year ago when I made my new years resolutions!

I read the menus every month when she posted it, thought about doing it, and then never did....until now! It was really not that bad. I would say that I spent about 4 hours cooking, but I got 22 meals out of it!

This month she did a menu with reader favorites. I made everything except the Buffalo Chicken Pizza (too spicy for the kids), Ham and Cheese Pinwheels or the breakfasts. So far we've had the Chicken Fried Rice and Sloppy Joes. I actually make that sloppy joe recipe regularly (from one of our favorite sites...Our Best Bites), so I knew we'd like that. The Chicken Fried Rice was great too (also from OBB)! I'd love to make that recipe again with lo mein noodles.

The best part of the deal is that I only spent $104.25 before tax on the food for the recipes! I had a lot of the stuff on the list in my pantry already. I got the chicken on sale over 50% off (I would only use fresh chicken...not frozen because some of the recipes you don't cook it right away). To save $ I bought what I could at Aldi and then I got all of my meat and produce from Price Chopper. I just don't like Aldi's meat, and their produce is very hit or miss.

Now, that $104 does not include side dishes, food for our lunches and snacks, so my actual grocery bill for 2 weeks was higher than that. But not much! I will have to pick up a few things like milk, bread, fruit and possibly lunch meat for next week, but that's it. We keep our grocery budget pretty low, and this definitely helps me stretch it!

I think that I will try to do this about once a month. I think it is a great time and money saver. It also helped bail me out yesterday because I forgot that I was scheduled to bring dinner to the priests! I just took one of the meals and didn't freeze it and it was ready to go!

I tried to take pictures as I went, but cooking 22 meals in my tiny kitchen wasn't easy, so I gave up! Here is a picture of most of the ingredients before I got started (minus the meat). Oh, and ignore those pineapples...they were on the list, but not needed for any of the recipes!

Another thing I loved about it is that there are very few processed foods in the recipes she chooses. I probably could have gone a little healthier with some of my choices...the tortillas, packaged taco seasoning, jarred spaghetti sauce, but I was going for cheap and convenient!

I highly recommend you check out her website and give it a try! Tonight we are having the Greek Inspired Chicken breasts with salad and garlic bread! That marinade smelled amazing...I can't wait to try them!