Starting the year off with a little FREEZER COOKING

Ok, so I haven't been really good about this whole blogging thing lately. I've had family asking me to start back up again so here goes... I am going to try to be consistent!

This past Saturday I got together with 2 friends from church to spend all day cooking. I've always wanted to try freezer cooking but it's definitely not something to tackle yourself... especially the first time. They had brought up the idea of taking a day to cook 15 meals a piece... 45 meals all together. I was all for it!

The week leading up to the big day was spent picking out recipes, figuring out how much of each ingredient that was needed and getting all the pots and pans, crockpots, and utensils ready to go! I think we purchased, cooked and shredded something like 52 chicken breasts!!

I arrived at the house at 10:30 ready to go. We began by cooking all the meat - hamburger, chicken and the pork for the pulled pork BBQ went into the crockpot. I cooked 15lbs of hamburger! Whew! Then after we cooked all the meat, we started assembling meals. Here's what we made:

Chicken and Veggies with Stuffing
Shepards Pie
Chicken Tortilla Soup
Chicken New Orleans.

Chicken Cassarole,
beef and bean burrito mix
Spinach lasagna
Ham, Potato, Cheese casserole
Sloppy Joes
Italian beef
Hamburger dish
Chicken Parmesan
Chicken Lasagna
Meatloaf
Pulled BBQ Pork

It was insane! But, oh so much fun! We cooked and assembled all day. I think the last meal was put together at 8:00pm and then we started clean-up. The fun part was trying to carry everything home and get it all in my freezer - thank goodness for a deep freeze!

It's been so nice on crazy hectic days (lately especially because we have had a house full of sick people) to just pull out a meal and warm it up! Plus, we totally saved on $$ buying everything in bulk and then cooking. It only cost me around $90 for all that!

Dinner time is crazy in our house just because the babies are usually tired and hungry at that point. Mark is usually just getting home or getting finished up in his office and I'm beat. So, it's been nice to have this little life-saver called "frozen meals" in my freezer. I think it may have to be an every 6 weeks type of thing. And maybe next time we will cook all the meat the day before (each person do a different type of meat) and I'm sure that would speed the process along as well!

All in all it was a fun day and I'm so glad I did it. Here are some pics from the 'event' (they were taken with my phone so they aren't the best quality!) :
Mixing up the Chicken Lasagna
Me being the organizational person that I am loved putting the foil on the finished meal and then writing the instructions (and sometimes a little note) on the top!
The finished Product! It may not look like a ton but the meals in the back are stacked 3-high and a lot of the ziploc bag meals are stacked as well! Yay for food!