My adventure with 50 Crock Pot Freezer meals

50 Pre-made meals in one day!

With the two of us working full time jobs we often find that dinner becomes a daily battle. to often we end up giving in and ordering a pizza. 

We both got two weeks off of work for the holidays and got to thinking and pintresting when we stumbled across the pin for : 40 Freezer Meals

(keep in mind this link is from the states so measurements and costs are very different. This was not a $200 dollar adventure.)

This seemed like it was a solution to our dinner battle. 

What really got me excited was that it was going to save us money and time. Plus there's a grocery list ready to go for the recipe.

The Preparation

So I began by writing out this grocery list in the categories.

I took each list and scanned my pantry, fridge and freezer crossing off any ingredients I already had. 

(which really wasn't much so that added a lot to the cost.)

 After I rewrote the grocery list reducing it down to 4 pages instead of six, I started looking through flyers for any deals that could save me big bucks.

Here I didn't have any luck.. my timing was not very good because I preparing this list on New years day hoping to score big on Jan 2nd when the stores opened for the new year.

This was a very bad idea and do not recommend anyone goes shopping the day after new years.

Not only was every store packed full but there we're no sales anywhere.

The Big Shop

I lucked out big time with my Mommy willing to help me through this very stressful shopping spree. It was not a job for one person and a struggle with two even.

A long and stressful visit to my local superstore I managed to get everything on my list and just had to get the meats.

Having looked through flyers I tried to find the best ways to save money on meat since that would be most of the cost.  I managed to get a giant pork shoulder for $19.99,  two full racks of pork ribs for $16.99. that's where the savings stopped and the spending started.

I defiantly advise trying to snag deals on the meat,  especially the chicken. this Recipe required 30 lbs of chicken breast. With there not being a sale in town on chicken breast I lost a lot of money into buying the chicken. I ended up buying 15 family pack (5 chicken breast) trays. After making the meals I still have two full trays to freeze as just chicken breasts.

We use a lot of ground beef in our house hold and when I couldn't find a good quality to price ratio on the ground be I went the the local butcher for my meat. This grocery list suggested I needed 6 lbs of ground beef. I spoke with the butcher and he cut the price per lb down 1.50 if I agreed to buy 10 lbs. Since we always use ground beef I agreed and happily left with 10 lbs of steak and two beautiful steaks for the fajitas.

I finally got everything packed into the back of the mini van and was on my way to a full night of cooking.

The Big Cook

My helpful house man helped and cleaned up the kitchen and dining room while I shopped.

While I washed all the produce He started getting the meats cooking in the crock pots.(Luckily I had borrowed my mom's.) 

 

The first crock pot was full of cubed chicken breast and ginger-ale. (tenderizes for pulled/shredded chicken but doesn't leave a strong flavour, good for a variety of recipes) on low for 4hrs and high for 2hrs.  Then shredded with two forks, cooled and divided into bags for recipes.

The second crock pot had most of the pork shoulder. (what I could fit in. we ended up with a full freezer bag of uncooked pork shoulder) this we cooked in ginger-ale root beer mixture. on Low for 2 hrs and high for 4 hrs. this was an intimidating step because it didn't look like much of anything till it was off the bone and shredded. once shredded and cooled it was divided into bags for meals. (we decided to ditch the "cafe rio pork salad", and keep some shredded pork for pulled pork sandwiches.)

The day prior I cooked a blade roast and shredded that for our beef dishes. (next time I would advise cooking all the meat the day before. It would make things a lot easier.)

While the meat cooked we put on a movie and chopped vegetables.  and chopped vegetables.

This was a lengthy process and hard on your shoulders and eyes (onions) but the two of us pushed through and had everything ready to go. 

I got the ribs cut up and bagged with their bbq sauces, straight to the freezer they went.

We got our red sauce and white sauce simmering away on the stove.

This is when things started to pick up.

We started bagging meals. (I had labelled the bags and containers during breaks of chopping vegetables) We started with the raw chicken meals and that happened so fast one recipe after another checked off the list.

Then He started making the Shepards pie, sloppy joes while I started shredding the chicken. 

After we assembled the shepards pies we dished out the sloppy joes and red sauce. This brought us to the half way point, and a much deserved Sloppy joe break.

Next were the shredded chicken meals, this process didn't take long as everything was ready to go. once the tops on the chicken pot pie were placed off to the freezer these went.

We then started assembling the shredded beef meals and moving them to the freezer.

Lastly we assembled the mu shu pork and bagged the pulled pork

This was the end of the Big cook and it was time to tidy up, have a glass of wine and put the feet up.

I will post in a few weeks after I've had a chance to experience how having these prepared meals has affected our lives.. 

Thanks for reading.

 

-Dee