Once A Month Cooking

Well, more like "Once A Month Meal Prep."  Yesterday I met up with four friends at church, and together we prepared sixty meals (twelve each).  It took us 4.5 hours to chop, bag, season, and stack.  We used the freezer cooking recipes from Mama and Baby Love.  These meals contain plenty of healthy veggies and meats, and are 600 calories or less per serving (average is about 400 calories).  My kind of convenience meal!

Here are some of the meals we prepared (this is half of them laid out before we traded):

Each person chose six recipes so we ended up with two meals from each recipe.  We kept half and traded the rest so that we went home with twelve different meals each. 

Each meal fits into a gallon-sized freezer bag.  When you are ready for the meal, pull it out of the freezer & plop it into the slow cooker for 3-8 hours.  This is going to save me so much time!!  The meals contain 3-4 adult servings per bag, which will give us dinner for DH, Baby Girl, and me and I can also take the leftovers for lunch the next day (or leave them for the babysitter). 

I was able to purchase most of my items at Aldi's.  I spent $120 total, but found an NBPR rebate that will get me $25 back :)  So that gives me 12 meals for $100, or around $8 per meal.  I am excited to see how well this works for us.  Working full time gives me only a few hours in the evening to spend with Baby Girl before she goes to bed.  I would love to find something that allows us to get a healthy meal on the table that does not require me to spend 30-60 minutes in the kitchen.  If this works well, I plan to stock up and prepare meals when the ingredients are on sale.

*Sam's Mental Notes*
- Cranberry Chicken - ok, would eat again.  Half the cranberries next time.
- Chicken Curry - delicious!
- Flank Steak Fajitas - YUM!!  DH would eat this every week if I made it :)
- Beef french dip sandwiches - YUM!!  Leftovers made great beef & noodles too.
- Goulash - um, I burned this one.  Oops!  Good thing I have another to try later.
- Barbeque Chicken - YUM!!  Another winner