Freezer Fanatic Vol. 3

We did freezer meals again yesterday.  And it seems as though we're getting this down to a science here.  This time there were four of us working and we got twenty dinners (per family) done in just 3 hours.  We did an extra set of meals for my sister-in-law Audrey (since she was at home cuddling my brand new nephew) so that = 100 dinners total in just three short hours. If you add the shopping time, plus the chopping time I spent beforehand, I probably spent about 6 hours total shopping, prepping and assembling on the day of.  Not bad at all.  This time our overall cost was about $150 per person, which makes each meal cost $7.25 total.  Most of the meals will have quite a bit of leftovers as well.

Our menu this month was:

Lemon Chicken
Sloppy Joes
Cranberry Ginger Pork Roast
Flank Steak Fajitas
Chicken Curry
Valencian Paella
Italian Meatloaf
BBQ Chicken
Chicken & Grapes
Cumin-Cinnamon Beef Stew

Only four of the recipes have to be cooked in the oven or grilled.  The others are all slow cooker meals.  So easy!

All of our recipes came from the Once-A-Month-Mom & the Mama&Baby Love slow cooker e-cookbook.  Once A Month Mom creates monthly menus with an adaptable google doc recipe cards that you can modify for the number of servings you'd like.  And the Mama and Baby Love e-cookbook is only 5 or 6 dollars and is full of shopping lists and delicious recipes.  The Mama and Baby Love recipes are usually chock full of vegetables so you will rarely have to prepare a side dish to go with them.

This is how we prep each month:
I just take their recipes, make a menu of 10 dinners (and make 2 of each dinner) and then multiply the recipe by the number of families involved.  Each lady involved is responsible for buying their own meat and my Mother-In-Law and I pick up all of the other ingredients, prep them based on the recipes and then split the total cost by the number of families involved.  Then the day of everyone shows up and we mix and bag our meals.  It's a few hours of work that makes figuring out dinners during the week incredibly easy.  I failed to take an action shot again this month because this is serious business...not time for photo ops.  But here is a shot of my stand up garage freezer full of delicious goodness:

all of this food for $150.  Not shabby.