A Freezer Party Nightmare

Well, I learned a lot from my first experience making freezer meals.
The main lesson being that it's a TON of work.

Also, if you are super pregnant, don't stand up all day and cook (duh). Even with sitting down and chopping all the veggies my back was killing me the next day. So much so that Andrew worked from home the next day to help me with Logan. Killer pain. Luckily after resting I was able to do normal stuff again, like change diapers, yay.

Here is the plan we followed this month: Once A Month Meals: Paleo September 2013

This is also our first time trying a Paleo diet. We aren't huge fans of the baked goods but it could be worse. We probably won't be doing it again (expensive and we are big dairy fans, go cheese!) but I am glad we gave it a shot.

I only got through half of the meals this month and then decided to just freeze the rest of the meat. My main problem with this plan is that it requires a lot of pre-cooking meals (which caused the back issues). When I envisioned doing freezer meals I thought I would just throw a bunch of stuff in a ziplock bag and then throw it in the freezer. Bam, done. Thaw, and then throw in the crock-pot on the day of.    

If I had actually taken the time to go through the recipes before hand and done a little bit more research then I maybe could have avoided my freezer meal/back disaster.

Our kitchen. Wow. It was bad. For somebody who doesn't like doing dishes this was the worst part. Luckily, I have an awesome husband who helped me do dishes all day to get our kitchen clean again. Yep, it took all day.

Next month I am going to try a different plan of attack. All of our dinners will be raw ingredients thrown into a ziplock and then frozen. All ready to go in the crock-pot. For lunch I will cook up some taco meat and grilled chicken (for taco salads, burritos, or whatever sounds good). Divide it into ziplocks and freeze. For breakfasts I am going to keep it simple and stick with cold cereal, bagels, or egg scrambles (not frozen, obviously).

Also, next month I will be making enough for two months that way we have food all ready to go for after Charlie makes his arrival. Gah, I can't believe it's already time to start thinking about stuff like that. Soon there will be two little boys running around this house. Crazy and so exciting!

P.S.

Here is one recipe that we have tried and it is SO good. I may keep this one on our menu through the fall. Italian Crock-Pot Chili (It is spicy and I didn't even use the fire-roasted tomatoes)

Freezer Party

This month I am attempting to do freezer meals. I am calling it a party in hopes that it will make the process at least a little fun. This morning I went shopping for the most food that I have ever bought at one time. The amount of meat that was purchased in one shopping trip is insane. I signed up for "once a month mom" which is a website that does all the meal planning for you. All I had to do was choose our menu for the month and they gave me a grocery list and instructions on how to prepare/freeze everything. They have many different categories of food and lots of food plans for each month so that way all the produce is in season. I am pretty excited about trying it out. I will let you all know how my "party" goes.

Now I am off to get my kitchen totally clean so that I can completely destroy it tomorrow and then clean it up again. Good times.