School Time Cook-Off

Let the Cook off Begin!!!

As the fall season begins, so does a crazy busy time at our house. Mom begins the busiest time at work, plus a new semester of classes. She is going back to school to finish her degree and we are so proud of her!! Dad(Alvin) starts work back at school and everyone is just super busy! One thing we really lack at is having good, healthy dinners and we usually end up picking something up on the way home or having cold cereal

  So with the beginning of this busy time, we decided to try a little experiment. We are HUGE fans of Pintrest and to start off with, we gathered a whole ton of dinners from various pinners and compiled them into the cookbook program on mom’s computer. This program is amazing, it has you pick meals you want to have and makes you a calendar and then makes you a shopping list for everything you need for all of the meals.

Well we decided to try this for a month so we got all of that put together and got our shopping list down and headed to town! Mom and I went on Friday night and we spent 2 and a half hours at Winco with two carts and then another hour at Walmart getting all of the food we would need for the next month’s worth of dinners. We spent what seems like a lot at once but for not having to pick up dinner or go grocery shopping every week, we will end up saving quite a bit! Even more of a bonus

Organized chaos

On our way home we call called the house and had Kray and Alvin get the counter and the fridge cleaned out to be able to put everything put away for the night. It took numerous trips to and from the car but we eventually got it all unpacked. We headed to bed for the night and got up on Saturday morning for the epic cook off!

Mom preparing to cook-away!

We started cooking at about 11:15 a.m. and continued on for 8 and a half more hours. We got all but 4 meals made and in the freezer. Mom starts classes on Monday and we made her stop for the night so that she and Alvin could go on one last summer night dateJ  On Sunday afternoon, we finished the last few meals and in total it took us 12 and a half hours. 

so much food!

when all is said and done...

We made 26 meals, with most of them having plenty for a second meal and left overs to take for lunch. Our grocery list was a tad bit off but we were able to make it work. We had to run to Broulim’s for some more onions and black beans and a couple other things. We also had some things left over, some peppers and produce that we cut up and put in baggies to freeze for when we do this again or for if we need some extra’s in dinner when we pull them out. As we were cooking the meals, we made one and would put it either in a foil casserole dish or a plastic freezer bag, depending on the cooking directions. 

see the directions?

We used pretty well the same dishes for all of the meals, just washing and rinsing as we got done with them, which was nice to be able to utilize as much space as we could.  We wrote on the foil or the bag with a permanent marker the cooking directions.

all snugly fit in the freezer

So hopefully this will help us be able to have a nice homemade meal every night and to be able to pack us all a lunch to cut down on eating out costs! I will keep you posted on how well it is going and which recipes we like and what ones we don’t!! Also if we decide this works for us, I will let you know what we do differently and what new recipes we decide to try!!

so prepared!

*H*