Freezer Cooking

So last week I attempted my first batch of freezer cooking. I had been thinking about doing it for quite some time. I'd seen a whole bunch of recipes on Pinterest (you can see my Freezer Cooking Pinterest board here) and had seen people posting on various blogs about their attempts at freezer cooking. After realizing that we have over 30 different soccer and volleyball games to go to in the month of April (with who knows how many more practices), I knew I wasn't going to be able to put dinner on the table every night without some help, so I finally bit the bullet and decided to do it. I went through the different blog posts I had pinned, reading about how others had done it so I could decide how I wanted to do it. I marked the recipes I wanted to try. I made up a list of all the ingredients I would need for those 10 recipes and then marked which ingredients I already had and which I would need to buy. Luckily, I have my own "store" to shop from, full of all the food storage items I have already stocked up on (I'm really glad that I coupon and price match, and already had quite a lot of ingredients that I had already bought on sale or with a coupon!). I ended up really only having to buy the meat (I was low on chicken breasts and I decided to buy the stew meat and pork chops, as mine were already frozen and I didn't want to defrost them then freeze them again) and a few other specialty items (like the teriyaki sauce, hoisin sauce, etc). I did spend about $11 on the ziploc bags (I bought a large box of the gallon size freezer bags at Sam's), but I didn't even use a fourth of them, so I'll have plenty more bags for the next time and won't have to count that price in. My final total ended up being $148.41 which, divided up into 22 meals, comes out to $6.75 a meal. That is not bad AT ALL!! Granted, most of the meals will still need a side dish, but holy cow!! MAYBE that'll come out to $10 a meal, which is something we could NEVER come close to at McDonald's or any other restaurant with a family our size. I am so super stoked about that!!

In reading some other blog posts, a couple ladies had said that they weren't happy with recipes they had used that had a lot of veggies in them (like stews with potatoes, or ones that added frozen broccoli, etc). They said that all the veggies were mushy and tasted the same at the end. That sounded like it was probably true, so I looked for recipes that were mainly meat with sauces. There were a couple I chose that had carrots added, and I also never have a problem with using onions in the crockpot, so I didn't exclude those. Two of the recipes I chose called for frozen broccoli, so I bought it, but I didn't put it in the bag with the rest of the meal. I'm planning on adding the frozen broccoli to the crockpot for the last half hour, so that it'll be cooked but hopefully not mushy and gross. I ended up going with 10 different recipes. I had planned on making 2 of each meal but, because of the amount of meat I had purchased, I was able to triple 2 of the meals, so I ended up with a total of 22 meals. The recipes I went with were Teriyaki Chicken, Balsamic Glazed Drumsticks (I made 3 of this one), Mongolian Beef, Beef Stroganoff, Honey Sesame Chicken, Black Bean Taco Soup, Chicken Alfredo, Maple Dijon Chicken, Cilantro Lime Chicken, and Marinated and Baked Pork Chops (I made 3 of this one also and it's the only one that doesn't go in the crockpot).

To start, I pulled out the ziploc bags and, on each bag, wrote down the name of the recipe, the date it was made, and the cooking instructions. (I don't have a picture of that.)

Then I got out every single ingredient I was going to need and put them all out on my kitchen table.

I started by prepping the veggies. I cut up all the onions; some called for large slices, some chopped, some diced fine. Since I'm a little OCD about things like that, I had to divide them all up on my cookie sheet lol. I also cut up the green peppers that were going into the chicken alfredo meal.

After that, I started prepping the meat. I washed and dried all the chicken breasts and drumsticks, got all the pork chops out of their packaging, and cooked the ground beef with the onions for the taco soup. Then I went through each recipe and put the correct amount of meat into each bag. Because our family is large, I put in a little more meat than was called for in each recipe (if it said 1.5 lbs of chicken, I put 2). I also made a little more sauce for each recipe (I didn't double them, but multiplied by 1.5).

After I had the meat in the bags, I added the veggies (fresh and canned). Here are all the bags with veggies and meat added.

The next step was to make the sauces. Somehow this took me SO much longer than I thought it would. My printer is broken, so I couldn't print up the recipes. I had my laptop on the kitchen counter with all the recipes pulled up and would have to keep going over to it to check the measurements, so that might have taken up some more time than necessary. I mixed up each sauce, poured it into the bag, sealed the bag, rinsed out the bowl, then started on the next sauce. The only bag I had a problem with was the pork chop bag. I was using bone-in pork chops and, I don't know if I had a particularly sharp bone or what, one of the chops tore a small hole in the bag. I just made up a new bag and double-bagged those ones. Once I had all my sauces made and my meals bagged up, I was done!

I took pictures of them all individually (but in the interest of space am leaving those pictures out) and then carried them down to my deep freezer. I have them all laying flat so they won't take up a lot of room. I plan on pulling them out of the freezer the night before using them and putting them into the fridge to defrost. Some people had said you can put them straight from the freezer into the crockpot, and I'm sure you can, but I'm a little concerned that stuff might stick to the bag. Then I'll put them in the crockpot that morning and we'll have dinner ready when we get home from our games that night. A lot of them are supposed to be served over rice, but I also have a rice cooker that I can set to cook before we leave the house. Then when we get home, while the girls are putting away all their stuff, I can steam/sauté some veggies or throw together a quick salad, and we'll have our meal ready to go!

To recap, I made 22 meals for about $6.75 each in a total of about 4.5 hours (5 with the cleanup afterwards). I really was happy with these results (and I bet I could put them together even faster next time)!

Just so you know, I haven't actually tried any of these recipes yet, so I can't swear that they're all good, but they look good and they've got to better than cereal, right? I'll post an update as we go through the meals and let you guys know what we thought of each one. If anyone has any questions, let me know and I'll answer as best as I can. And if you decide to do it too, I'd love to see what you make!

new scrapbook pages

So I've been a pretty busy scrapper this past week, but I couldn't post any of the pages till this past Friday. Then things got busy, and I didn't make it here to post them on the blog till now. I made three pages for Sya's Blueprints, as she had a grab bag that came out with the re-opening of the Scrap Matters store. We couldn't post our pages until the grab bag was available for purchase. Then last week, I was accepted onto another CT, this time for Jeni Hopewell, who also sells at Scrap Matters. She also has a grab bag out in the store, so I created a page using things from her grab bag. (In case you don't know, a grab bag is kind of a mystery. They're usually around $3-4, but you don't know what's in them till after you've purchased them. But they're always worth way more than what you pay for them.) So without further ado, here are the pages (the first three are using templates from Sya's grab bag and the fourth uses a template from Sya and stuff from Jeni's grab bag).....

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Last, but not least, there was a speed scrap over at Scrap Matters this morning and this is the page I made for it.

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Watching Fireworks

I don't think I've mentioned this here on the blog, but I applied for and was accepted on a digital scrapbooking creative team. A creative team is a group of people who make scrapbook pages using a designer's products to showcase on the internet to get other people interested in buying the products. Make sense? So the team I applied for is a new designer to ScrapMatters who specializes in templates. Her store can be found here. I'm really excited to be able to do this. Here's the first page I've done as a member of her creative team...this is for a template pack that will be available tomorrow.

For credits, click here.

comin to ya live... (part 2)

from San Diego!! We left our hotel this morning to drive down here to take the girls to Sea World. They were so excited to see Shamu again. And this time we got to feed the dolphins and all the girls got the chance to touch a dolphin. That was pretty dang cool. We also fed the seals. The trainer told us not to dangle the little fish over the edge because there were seagulls all around, just waiting for you to do that so they can fly in and steal the fish before the seal gets it. Sure enough, Elena dangled hers over and I got a picture of the bird stealing it out of her hand. Speaking of Elena, we only lost her twice today. So I'd say our parenting skills have greatly improved. Side note - I walked away from her just a little (like 5 feet), but she didn't see me walk away. She turned around, and started looking all around for me. Once she saw that I was nearby, she kind of chuckled and then said "Oh! I thought I was lost again!" And if anyone is wondering, the Orlando Sea World is definitely better than the San Diego one. Not that this one wasn't fun, because it was, the Orlando one is just bigger and better. I don't know what we'll do tomorrow. We don't really know. Maybe check out the Pacific coast beaches (I've never seen the Pacific before - but I'm sure it can't compare with the beaches of Naples) or just sightsee around town. I guess if you care you can check back in tomorrow night. And I still can't post any pictures, but I was able to find these ones of us from the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disney. The one of Amya and Téa didn't come out for some reason, but there's one of me with Maricela, and Keith with Elena. And just so you know, my score is slightly lower than Keith's because I was trying to take pictures and wasn't really concentrating on shooting. (It's actually an improvement on my score from last year!)

comin to ya live...

from Disney!! Amya and I have our fall break this weekend. Keith and I had talked about taking the girls to Disney but didn't have any definite plans. Wed night we were talking about what we wanted to do over this break and Keith said, "So what about Disney?" We packed up and left the next morning. We just spent 11 hours at Disneyland with the girls (which may have been a few too many). I don't have a cord to connect my camera to my laptop, so I can't post any pics, but we had a great time. The girls looked for characters to get autographs, we rode all the rides they wanted to, we lost Elena at least four times and we watched the parade twice. It was a blast. But I'm seriously thinking about stopping at WalMart for a leash for Elena tomorrow before we take off for SeaWorld. If our hotel down there has wireless, I'll update again....maybe we'll only lose her three times tomorrow.



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ummm, I don't have a fun title today

sooo...yes, I know it's been awhile. But in my defense, we've had some problems. Our computer completely shut down (we think it was a virus) and we went to Texas for a week. So I haven't been able to post for awhile. But now I'm back.

In Maricela news, that girl is movin!! She's crawling all over the house. She can pull herself up to stand (and does it quite often). She follows her sisters wherever they go and has so much fun playing with them. And the girls are so sweet to her. They bring her into their little clubhouses that they make, they make special clubhouses just for her, they share their food with her (not always a good thing), they get her toys to play with, they read to her, etc. It's so neat to watch them play together and know that they're developing this strong sister bond. You can tell that they all just really love each other. Hopefully they won't lose that closeness during the teenage years.....

Yesterday was a great day. We had so much fun together. We went up American Fork canyon to swim in a lake in the middle of the mountains. The water was a little cold at first, but once you got used to it, it felt SO nice. Here are some pictures of us at the lake.


There was a little prairie dog (I think that's what it was) that came over to where we are to beg for some food. The girls thought it was so cute and Elena was trying to get it to eat out of her hand. He was just about to when she moved her head and it scared him off. She got bored of waiting for him (she really did a good job of staying still - I wish she would stay that still at church!) and never did feed him out of her hand.

But Keith did and one of our friends that was there did, too. It got to the point where we had to shoo him away because he was trying to get into the Doritos bag!

Amya definitely won the "staying in the lake the longest" award. She was like a fish! She had her goggles on and was swimming around in tubes and with water wings. She did not want to get out of the water. Her lips were purple and she was shivering, and we couldn't convince her to come out. After she finally did, she ate a little, warmed up, and then said she was going back in!!! Crazy girl!

Tea had a good time. She loves rocks and dirt, so she was totally in her element. She didn't like the cold water very much. It took her awhile to get used to it, and she didn't want her whole body to be in it. She sat on top of me while I was in my tube.

And Maricela had fun as well. She has recently discovered the amazing taste of rocks and dirt and we had a hard time keeping her from eating every one she could put in her mouth. She didn't like the water at all. I tried to put her in it, but as soon as her feet touched the water, she lifted her legs up to her b*tt so that she wouldn't have to feel the cold water. Needless to say, she spent her time on the blanket, trying to eat more rocks.


When we were all tired out from the lake, we packed up our stuff and headed down to the farm. We rested up there and hung out with Bonnie, Joseph, George & Angie & their kids, and Keith's mom. We lit some fireworks around dusk and the girls had a lot of fun with that. They must have thrown hundreds of those little poppers, and the girls had fun going around and stomping on the ones that didn't explode. (Notice that Elena's barefoot but that didn't stop her!)

We also had a lot of fun with the sparklers.


Amya took this shot of Keith, Maricela, and me. I like how she's looking up at us.

George and Angie brought those little neon bracelet and necklace thingies. I think the girls were more excited about those than the fireworks. They had a lot of fun making necklaces, crowns, and bracelets.


One of my favorite shots.

july desktop

Just thought I'd show you guys what my July desktop looks like. All of these pics were taken at Keith's family reunion we went to in Texas. I love the picture of Amya dancing in the top right corner. She was doing "the swim". Enjoy!

Random Pics from the dub-v

I just wanted to get some pics up. Since our camera broke, we didn't take as many pictures as we normally would have. I'm tellin ya, Keith goes crazy with that thing. He took 393 pictures Christmas day, before he dropped it. Imagine how many more we would have if it had been working for the rest of the vacation! So we don't have pics of paintballing with Robert, or going to the Huntington High basketball game (they're ranked #3 in the country, by the way). We don't have pics of us playing games with my brother and sisters, or my girls playing with them. But we had a great time, and I'm sure that we'll remember it without the pictures.

Maricela really liked my dad's beard.


Here's Sally and Ben with all the kiddos.


Here's Memmie, Amya, and me. (Don't I look like a giant?)

This is my mom, Jan, and Kara.

And here's my dad asleep with Maricela. Did you spot the puddle of drool she left on his shirt?


That's all for now. I hear the baby starting to fuss. Oh, I added some more pics to the West Virginia recap post, so be sure to go back and check those out.