You may have noticed from several of my posts that I’ve been attempting various strategies to try to pull myself together before school started back.
This latest endeavor is no different.
I have decided to try my hand at….
you guessed it…
cooking en masse.
Okay. You probably wouldn’t have guessed that. But when I saw this pin on Pinterest I thought it might be something good to try.
You can read the detailed instructions here.
This is how it works. You obtain all the ingredients and prepare all of the meals and freeze them in the freezer. This process is supposed to take an hour. (It took me two hours but that only confirms my suspicions that I cook twice as slowly as a normal person.)
The night before you want to cook them you thaw them in the fridge and then cook them in the crock pot the following day.
So far we’ve eaten 3 of 7 meals. Two of them received high marks from my husband and myself…the third was just okay. I wanted to hold off on blogging about these until I had at least tried some of the recipes.
Here’s what I like about it:
- It keeps me from having to run to the grocery store after work. I usually only buy enough meat for 2 or 3 meals because I never know what our schedule will be like or which set of in-laws will invite us over to eat with them on a given night. It never fails that I am out of meat on the night we have no invitations.
- It’s ready by the time I get home! That is awesome.
- I use these crockpot liners so there’s very little clean up. (Side note: Don’t try to use these in a Roaster. It will melt and stick to the side of the pan. Learn from my mishaps.)
- I loved the all inclusive shopping list. I spent less than $100 for the ingredients for all 7 meals, although I already had a lot of the pantry and spice items. That is a more than I normally spend on a trip to the grocery store but I usually don’t buy enough food for 7 meals either.
- Although it took up 2 hours on a Saturday, it was well worth the time I have saved during the week, thus far anyway. And I’m sure it would take less time next time.
Here’s what I didn’t like so much:
- Most of the recipes cook in 6 hours. I can program my crock pot to cook for any amount of time and then it switches to keep warm. I feel like the recipe that was just okay was probably because the meat dried out on the keep warm setting before I could get home.
- I think next time I will try this version of recipes since it has step by step instructions and also has a detailed shopping list and even has printable labels (how cute is that?!?). It also has recipes that aren’t crock pot recipes.
Like the idea of cooking en masse? Scope out Pinterest for all sorts of posts. I even saw one that was 40 meals in 4 hours. I’m intrigued but thought I would try my hand with the 7 meals first before I committed to 40 meals. They also have ideas for inviting over a friend or two and prepping together and then splitting the meals.
p.s. I’m linking up to Home Stories A to Z, My Uncommon Slice of Suburbia, By Stephanie Lynn, I heart Naptime, Serenity Now, Savvy Southern Style, Remodelaholic, Tidy Mom, Living Well Spending Less and It’s Overflowing.