Thursday, October 18, 2012

Prep Work is Hard Work!

We did a ton of prep work for our cooking session.  Besides all of the dicing, slicing, shredding and browning, we made a huge slow cooker full of pasta sauce, 2 pounds of refried beans, cooked and shredded a 9 lb. pork shoulder roast and a 4 lb. beef chuck roast, and prepped 20 lbs. of skinless, boneless chicken breasts.

Final numbers included:

Bell peppers: Dice 8, Slice 2 and Chunk 4
Onions: Slice 1, Chunk 6 and buy a huge bag of frozen, diced onions instead of dicing 15 of them ourselves
Chicken: Boil 8 pounds, Shred 7, Dice 1; Slice 5 pounds raw
Steak: Slice 3 pounds raw for fajitas and stir-fry
Ground beef: Brown 6 pounds
Tomatoes: Peel 6 pounds

Additional prep:
Rolled 75 enchiladas and 80 taquitos
Stuffed over 5 dozen shells
Made 20 burritos
Used 144 Ziploc bags

The freezer is full, and we are pooped!  Recipes, pics and details coming soon!

Anybody home?

Oh wait. I guess I shouldn't be asking that since I'm the one who's been the horrible hostess. OK. So yes, it's been just over 6 months since the last time that I posted, but I have a reason for that.  Mainly, it's been a combination of work, and more recently, because I've returned to school full time.  There just aren't enough hours in the day to work 32 hours a week, take 15 units while maintaining a 4.0 GPA, get enough sleep, AND post on my blog.  So yes, poor neglected blog.  Poor thing to be unloved and unvisited by its owner for several long, lonely months. Boo hoo.

Anyway, now that my blog I've given myself a mini guilt trip, I can get on with my reason for posting, and that is a huge session to feed the freezer. Basically, Roger and I are tired of the "What's for Dinner" dance every night, so I took a couple of days off work and planned an enormous freezer cooking session with a ton of chicken, ground beef and meatless dishes.

As with all best laid plans of blah, blah, blah, we didn't finish everything on the list over the course of one weekend so we are still working on the last few meals.  When all is said and done, we will have 36 meals in the freezer with some that are large enough to generate lunches as well.  This is our first freezer session on this scale and we're pretty proud of ourselves.  Yes, it was a lot of work, but it's also immensely satisfying.

So, coming in the next few posts will be recipes and photos of freezer meals galore along with a final list of what we completed.  Hopefully it provides a little motivation to someone else to try it also.  I am certainly glad we did!