Money Saving Mom®

After about four hours of work, here’s what my sister and I had to show for our efforts:

FishMama’s Lasagna x 4

Brown Bag Burritos x 2

Cheeseburger Meatloaf x 3

Chicken and Red Bean Burritos (recipe from The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook)

Lemon Chicken x 3 (recipe from The $5 Dinner Mom Cookbook)

White Bean and Chicken Chili (recipe from Eat Well, Save Big Cookbook)

Taco Meat

Make Ahead Butterhorns x 2

Blueberry Pancakes

Chopped onions

2 bags of cooked brown rice

1 bag of cooked Great Northern beans

All totaled, the above should make enough for about 25 dinners for our family–plus some breakfasts and lots of Butterhorns! I sent 8 of the meals home with my sister as a thank you for all her help.

The rest of the meals should last us almost an entire month since we eat an average of 16-20 home-cooked dinners per month. (We go out to eat once a week and usually have dinner at our parents’ homes 1-2 times per week, plus we also eat leftovers or a really simple dinner of sandwiches or cereal a few times a month, too!)

It feels so nice to have the freezer all stocked up again!

Did you have a chance to do any baking or cooking this week? If so, post about it on your blog and leave your link below to your direct blo g post. I’d love it especially if you could share pictures and recipes so we can get ideas for our next Freezer Cooking Day! And I’m guessing many others would be inspired as well.

While the thought of making up casseroles and freezing them might not be appealing to your family, there are many ways that you can use your freezer to speed up cooking preparations. Here’s one example:

I really do not enjoy chopping up onions (does anyone?), but I do love how they taste in recipes, so I’ve found that my best options are to buy bags of frozen already-chopped onions at the store (which I have done when I’ve found a good sale on them!) or to chop them in bulk and freeze them. I usually opt for the latter since it just seems fresher to me, for some reason.

I did a big batch of onions on Freezer Cooking Day and thought I’d share what works for me:

1) Cut off the ends, peel, and cut in fourths.

2) Stick in the food processor and chop. If you don’t have a food processor, you can also use a blender, though it will chop the onion pretty fine.

3) Measure 1/2 cup of chopped onions into small sandwich baggies and then stick these into a freezer bag (as shown above). Freeze.

You can then just pull out a bag of chopped onions and use them in recipes whenever they call for chopped onion. Doing them in bulk like this saves a lot of time and effort–and tears! However, if I had followed the advice from Meal Planning Mommies here, I wouldn’t have had to worry about the tears!

Gretchen added spices and onions to the already-browned ground beef for Taco Meat and then she took on that task of making all the Butterhorn rolls (a rather tedious task that I was completely happy having her volunteer for!).

While she was busy with that, I put together four pans of FishMama’s Lasagna, the marinade for the lemon chicken (I took this recipe times three and divided frozen chicken breasts into three bags and poured a third of the marinade into each), and the White Bean and Chicken Chili.

Whew! What a great feeling to be done–and it was only 1:15 p.m.! I’m so very, very glad my sister said she’d help. Without her, I would still be back on the second recipe, I’m pretty sure. But instead, in four hours, we whipped out 25 dinners plus 64 Butterhorns and a batch of Blueberry Pancakes! Plus, we had leftover cooked brown rice and beans to freeze and chopped onions, too.

Our little kitchen “helper” (ahem, he enjoyed pulling out all the contents from under the kitchen sink!)

And the girls–with make-up on! (Auntie Gretchen had fun playing “beauty shop” with them while she was here!)

Stay tuned tomorrow for the final picture of everything we made ready to go in the freezer. I’ll post a link-up post at 12 p.m. CST for you to come and share your Freezer Cooking Day accomplishments, too. I can’t wait to see what you made!

Someone had left a tip on a recent Freezer Cooking Day suggesting that I try baking the chicken instead of boiling it. I’m not sure who left that tip, but it’s a good one. I just stuck the frozen chicken breasts straight onto a baking sheet and cooked them at 350 degrees for around 45 minutes, turning them once while they were cooking (not exactly sure on how long I ended up cooking them because I just checked them every 10 minutes or so to see if they were done).

Wow! The chicken breasts came out so much more tender and juicy than they do when I boil them. Plus, it freed up some stove-top space, too! So a big thanks to whomever suggested that (I couldn’t seem to find the original comment to specifically thank the individual!).

After the Cheeseburger Meatloaf was in the oven and the Blueberry Pancakes were cooking, we moved on to the burritos. Gretchen made the Brown Bag Burritos and I made the Chicken and Red Bean Burrito recipe. We love Brown Bag Burritos–especially the guys in our family. I’m so thankful to Amy for sharing this winner recipe. We doubled it and should have enough burritos to keep our husbands happy for the next few weeks!

I wasn’t thrilled with how the Chicken and Red Bean Burritos turned out and ended up adding some salt to the recipe as I thought the filling seemed a little bland. That seemed to do the trick.

Next up: Taco Meat, Lasagna, Lemon Chicken, & White Bean Chili

How’s the Freezer Cooking Day going at your house? My sister Gretchen, came to help me and we began our cooking around 9:15 a.m.

(After I made out my plan, I started panicking a little because I wasn’t sure how I could pull off making 25 meals in five hours with three little children underfoot. So I “bribed” my sister to come by telling her I’d send some of the food home with her so she wouldn’t have to cook as much in March! I’m sure she would have come without the bribe–because she’s nice like that–but I’m sure the bribe didn’t hurt anything!)

I got started on the Prep Work list while Gretchen started in on making the Butterhorns since those are a little more time-intensive.

We decided to double the Butterhorn recipe, which probably wasn’t the best idea seeing as it made a massive amount of dough and was a little hard to knead and work with. But she managed to pull it off.

While the dough was rising, Gretchen finished mixing up the Blueberry Pancakes. I already had the dry ingredients mixed up for her, so she just had to add in the wet ingredients. I told her to let me know how many eggs the recipe took since we were running short on eggs and I wanted to make sure we had enough to go around. That’s when we both realized the recipe didn’t list eggs as one of the ingredients (Do you see eggs listed here? Are we going blind?)

I finished up all the Prep Work and then got ready to make the Cheeseburger Meatloaf. Only there was one big problem: we realized that my two big bowls were up on top of the refrigerator with dough rising in them. So there was nothing for me to mix up the meatloaf in. Oops. I guess that I’m not really set up for this two-people-working-in-the-kitchen thing. Maybe I should look for some more big bowls the next time I’m at the thrift store?

Since I couldn’t sit around and wait for the dough to finish rising, I finally opted to mix up the meatloaf in a 9×13 pan. It worked, albeit not quite as great as a bowl would.

Next up: Brown-Bag Burritos and Chicken and Red Bean Burritos

I’m so excited about Freezer Cooking Day! I’m ready to fill up our getting-close-to-empty freezer again!

To start things off, here’s a picture of all the groceries we bought for Freezer Cooking Day. All totaled, we spent $64.61. It seems a little high but considering about $20 of that was spent on meat and $12 on tortillas, I’m happy with it. And I felt even better when I realized that all of that coupled with the food we already have on hand should make about 25 dinners for our family.

However, next time around, I’m going to try and do a better job of buying more groceries ahead of time because I hated paying full price for a few of these items that I know I can often get for pennies on the dollar if I plan ahead. I haven’t done a good enough job recently of following my own advice to Buy Ahead, I guess!

I’ll be back later with an update on our progress.