Saturday, June 20, 2009

Cooking

On of my ongoing goals for the summer is to learn how to feed my family better. This means many different things to me.

Better means...

-cheaper (at the grocery store and
-healthier
-less prepared foods (usually frozen meals of some sort)
-more home cooked foods
-less stressful (It's 4pm, what's for dinner?!?)

I'm an okay cook. I have several recipes (maybe 6-8 main dishes) that I can make well but I'm not good at experimenting (especially with a 3 year-old!) so I could always use more cooking weapons in my arsenal. I've actually been improving with this slowly over the last year or so but I want to make some particular strides this summer. A friend and I started getting together last January to cook and make frozen meals to put back for our families as a money saving technique and a stress buster. It has been awesome. Her cooking prowess and my grunt labor and we are a force to be reckoned with!

It has been such a hit for us (good food, good fellowship, good fun) that we've started expanding our cooking time into actually planning what we are going to make beforehand. Planning comes in many different forms. One form is meeting before the cooking day to go over recipes and make sure we know what we want to cook, decide which ingredients to buy or who will bring what, and what, if anything needs to be cooked beforehand like cooking the chicken. Another form of planning is checking out all of the local grocery store sales in the month or so prior and buying large amounts of meat when it is on sale. For example, a local grocery store offered buy 2 get 3 bags of frozen chicken breasts free a few weeks back. I bought 5 bags.

In this case, we haven't had a chance to cook since at least April, maybe March, so I've been checking out sales like crazy and buying whenever meat was on sale. As it stands, I have most of the ingredients for the stuff we're going to make and my friend has the rest so I only have to buy a couple items and I expect that we'll each be able to make 4-6 meals worth of food. Heather has a goal of putting back 30 meals and I am going to take that goal on as my own as well. I want to put back 30 frozen meals before school begins. Ideally, I'll also be organized enough to also know what I have in the freezer!

Another goal I have in regards to cooking is learning a few more recipes (one new recipe a week), especially ones that are easy, go in the crockpot or ones that are actually possible to make on a Wednesday evening when we're all tired after a long day of work and Katie is cranky.

To that end I made Applesauce Chicken from the The Crockpot Lady website this week. Our family's verdict: it was good. Katie ate it (SCORE!) but I think I'll leave out the red pepper next time. I only have ground red pepper, not red pepper flakes and it burned my tongue instead of being flavorful. I think it burned Katie's tongue too because she liked the first few bites better than the 4th and 5th bites when it started burning mine. It's definitely one we are going to do again though. It was super simple and quick to throw everything in the crockpot and I didn't even have to defrost the chicken.

More reports to come as I find more interesting recipes to try! Have an old family favorite that you think my family will like? Post it and I'd love to try it!

2 comments:

HeatherV said...

Seriously... Had I known that my lifetime of having Ground-Beef-O-Ramas with my mom every summer resulting in 25 lbs of ground beef being frozen in every way possible as a market in the meal prep industry I would be a really rich woman. I can put Supper Suppers to shame in pan reusage alone.

Glad that we are doing this and I raise our 30 and I bet we could make it 40 if we do this several times this summer!

ElizabethS said...

You're on!