Thursday, October 17, 2013

Meal Stockpile.

One of the things I plan on doing before Bee arrives is stockpiling meals. Sean and I are both super lazy about cooking when tired...and well, I feel like the first few weeks (or years) are going to be exhausting. So I've been making lists of meals that are easily frozen and reheat well for the future. Some of them are mine, some of them are from online, some are crockpot, and some are oven baked. I can't make any of them now, as we don't have a deep freezer, but that's #1 on my Black Friday shopping list!!

In any case...I'm prepping my list as best I can now, in pretty much the same way I did my meal planning worksheet. I'm having to update my list a lot though - I'm test cooking all of these meals to make sure we like them before I make 3-4 meals of each one!

We're planning on trying to buy as much as possible from Aldi's and Costco. We may have to pick up a few things at the normal grocery store, but if I can stretch my money it will be wonderful. Plus, I'm going to start couponing ASAP (and maybe stocking up on some non-perishables when our food budget allows). Right now I have 30 things on my list, but some of them are things like cookie dough (a staple!), muffins, and bagels. There's 10 crockpot meals and 13 baked dinners. Frozen pizza will totally be on the list too, but I'd rather not survive on that. Well, I'd be okay with it, but Sean wouldn't.

I think it'll take a TON of planning and pre-cooking, but even so - to have all of that done? I think it'll be amazing. And Sean's totally on board with helping prep, and I miiiight be able to convince some friends to join in the cooking madness.

Am I crazy? Smart? Overly ambitious? All 3?!

2 comments:

Caryn said...

You are SO SMART! That's totally what I did when Moriah was born and it was such a huge help. Along with meals, I cooked chicken, shredded it, and froze it in 2 cup packages, and the same with ground beef and ground sausage. So when nothing sounds good that I've already made, I would already have cooked meat for an on-the-spot meal. I've been dying to get a deep freezer, too, and I didn't even think about Black Friday! I don't even know if I could pull that off, but I'm going to try!

Amanda said...

I was surprised at how inexpensive they can be! Even not on sale, a small one is only $150ish. We'll probably get a 7 cu ft one - we won't need that much space either!