Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Ten Dinners in Two Hours

So I gave myself a little bit of an unspoken challenge this month.  I figure if I don't say them out loud and they never come to fruition then it's not a true failure right??   Any who, I challenged myself to making my life easier on myself one little bit at a time.  And with that I decided to attempt a feat I saw originally on Pinterest.  A 'making dinner easier for myself' challenge.  There isn't nothing I hate more than having to plan out dinner in the morning when it's the furthest thing on my mind or coming home after 8 hours to decide what to make for dinner (and usually everything is frozen).  That kind of hatred leads to eating in restaurants a lot and with Eric laid off, that's not terribly conducive to our wallet and bank account.

I found an ideal starting place at Mommy's Fabulous Finds.  Ten crock pot recipes prepped in one night to pull out and use over the next week and half.  All of the recipes I used can be found on her blog.  The ten I prepared are listed in the link above, but she has many other crock pot recipes on her site you could try for variance.  It took me about one hour and 45 minutes from taking the food out of the cupboard to putting the freezer bags filled with dinner into the freezer and cost me around $120.00.  Each recipe feeds 3-4 people. Not terribly bad, if you ask me.  I originally went through all the recipes and created an entire list of everything I would need.  Then I started crossing off what I already had in stock and what I was left with was the most detailed grocery list I've ever compiled.

The ten recipes I made tonight are:

Savoury Pepper Steak
Sweet and Sour Meatballs
Teriyaki Pork Chops
BBQ Cranberry Chicken
Honey BBQ Chicken
Pork Carnitas
South western Chicken Chili
Sausage and Peppers
Apple BBQ Pork Tenderloin
Pineapple Chicken Burritos

Like I said, all the recipes can be found right HERE!   Thanks to Mommy's Fabulous Finds for doing the majority of the leg work and making this little challenge easier for me.  I'm really looking forward to the pay off for this.


6 comments:

  1. hmmm....gonna have to read the recipes...did you precook any of these? or just freeze and bake like a casserole?

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  2. oh my bad...crock pot...i shoulda kept reading, lol

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  3. No pre-cooking necessary. Just pull it out of the freezer the night before and throw it in the crock pot in the a.m. before leaving for work! It's that simple!

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  4. Wow. We have a crock pot. We have two, in fact. I need to do this. Definitely need to do this!

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  5. Hey Holly, I've finally reached the nesting stage and started my freezer meals. I used a handful of the recipes from the site you recommended. Just wondering if there were certain ones you really liked and go back to?
    Thanks!!
    Sam

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