Freezer Meals and Meatballs

From the cupboard to the freezer.  That's what we have done to a lot of our canned goods recently.  I read another blog about someone who took a day to prepare many crockpot meals and freeze them in gallon bags to make meals easier when she had limited time to prepare meals for whatever reason.  I also remember hearing that some of our relatives do/did this also.  I started talking to Jake about it and he informed me that there are stores down south where people come in and assemble many meals to take home and put in the freezer.  Families where both of the adults work may benefit from these types of stores.  It seems like they would be able to eat healthier while saving time.  I found a website for one such establishment.  They have locations in over a dozen states.  Here is their website: http://dreamdinners.com/main.php?static=take_back_dinner

This particular website has a section where they state statistics about the benefits of eating family dinners together.  Interesting.

Well, i thought it would be good to try these freezer meals.  I figured it would benefit us in many ways.  Here are a few of them:

1. Encourage us to be productive on a Saturday.
2. Allow us to take advantage of Efficiency in preparing multiple meals at once.
3. Save us money because we would have a meal ready at home when we might otherwise not have time to make one.
4. Keep us healthier because we would be able to eat at home instead of eating out.
5. Finally, allow us to more spontaneously give a meal to someone else if we find a need.

SO, we decided to try it.  Some recipes we found consisted of meat and sauce.  Others seemed to have a lot more vegetables in them.  I liked the ones from a particular site because of all the vegetables.  We selected some recipes at this blog site and assembled a shopping list of sorts:

http://www.lovingmynest.com/learning-activities/cooking/freezer-crock-pot-recipes/

After a trip to two stores, we had a bunch of fresh veggies, canned beans and meat.  We basically followed the instructions.  Prepared each of the ingredients "en masse".  Our Cuisinart food processor was also quite helpful for chopping onions and slicing carrots, zucchini, and celery.  Once we got the ingredients all prepared we assembled them in 1 gallon freezer bags.  It went pretty fast.  

We put together 11 meals in about 3 hours (including most of the cleanup)  I think it cost us about $100.  That works out to about $9 per meal, each of which is supposed to feed 6-8 people.  We haven't actually cooked any of them, so i will have to let you know how they taste. lol.

Here's a picture of the final product.

Also, we made a batch of meatballs from 2 pounds of ground beef.  We froze 3/4 of them too.  When we were all done, our cupboards were almost void of tomato products. But we had lots of canned beans leftover.  The vegetables and meat worked out just right.

Until Next Time....