Category Archives: Menu Planning

Saving Money/Menu Planning/New Recipes

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I have mentioned before that we have 2 freezers in addition to the 2 small freezers that are part of our refrigerators. I love having all the extra space to freeze things and I often have had all of the freezers full. Last year I was able to clean out both of the larger freezers and made one a dedicated veggie freezer and the second one for meat.  The idea is to keep just enough for meals and a couple of convenience meals up in the house. However, what has tended to happen is that we just stick things in the two freezers in the house instead of going to the building. One of the next things on my cleaning list is to organize and rearrange the freezers to make things easier to find.  We have been slowly trying to eat things and rearrange slowly.

We have lots of chicken from our big purchase in October. My original thought was that we would have one chicken meal a week so that should last a year. I am finding that each of the crockpot meals is making at least 2 meals with leftovers. I have also discovered that only 2 of the crockpot meals so far has been worth the effort.  I would say at this point that we have eaten less than half of the chicken that was purchased.

The other meat item that we have in abundance is ground deer meat.  We have been using it in some of our favorite recipes but the “wild” taste was proving to be a little strong for our taste buds. However I have discovered what I hope to be a solution to this problem, bacon grease.  Tonight we used a pound of deer meat fried in bacon grease for cheeseburger pizza, and no one was able to taste any of the “wild” flavor. My hope is that we can use this secret trick to get a lot of use out  of this meat.

After all that let  me get back to the original intention of this post. So other than deer meat and chicken, we only have one more pack of cube steak in the freezer. We do have several packs of bacon and sausage in addition to at least one kielbasa sausage but as you can tell our choices for meat are limited. I really want to use up most of this meat prior to purchasing any more but you can only eat tacos, and spaghetti so many times. So I decided to search the internet for new recipes using chicken and ground deer meat. So far I have collect right at 10 that I am planning on using in the next two weeks. We actually tried a new recipe on Thursday with chicken and one with deer on Friday. Neither of these first two dishes make the cut, they were not awful just not good enough to repeat. My goal is to make it at least 2 additional weeks in April with using just the meat we have on hand and trying the new recipes. However, in my head, I am hoping to be able to not purchase any meat until the last weekend of April.

Do you have any awesome chicken or ground deer recipes to share to help me achieve this lofty goal?

 

Cooking Day-Non Chicken 1/23/2014

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Matt pointed out the other day that although we have lots of food to choice from we were running extremely low on quick and easy to prepare meals. So with a few minutes of discussion, we decided that today would be a “cooking day”  I am quite pleased with the results.

First, early this morning, I placed the turkey that was purchased prior to Thanksgiving in the crockpot. I must say this is the best way to cook a turkey. I cooked it on high for 4 hours till the internal temperature was 160 then switched to low for another 3 until the temperature was 170*. I cook it breast down, rubbed with olive oil, and coated with Paula Deen seasoning. I did place one onion inside the cavity and added 1 cup of apple juice. We enjoyed turkey for dinner, I have plans to use the rest for at least 2 additional meals this weekend plus at least one or two meals of plain turkey.  In addition to the meat, I have already frozen 16 cups of broth with plans to finish with at least another 20 cups today from the bones and skin.  Total cost for the meat for 5 meals is $12.

Next, we purchased for the cost of processing some venison in November. We have not been able/ forgot to count the total amount of ground venison we received but we are thinking it was around 60#.  Today we used 8# to make and freeze 2 cheeseburger quiches  and 11 packs of Salisbury Steaks. Matt and I both worked in the kitchen for a total of 3 hours or less for these meals. The Salisbury Steaks will need to have a starch and vegetable add to complete.  Total cost for 13 meals of meat is $6.

This was one of the easiest cooking days that I have done in a long time. In less than 4 hours and for less than $25 total, we have 18 meals for 5 people. That works out to  $1.38 a meal. This should go a long way to helping reduce our grocery spending for the first part of the year!

Stretching Our Food Budget

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I am attempting to feed 5 of us (both the older girls eat only occasionally) on a budget of $600 a month. Let me break this down a little bit further; that is 35 breakfasts, 31 lunches, and 35 dinners a week, or 430 meals a month.  Both the girls usually eat at school several times a week but both need a daily snack as well.   This amount includes pet care as well as all items except clothing that I purchase to use in the house, paper towel, toilet paper, hair spray, soap, deodorant etc.

Last month, I failed miserable by spending almost double that amount. So one of the things that I will be doing in November to even out the budget for the year is stretching our food.  I had originally thought that our chicken purchase would make 50 meals for 5 people or 250 meals. However I have already added at least 10 meals to this number. Here is how:
1. This is simple, depending on the amount of leftovers, I pack a dinner plate or so for me to take to lunch. For example- after 2 dinners of chicken pie, I packed two dinner plates for my lunches.
2. I use leftover chicken to make a different meal. The World’s best chicken was a disappointment alone, so I made chicken salad out of the remaining breast. The girls LOVED this and I know have eaten for lunch at least 2 days and I had a sandwich last night for dinner.  Another example is I used the remaining chicken breast from the Café Rio chicken for a pot of chicken and rice soup. I chose this because I had some carrots and onions as well that needed to get eaten. So out of the one bag of chicken, we are currently eating meal number 4.
3. Schedule a left over meal. We had leftovers at least twice last week. One of the meals ended up being a vegetable plate, which the kids thought was a great change.
4. This one is a great lunch suggestion- instead of buying individual size jello or pudding. Buy a box and make it at home. We use re-useable containers and once a week. I will make jello or pudding for the following week. The girls enjoy containers of popcorn, goldfish and nuttella with crackers. By buying in a large size and separating at home, I saved a ton of money!
5.  Use coupons to buy some convenience foods for the days you just don’t want to cook. We love pizza and I don’t mind making pizza but on days like today that we have spent busy in the house and outside, come lunch and I don’t want to take time to make the pizza. So we have several frozen pizza in the freezer, we used one of them today instead of running out for pizza or fast food which would have been $10 at best.

If we can control our eating out then our overall budget goes much better. Do you have any suggestion for stretch your food?

 

 

What to Do with 120# of Chicken?

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Day Zero- This actually occurred several weeks ahead of time for me. I started searching for a variety of chicken recipes that could easily be frozen. I discovered that the internet is full of ideas but I eliminated first the ones that required ingredients that I don’t normally cook with or just sounded like the same basic idea and second ones that didn’t sound like they would freeze well or be easy to complete. I printed these recipes up and made a stack to be addressed in the next step.

Day One- I will admit that this step took 3-4 hours to complete. I took my recipes decided if I wanted to double triple or just try it out. Next, was a list of the quantity of dishes. Third was the list of ingredient divided into two parts, items on hand and items that needed to be purchased. Finally I made a list of items to be purchased, including which store to purchase at and searched for any coupons I could find.

Day Two- Shopping.  I purchased most items on my regular trip to Costco and Target but did make another stop the week we received the chicken to purchase the fresh veggies that were still needed.

Day Two and half- I again spread this out over 3-4 days of the week of chicken arrival. I clean and made space for the chicken first in our large chest freeze, then in one of our kitchen freezers so initial freezing will be easier for some of the items. We also located several crates that will make transporting to the chest freezer easier. I also clean out space in the fridge to be able to place at least one of the boxes to  take a break on Saturday night to get the kids feed and in bed.

Day Three- I spent about two and half hours chopping up all the fresh veggies and even beginning to label some of the bags.

Day Four- Chicken arrived, the pick up was smooth and the easiest I have ever experienced.  In total we spent 4 hours processing the chicken into the recipes you can find here. I am only counting time that we (Matt and I) were working with the chicken. I did have around an hour that I stopped to get the kids to bed and another 30 minutes that I took a shower while waiting for the crockpots to finish with the chicken to be shredded.  By far, the best tip I have is the Kitchen Aid mixer will shred chicken in 2 minutes!

Total of 48 set meals not counting left overs, so easily 50 meals totally prepared in 10 hours or less.  Now to see how long it actually last!

Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?

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To avoid our house!

Now to answer the other question that I heard several times. Below is the inventory of the items that we made from our 120# of chicken. I have linked most to recipe that I used. A lot of these are total new to us so  my plan is to come back and make a quick comment regarding how we liked it. Then the next time we try this I will have a starting place as to what to fix and what to replace. I am a little disappointed as I did not have enough chicken to complete 2 of the meals I wanted to try so next time these may replace what is don’t like.

 

This makes a total of 47  meals. My thought is that in reality this will be 50 meals or more including leftovers at least one night.   I will add another post with the details of how long it took to actually prepare these meals and how I complete the task on a very busy Saturday for us.

Do you have an easy freezer chicken recipe to share?

Bunches of Breakfast

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One of the areas that few people talk about is breakfast meals. I am assuming that most plan to eat the cheap  cereal for months on in. However that just would not happen in this house. I LOVE breakfast, it is probably  my favorite meal. Now that school is back in session, it is hard to eat a quick and healthy breakfast that does not cost a lot. Over the past few weeks we have developed a list of breakfast items that seem to be working for us.

  • Cereal at least once a week, currently we have several varieties of Cheerios. My price point is $1 a box so I try to stock up when I can.
  • Poptarts- depending on the flavor we have, some weeks the kids could eat this several times a week. But I can definitely say these are one of the foods I refuse to eat.
  • Eggs- Fried or scrambled.  Over the summer it has been really  nice to add fresh green peppers, ham and onions to make a quick omelet. The kids are starting to enjoy plain fried eggs which take less than 3 minutes to fix.  Last week I was given the following recipe which I plan to make over the weekend and we can re-heat at least one time if it last. I  made it last weekend but we did not have any leftovers.
      • 10 eggs whisk together, 2 cups of cottage cheese, diced onions, diced green pepper and spinach. Bake at 350 for  45 minutes.
  • Pancakes- These are a great meal that we can prepare ahead. I place in a ziplock bag and simply pop in the toaster any morning when the kids ask for them.
  • Baked Oatmeal- our current favorite is Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chips. The recipe can be found here :http://www.lynnskitchenadventures.com/2009/05/peanut-butter-baked-oatmeal.html.   I timed this last night and it took 10 minutes from start to finish. I set the stove to cook and we wake up to a warm breakfast. I also have tried apple oatmeal in the crock pot not bad but with all the variety and ease of this recipe, honestly this is better and easier!

On the weekends we tend to make bigger more traditional breakfast meals but these are quick and everyone enjoys!

Restocking

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Over the past several months we have been working on cleaning out our freezers. I am happy to say that task is complete. We currently have chicken broth/stock and beef broth in our large chest freezer along with a 20# box of chicken tenders/nuggets. In our second stand up freezer we have veggies. It is quite full but all these are easily seen and I now know what can be used. The plan/goal of the next several weekends will be to restock.
We are a busy family and most weeks, we have extra activities three to four nights a week. One of the most successful ways that we have found to make these evenings go smoothly and not end up eating out is by  have an assortment of items in our freezers that when combine make simple meals.  We have recently purchased 120# of boneless chicken breast, these will be picked up mid October. I am already collecting recipes to use to make meals with at least the first 40#. The remaining will be divided into portion bags and use for grilling or other things.  My hope is that we can find several of meals that we really like and can then just add ingredients together.

This weekend, I am cooking and freezing beans. A can of beans on sale usually is about $0.50 to $0.75 each. A bag of beans is around $1.00. Currently, I have 4 variety of beans soaking overnight; pintos, red beans, black beans and navy beans. I have washed and looked them over, actually removing one rock today.  They will soak overnight. I will cook overnight on Friday night and then divide up and freeze on Saturday.  Each bag of dried beans will produce 3-4 cans so the saving add up quick, in addition to a significant decrease in sodium. We mainly use beans as soup ingredients, because I don’t like the taste of them.

By the end of October, my goal is to have the freezers restocked and ready for the winter.

Stretching Your Dollar and Ground Beef

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I wanted to share today how we have managed to stretch our ground beef over the past several days.  These are simple and fast, but because my family  really does not like left overs this is a way to stretch the ground beef.

Start with 3-4 pounds of ground beef and simply brown.
Tacos are first, add the seasoning and water. Enjoy!
Sloppy joes are next add one can of rotel and enough ketchup to make the remaining meat look “soupy”. Let this mixture simmer for about 30 minutes or so. Add bread and cheese.
The remaining mixture can be used in several different ways; chili(or sloppy joe) cheese fries, hot dog chili, spaghetti sauce.

We actually have practiced this for the past couple of days. We have actively been raising money for Haley’s summer youth trip to the National Youth Conference. Our first meal was pintos, I brought home leftovers and made refried beans. The next meal was a “Mexican Meal” we used the refried beans and add Taco meat. I definitely over purchased the meat, so we frozen the remaining 10 or so pounds. This past Sunday was our “Soup and Sandwich” Meal. I used the above recipe to change the taco meat into sloppy joes. Because the meat had been frozen one time, the remaining meat was sent home with several families. Matt has enjoyed several meal of Sloppy Joes but the kids really did not like this idea so the other idea became part of the plan. Tonight Matt was able to use up the remaining meat mixture in a baked spaghetti which was really good!

 

 

Day of Cooking 4/13/2013

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One of the things that I have not done in over a year is spend a day preparing food that then is easy to heat up and serve as meals. I have done this several times a year in the past. With our focus this month on reducing all expenses, I decided to spend my day in the kitchen. I purchased a total of 12# of ground beef from Costco on Thursday and Matt had picked up an order of Chicken from Zaycon Foods on Tuesday so I knew we probably had everything I need to cook most of these items. I spent a total of 8 hours in the kitchen today including clean up time and I took several breaks. I was able to assemble 15 different meals. I have a list of these meals along with all the different other meats we have on the fridge. We will mostly like have one or two a week and then wait a week before having the same item again. I find it much easier to prepare a larger quantity at once. I first heard of freezer cooking several years ago, most of the recipes I use are from 30 day Gourmet, I have not purchased any of their books but printed out a ton of recipes from their site.   Here is a list of what we have, most have recipes with them.

1 pack of cooked ground beef this will be great for chili or another dish
2 meals of Chicken Fried Rice this is Haley favorite meal of all time.
2 Cheeseburger Pies
4 Packs of Salisbury Patties
4 packs of Taco Rice – one of these is actually to take with us to the Beach in August. It was a favorite last year.
2 meatloaf This is a recipe from my mother, I will place at the end if you are interested. I have taken one of Matt’s sisters idea (cheese) and add to make it even better!
1 Baked Ziti For our lunch tomorrow

We had one of the meatloaf for dinner tonight along with Pineapple casserole and Paula Deen Mac and Cheese

I plan to finish the night by making a Baked Oatmeal that I will set for the oven to bake first thing in the morning!

I started by making a huge batch of Rice since I planned to make several items that called for it. I also browned up 6 lbs of ground beef at once and spread between several dishes. I like to clean up as I go. So I was able to use my Kitchen Aid mixer for several things after a quick clean. I will say that it made especially the Salisbury patties much easier. Currently I am just under $200 left in the grocery budget for the month. I have a list of 35 main meal items on the fridge so maybe I can keep our budget way down and transfer the money to other needs!

Do you have any good recipes to share along these lines if so leave a comment!

Meatloaf
1 ½ Lb ground Beef
¾ cup Bread crumbs
1 T prepared Mustard
2 T Ketchup
1 cup Milk
1 sm onion 1 cup Cheddar Cheese
Blend onion and milk in blender. Mix together all above. Place half in loaf pan. Cover with layer of Cheddar Cheese. Place remaining meat mixture on top be sure to round the ends so that the cheese is sealed. Top with the following, after mixing together
¾ cup brown sugar
2 cups Ketchup
1 ¼ tsp prepared mustard
¼ tsp nutmeg

A Productive Day in the Kitchen

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We are a busy family, we need things to be as convenient as possible. We also are trying very hard to be good stewards of the money that God has provide. Combine all of these things for the maximum benefit, the result is a day in the kitchen. I discover Freezer Cooking several years ago, I even used recipes from the site http://www.30daygourmet.com/.  I also have learn what our family likes and adaptive some other things to do to make evening meal especially easier and less expensive. Matt loves bread so of course I made some artisan bread. (Disclaimer: I have not purchase the rights to any recipes, I use google and tried only the free ones from 30 day).

Here is a list of things that have been finished or if indicated will be finished on Sunday.  I am including only one list because we also made a trip to Walmart today and the kids have not been neglected :).

Breakfast- Baked Banana Oatmeal (Confession: this is a site I discovered yesterday, I can’t wait to try out many more of her recipes).
Lunch- Ham and cheese crescent rolls
Dinner- Salisbury Steak with gravy, mashed potatoes and squash casserole.

Frozen Meats- 3 Salisbury Steak (30 day gourmet)
                        3 meals of shredded chicken
                        2 Cheeseburger Pies (30 day gourmet)

Other Frozen things- 5 cans Navy/White Beans
                                9 cans of Chicken Brooth/ I simply threw all the throw away parts of chicken back in crock pot, filled with water to the brim and cooked on low for another 6 hours.

Finished on Sunday            did
To be completed– I will try and remember to list actual quantities after they are finished. These are all soaking and will cook overnight. We will finished up on Sunday afternoon!
                           3 cans Re-fried beans
                           3 cans of Black beans
                           3 cans of Red beans