I have been doing some type of freezer cooking for years. I have done this several different ways including share a day with friends as well as simply doubling recipes to place in the freezer or most recently finding ways to process meat/chicken when purchased in large quantities.  I have learned that doubling is the easiest way to keep the freezer stocked but it is not always convenient  to work things this way. This weekend, my best friend and I decided to try a menu plan. I am going to be really honest and upfront, I did not spend the money to actually purchase the plan so I am hopefully that the problems I had/discovered would have been covered if we had purchased the plan. This is the actual plan.

First, the reasons that I was excited to attempt the plan. This plan includes 20 meals but in reality it is 10 meals that can be repeated. This was a huge plus as it allowed us both to work together share the cost and end up with 10 meals. We were able to reduce some of the cost by using ingredients that we already had on hand such as the chicken stock and diced tomatoes. Total spent out of pocket was $66.25 each. I did end up with 11 meals because I could tell that the soup was easily tow full meal so that cost per meal is $6. The fact that this plan used four different types of meat and was gluten free were also high on the reason to try list.   Another advantage to this plan was shopping at Costco, I love Costco and the food is always a better quality.  We were not able to find all the ingredients at Costco so we did end up spending money at Food Lion as well. Finally, one of the biggest reasons I wanted to try the plan was the idea of “completing/assembling” in 2 hours.

Now on to reality, first as I mentioned we were not able to find all the items at Costco, which meant we shopped the first time at Food Lion. Second as we were working on the meals, we realized that some of the ingredients were incorrect, for example we only used two cans of black beans instead of four, we needed an additional two or three peppers and two cans of rotel were left off the list entirely. My husband ended up going out to grab things twice while we were assembling. Finally the biggest negative about this list and preparing it was the actually time we spent. I didn’t keep account of shopping time but we spent 5 hours at my friends house cooking on Saturday. I have gone back to the site today and realized that she used the word assembled in regards to the two hour time frame. I did not purchase the plan so I have not watched the video but I am pretty sure that when she used the word assembled it was just that putting all the items in a bag. This plan is labor intensive and require a lot more than just assembling.  We both enjoyed spending time together and overall this was probably not as much time as most people spend on preparing two weeks worth of meal but I had I anticipated the time more accurately than it would have been more enjoyable.

I am excited to try the food because each of the meals looks and smells good so in the end this may not be a bad experience; however I will be very careful about my reading in the future.