Yesterday, we picked up more chicken from Zaycon foods. After some debate, we decided to purchase another 120#. Last year we purchased the same amount but spent a lot of time and energy just figuring out what to do with it. Overall, the chicken lasted our family around 10 months. This year, our order was delay by one month due to “higher” prices so in reality we have been out of chicken for around 3 months now. iwas able to find some on sale but it still was more expensive and of a lesser quality than what we purchased from Zaycon.   Luckily I was able to get an awesome deal because I had ordered early, spending an average of $1.77 a pound of boneless skinless chicken breast.

Here are most of the details of our first purchase last October. I spent the better part of a week, planning and organizing for this. I can honestly say that I was more than disappointed with the results, most of the recipes were just ok and I did not leave myself with any raw chicken to make things that we did enjoy as a family. So this was a major part of the decision to scale back and simplify this year.  I decided to only make recipes that I knew we enjoyed. I also scaled back on the portions to eliminate a lot of the leftovers and to give a better variety.

I started planning on paper on Thursday and both Matt and I did a shopping trip to different grocery stores on Friday am. In total we spent $63.91 on ingredients that I could not pull out of the stockpile to use.  I am most pleased with the fact that we used a lot of items already on hand and even with the additional purchase stayed under budget for November.  Total time this year was probably 10 hours. I was up at midnight finishing up the meals but we did not receive the chicken until 4pm and had to stop for over an hour to get the kids dinner and baths on Saturday.

A total of 277.09 was used for the 70  meals that we created.  Here is the list of items that we have mostly frozen for use in the next year.

12 bags of grilled chicken- we doubled the portion of each bag with the idea that we can always use the leftovers for salads, wraps and sandwiches. I actually counted these as 24 meals.
5 bags of raw chicken breast cut into normal size portions.
18 bags of shredded chicken- each bag contains 2 cups. Let me just add that I LOVE my Kitchen Aid mixer for this.
5 meal of crockpot chicken- 1 pineapple chicken, 2 café rio chicken and 2 garlic lime chicken. The recipes are linked here.
2 meals of chicken enchiladas– We had one for our lunch today and it was AWESOME!
4 Chicken Broccoli casseroles-check the recipe tab if you are interested.
4 Chicken pie bases- the tops will be added the day we cook.
8 Frozen chicken fried rice meals.