Freezer Meals

We have a group at our church called FISH.  It stands for friends in service to him.  At one point all of us ladies and most of our spouses would meet together and do a formal Bible Study.  Then we all got married and had kids.  Now the dads get together and are currently working on playground project for church and us moms get together at least once a month and work on other projects.  About twice a year we have been doing freezer meal packing.  One of our mentors brought the idea to us a couple years ago and we loved it.  Even better was that she did all the shopping and prep work and we just showed up, wrote a check for our portion and had 5 meals in under 2 hours without even going to the store!! 

We heard that some other people in church were interested in participating so our FISH group decided to plan one and open it to everyone in the church.  I ended up being the one to do the shopping.  I don't enjoy shopping at all, never have.  It doesn't matter if it is shoes, clothes, food, etc I just don't enjoy it.  In order to make my shopping list I had to know random things like how many cups 3 diced carrots makes, or how many teaspoons in a tiny container of spices, or how many green peppers it takes to get 1 cup of diced pepper, or how many cups of chicken 1 chicken breast  makes.  You see when I cook I mostly follow recipes but if it says 1/2 a cup of onion I just cut up the whole thing and throw it in.  If it says 1 clove of garlic and I don't have any, I just sprinkle some minced garlic in and hope for the best.  When I am cooking for my family it doesn't matter when I am shopping for 13 other people it does matter.

I went to Aldi's one night and bought as much as I could from them.  I almost bought them out of beef broth.  Then another day Cecilia and I went to Costco and Walmart to finish up.  The entire back of the cart at Costco was filled to the top with meat when I got done.  We got several strange looks and 3 different people from the meat department asked if we needed help and asked what we were doing.  The cashier thought I was crazy, so I again had to explain what we were doing and he was impressed with the whole process.  One our way to the car our very heavy grocery cart hit a small pot hole in the sidewalk as we were going downhill which caused our whole box filled with chicken to spill onto the parking lot.  Don't worry it was all sealed in plastic and nothing ripped open.  Cecilia was very worried we would never get the shopping cart unstuck and to our car.

We were able to find everything but pearled barley on our shopping adventure and luckily we were able to enlist some help to go track it down and purchase it for us because I was over shopping by the end of the day.

I did all this shopping and our pantry, fridge and freezer are all running very low and it was going to be a few days before I was going to be up for another grocery shopping trip or had time to go on one.  I have a feeling my freezer meals are going to be used up rather quickly!