Empty to Full

This past weekend a friend of mine and I went to work in the kitchen to create some freezer meals. We had a plan of action and started off a little slow, but together made 14 meals to fill our freezers. Now if you know me I'm pretty ambitious and always think I can do WAY more than I actually have time for, so I planned on making 18 meals. We stopped around 10:15 p.m. after we decided to do 4 of the meals on our own the next day.

It was so much more fun to cook with another person and by the end of the day I was so tired and had some killer cankles. I am excited to just pull out a meal and not have to worry about prep work for dinner. I'm also very excited about doing fewer dishes this next month!!!! Each meal was roughly around $8.00, which is pretty average here I've found, so I don't think it saves us any money, other than making sure we don't throw away any ingredients, but if it saves us some time I'm all for it. Most of these meals will give us enough for leftovers too!

After talking about how the day went we decided we had to change a few things next go around:

We will DEFINETLY preparing fewer recipes that involve dough. This month we tried to do a lot of recipes that would help us not use our ovens this summer so we baked, and baked, and baked some more, so we would not have to do it later. For the first 2 hours I was constantly making some sort of dough, and most of that dough also had to be filled with something, so that was VERY time consuming.

Also we need to recruit a dishwasher. At the end of the day after Calvin went to bed, Marvin became our dishwasher, it was very nice. Also it will be much easier when we don't have to bring hot water in from our bathroom. Right now it's summer and the hot water is off in our building, thankfully we have a hot water heater to heat water in our bathroom or else this would not have been fun. This type of cooking produces a LOT of dishes, I'm not going to lie that part stunk.

If we want to do make this many meals, we need do more prep than we did, we tried to chop everything ahead of time, but had a few things that I thought could have been done before we got together.

Also it will be good to figure out which containers would work best for what ahead of time, and label them. I'm very bad at figuring out what will fit in what. Since Ziploc bags are hard to come by in our part of the world we tried to use as many containers as possible. We both ran into problems towards the end with not having enough containers to fit what we needed. It also took a lot of time to stop and label stuff, so we either need to have our labels ready or know what containers will fit what.

I highly recommend getting a good night sleep before a mega cooking spree. We both stayed up late doing our prep work which made for some tired girls going into it.

Overall I'm glad we did it and I'll certainly do it again, the benefits highly outweigh the negatives.