What a day Saturday! Compiled my list and off to the grocery
store I went. One VERY full cart 2 hours later, I was ready to begin. I sorted
all of the groceries on the dining room table. Many of the items on my list we
already had on hand in the house as main staples. Groceries cost me about
$325.00. Not bad for 24 home cooked meals for a family of four (with leftovers
on some recipes). The sorting and cooking took me about 5 1/2 hours. 
After the groceries were sorted out, I began by cooking the
chicken thighs and the stewing beef. To cook the 8 pounds of stewing beef I dug
out my largest flat roasting pans, put oil in the bottoms of them and loaded
them up with a layer of beef. Before placing the beef in, I lightly floured it
in a seasoned flour mixture of flour, onion powder, garlic powder, seasoning
salt and pepper. In a 375 degree oven I roasted for 10 minutes, turn the meat
over and roasted another 10-12 minutes until the beef was medium (slightly pink
in the middle). For the chicken thighs I lightly seasoned with seasoning salt,
and pepper before baking. Doing much the same, but not turning the meat. I
baked the thighs for about 20-25 minutes. Let meat cool.
I chose to cook the meat as I felt it to be a safer way of
grabbing a bag of goodies out of the freezer to just plop into the slow cooker
in the morning. Both USDA and Canadian Health websites recommend not cooking
RAW FROZEN meat in slow cookers as they do not reach temperature fast enough to
be safe. You will notice that my recipes will either state; dump the frozen
goodies into slow cooker or THAW first or then dump goodies into slow cooker.
The frozen would be cooked meat; the thawed would be raw meat.
For the chicken breasts I also baked seasoned the same as
the thighs for about 20-25 minutes (except for 8 of the breasts for the Chicken
Cordon Blue Recipe)
While the meat was cooking, I did all of my dicing, slicing,
chopping and mincing. I put each of the chopped up items in there own bowls
with cups in them to measure out the amounts.
The first bags that I put together were the recipes that
called for raw meat. That would be all of the roast recipes and the chicken
Cordon Blue recipe. Next I put together the cooked meat recipes for beef, then
the cooked meat recipes for chicken. Remember safe food handling! All of my
meat was put in the fridge until I was ready to start on the next section of
packing up bags.
After I completed 5 or 6 recipes, I loaded them up in the
freezer. After five and a half hours, a freezer full of suppers, I cleaned up (with
the help of my wonderful hubby) I flopped down on the couch with a really great
Red Wine and relaxed.
Sunday morning awakening with back aching and sore feet from
Saturday’s cooking marathon I am excited to try the first recipe and find out
what the family thinks.
Until then! Cheers,
Kimberley
No comments:
Post a Comment