Plums-tastic

My mom and I spotted a great deal on plums at the store and we went a little crazy. At least, I'm sure that's what the check out girl thought. She gave us a funny look. :)

Mom and I spent a lot of time cutting out pits and creating freezer bags full of plums. I decided that I wanted to make jam so guess what I pulled out first? Yup. My handy-dandy juicer. Have I mentioned how much I love my juicer?

After grinding up two colander's worth, I realized I needed to be somewhere. I grabbed my freezer bags and measured out the correct amounts for a batch of jam and poured it into the freezer bags. I labeled them and threw them in the freezer. When I am in a jam mood again all I have to do is dump the jam in the jam pot and add the pectin. Viola!

Did you notice that I have my bag hanging inside a blender jar? It's a trick I learned online (probably from Money Saving Mom) to prevent the bag from collapsing or spilling while you are trying to fill it. Put the bag in a jar, bowl, cup or anything else that the bag's zipper will fit over and it stays open while you are pouring. (Make sure you take out the blade if you use the mixer.) I am just in awe of how smart people can be!

Batch Baking and Corn Dog Muffins

I did another batch baking session and made banana bread and corn dog muffins. Unfortunately the banana bread came out on the rubbery side but the kids gobbled down the corn dog muffins.

I didn't do anything special for the corn dog muffins. I used a regular corn muffin mix, poured it into the mini loaf pans, cut the hot dogs in half then placed one dog on top of the batter. While cooking the dog drops into the batter and cooks in the middle of the loaf.

The one change I would make is pouring honey on top of the muffins before cooking. The corn dog mix is fine but I like the extra pizazz honey brings to a dish.

I made several loaves and what we didn't eat I let cool on a wire rack fully then placed about 8 in each freezer bag. When I pulled these bad boys out of the freezer to serve another meal, I microwaved for 1 minute and served. The reheat tasted just as good as the original.


At the bottom of the picture to the right you can see how the corn dogs look when they are done. Yea!

My mom had an idea when she saw these. She suggested cutting the hot dogs into 1/4"-1/2" bite sized pieces and using mini loaf pans. I will try a pan of those in my next corn dog cooking session.

Have you made any fun dishes today?

Chicken Alfredo-ish

Continuing my batch cooking for freezer meals, I went after a chicken Alfredo effort. I used:

1 bag of chicken tenderloins (they were a good deal),
2 cans of cream of mushroom soup,
2 boxes of Garden Rotini
1/2 bag of frozen vegetables.
2 chicken bouillion cubes

I know that Oriental Stir-fry seems like a weird choice but it worked.



I threw the whole bag in my large Pampered Chef sauce pan on medium heat. I threw in 2 bouillon cubes to add more flavor to the meat and covered the pan to seal in the juices.

I also started a large stock pot of water to cook the pasta. It took a good 10 minutes before the water boiled but the timing was perfect. Cooking a whole bag of frozen chicken takes quite a while.

I added the pasta and let it boil for 9 minutes then strained it off. I tossed olive oil in the pasta to add flavor, prevent the pasta from sticking together and simply because it's so good for you!


By this time, the chicken was thoroughly cooked. I threw all the ingredients in the large stock pot and stirred well. I let the vegetables warm up and served the family dinner.

After dinner, I divided the remaining food into gallon-sized bags. There was enough left over for three more meals!

All the ingredients cost $13.84. Making 4 meals out of the ingredients dropped the price per meal to $3.46! This is much closer to my goal of $3.00 per dinner. Happy dance!

Meatloaf in mass

I didn't like meatloaf growing up. To be fair, I'm not sure my mom cooked it that often so maybe it was alright but didn't leave a great impression. As an adult, I was blessed to try my mother-in-law's meatloaf and I was hooked!

As I planned what I wanted to try for freezer meals, I figured that meatloaf would be pretty easy. I gathered all my materials and I multiplied by 5 when pulling out ingredients.

The recipe I think is close to what my mother-in-law told me (because I can't find where I wrote it down) is:
1lb hamburger
1 cup oatmeal
1 egg
1TBSP ketchup
1TBSP Worcestershire sauce
miscellaneous vegetables
additional ketchup

I had a 5lb roll of hamburger so I threw the whole thing in the big metal bowl. I took the carrot pulp from the other day and dumped in about a cup. I added 5 eggs, 5 cups of oatmeal, 5 TBSP of ketchup and 5 TBSP of Worcestershire sauce.

For the miscellaneous veggies, I grabbed what I had in the fridge. I always try to keep a couple peppers in the fridge because they are easy to add to any recipe; especially because I have a Pampered Chef Chopper! (Again, Pampered Chef fan here.) My hand cutting consists of slicing the pepper into manageable portions and removing the seeds. Then I pop the top a few times and I have lovely chopped veggies!

Usually I have an onion to throw in my food as well but unfortunately, I didn't have any in the fridge. I bought mushrooms to put in the meatloaf and after chopping those as well, I had everything I needed to start mixing.

Mixing is probably the worst part of the whole process. You can use a spoon but after the cookie dough x 4 experience, I decided to roll my sleeves up and get dirty.

It only took about 3 minutes of mushing before it looked and felt completely mixed together. The egg needs to be spread among all of the meat to help hold the loaf together when you are serving it. If you are worried about germs, the meat is in the oven for an hour. Any germs left over after washing your hands don't stand a chance.

I purchased disposable bread pans just for this experiment. I lined the bread pans with plastic wrap then added the meat on top. After the pan was filled, I wrapped the remaining plastic over the top.

I ended up with 4 loaves. I'm a little disappointed. I thought with 5 lbs we would get 5 loaves but these pans held more than a pound of meat. A good friend of mine suggested that I bulk up my meat further by adding lentils. She said it doesn't change the texture but it does make the meat go further and adds a couple more nutrients. I will try that next time.

I cooked one of them at 375 for 1 hour, added a drizzle of ketchup on top and cooked them for another 15 minutes. If I may say so myself, it was tasty! I added mashed potatoes and fruit to round out the meal.

***Note: Pull the frozen meatloaf out of the freezer the night before and let it thaw in the refrigerator before cooking. If the meatloaf isn't thawed, it will take much longer than 1 hr and 15 minutes to cook.

The ingredients cost $19.22 and made 4 meals. Again, I'm right around $5.00 per meal. Next time, I will buy the meat on sale, add lentils and possibly fill the pans a little less.

I need to do enchilladas in the next couple of days so the meat doesn't sit too much longer. Also, I will be posting about the wheat fiasco soon. (I'm still rolling my eyes.)

Batch Baking Attempt #1

I'm at home now. It's kind of a scary thought really. I'm not sure if my kids will survive but I hear they can flourish on macaroni and cheese and kisses. Well, they will get a lot of kisses but not so much macaroni and cheese. I don't like the stuff.

I was turned on to Money Saving Mom by my awesome friend Lea. Money Saving Mom did a post last week on freezer meals. In essence, you spend half a day baking up bulk amounts of meals or meal makings then freezing it all. The goal is quick, nutritious meals for the busy family and a big money savings by buying large amounts of food. Well, busy family is us with my oldest in baseball and sticking to a budget is now my mantra.

Today I decided to give it a shot. I shopped last night for ingredient to several meals so I pulled some of the supplies out and started cooking. First I grabbed the potatoes. I bought the 10 pound bag of russets. I don't know that there's a difference between Betty Crocker and Idaho potatoes but this is what the local store had.

I wanted to try two experiments with the potatoes. I wanted to get chicken legs and potatoes in barbecue sauce as the base for one meal and on Money Saving Mom there was a suggestion for twice baked potatoes.

I split the bag and put 15 potatoes in the oven to bake at 375 for 1 hour. In hindsight, I should have pulled out the largest potatoes from the bag and used those to bake. My intensive selection process consisted of grabbing the potatoes on the top of the bag and washing them. Not bad for conserving time, but horrible for getting great results. Next time, I will know better and sort by size.

The rest of the bag I chopped up and divided into five -gallon-sized ziplock bags. I then divvied up the drumsticks into each bag. I poured barbecue sauce into each bag, squished the contents around to spread the sauce and sealed them. I chose Sweet Baby Ray's because it was the best deal at the store. I'll let you know if it's good or not in a later post.

Do you notice the bags aren't labeled? Yeah. Don't do that. The contents of the bag caused condensation to form. My Sharpie didn't mark well and writing on an uneven surface was inconvenient at best. Mark your bags BEFORE placing food inside.

I had five bags filled and ready for freezing in about 30 minutes. Since it would have taken me about that long to make one meal, I figure this project was a definite baking success.

When I'm ready to cook these dinners, I'll take the dinner out of the freezer the night before and put it in the fridge to thaw. We usually eat around 5 PM so at 4PM I'll put it in the oven at 400 degrees for 1 hour.

During all of this, I had 4 1/2 cup sticks of butter on the oven softening. I went for the gold and make a quadruple batch of cookies. I mixed the liquids/sugars and realized that I didn't have a big enough bowl. I pulled out the huge metal mixing bowl and stirred the flour in two cups at a time. Did you know that a triple batch takes almost 10 cups of flour? I'm sure you seasoned cookie makers out there are snickering at me. I will not attempt to hand mix a quadruple batch of cookie dough ever again. First, it's not like mixing liquids. There is no smooth movement. It's like trying to stir mud with a stick. Yummy flavored mud of course, but thick and unyielding nonetheless. My hand and arm are rather numb and I'm not looking forward to the ache that will come tomorrow morning.

I didn't add the mix-ins until after I had the dough finished. I split the batter and put 1 bag of Andes mint chips in one half and chocolate toffee chunks into the other. Since I'm not a proponent of cooking dozens of cookies (because I will eat most of them), I divided the dough into four quart bags of each kind. I then made cookies out of one bag to see how many I would get. I made the cookies about golf ball sized (then squished) and I baked two dozen.

I used unsalted real butter and I'm not thrilled with the results. The cookies are more crumbly than I prefer. I'm normally lazy and use vegetable spread like Country Crock and the cookies come out more moist but don't hold their shape well. I will experiment with this more. If anyone knows the perfect butter/spread to try, please let me know!

Once all this was done, the oven was beeping for the baking potatoes. I pulled those out and let them cool while we ate dinner. After dinner was done and we had cleaned up, I cut all the potatoes in half and scooped out the middles. This is where I figure out I should have used the larger potatoes. First, most of the small ones were over cooked. Second, they didn't have much middles to scoop out and third, the skins didn't hold together well. Out of the 15 potatoes I put in the oven, I threw away about 2. I ended up with 25 twice baked potatoes. I'm not sure how these will be consumed yet. They might be a meal but I can see my husband grabbing them individually and zapping them in the microwave for snacks and lunches. I don't consider this experiment as a bomb but I definitely will make sure I get larger potatoes to bake next time.

On the blog post about freezer meals the gal said to use grated carrots in hamburger and to throw in different recipes. She said it bulked up the meat, added nutrients that kids sometimes don't want to consume and I think it can add color to a dull looking meal.

After grating 5 bars of Fels-Naptha for washing machine detergent, I was not in the mood for grating anything else. The geek/gadget lover in me wondered what my juicer would do. I took a bag of carrots and sent them through. At the end of the bag I had a full cup of carrot juice and half a catch container full of pulp.

You probably noticed the orange ice cubes already. (My husband thinks it's weird.) I poured enough juice into the ice cube tray so I could freeze the juice into cubes. My husband and I make a lot of smoothies and I'll use these cubes to add more nutrients to a drink. I scooped the pulp into a quart sized bag and poured the rest of the carrot juice back into the pulp. The pulp sucked it up quickly and the quart bag does not have moisture in the bottom. I will use the pulp in the meatloaves I will make in the next batch baking attempt as well as other dishes I decide to try.

I wanted to get more meals done but I am trying to pace myself so I don't get burned out. At the end of today, I have 5 bags of barbecue chicken and potatoes, 25 twice baked potatoes and 7 bags of cookie dough. I cleaned the crock pot from dinner tonight and put in a pork roast. Following the directions I found on a website, I am going to let it cook over night. Then I'll drain the juices, pull the pork apart, add barbecue sauce then leave it on low for another four hours. I'll let it cool then separate it into quart sized containers. I'm excited to see how many bags I'll get from 9 lbs.