Taco Heaven

Today I did my big shopping trip. Super Saver had a weekend sale on 80/20 hamburger meat. Since it was less than $2.00 a pound for a huge roll and I needed a few more items in Lincoln, I could justify making the trip.

While I was at Super Saver I found the huge bottle of taco sauce. I absolutely love this jug! My husband loves making nachos so I figured this would be a win-win situation.

I have hamburgers planned for a meal this week so I went ahead and made hamburger patties and put them in a container. I used about 5 lbs and I have 12 patties that will be ready to cook when we decide to eat them.

I put about 3 lbs of meat in my large Pampered Chef Sauce Pan and browned the meat. Once it was done cooking, I poured the grease out then poured a generaous amount of taco sauce in. We had nachos and afterwards, I put the leftovers in baggies to freeze.


Whoops! I forgot to mark these bags! I grabbed my masking tape and wrote the date and "taco meat" four times. I stuck the tape to the bags and threw them in the freezer.

The taco sauce I will tackle tomorrow. that is a lot of sauce to use so I will divide it up in quarts tomorrow then can it. I'll take photos so you can see how to divvy up a large container of non-meat food.

Now, to figure out how I am going to use the jug . . .

Rhubarb Joy!

When I made up all the zucchini bread, I saved a loaf to take to the neighbor who gave me the zucchini. I finally remembered to take it to her yesterday and while I was there she asked me if I wanted some rhubarb. Well, of course I did! She even had a print out of ways to use rhubarb that she gave me.

In case you aren't familiar with rhubarb, the plant grows in bushy clumps. It survives the best in cool months. It doesn't do well in southern states but northern states can generally develop a good crop. The rhubarb is immune to most pests and disease which makes it a low maintenance crop. It has a tart flavor in the stalk area which is wonderful for jams and pies. You can actually chew on the stalk like celery if you want. I remember doing so when I was a young girl in my mother's garden.

Pictured you can see the stalks that my neighbor gave to me. I'd like to say that Jasmine's hand is in the picture for reference but really she just wanted her picture taken and this was her sneaky way of getting in all the photos. :)

I took the stalks and trimmed the leaves off the top and cleaned the stalks thoroughly. I know my neighbor doesn't use pesticides on her crops but the stalks had a lot of dirt on them. Once cleaned, you know my favorite method of chopping/getting-the-food-to-manageable-sizes. Yes indeedy, I pulled out my handy-dandy juicer and threw the stalks in.

In hind-sight, I would do things differently if I get more rhubarb. The stalks went through the juicer fast enough but several large chunks popped out of the juicing part and into the pulp catcher. I will throw the stalks in the freezer next time to give them a better solidity before using the juicer. I think I'll be much happier with the results.


As it was, I ended up with a funky-looking mass. I washed my hands and ran my fingers around to catch the big chunks that eluded the juicing process. You can see them on the counter next to the bowl.

One thing I noticed was the mixture was very fiber-y. I wasn't sure how this would effect the results of baking. After looking at several of the recipes from my neighbor, I decided I would try the rhubarb bread.



The recipe is:
1 1/2 Cup Brown Sugar
2/3 Cup Oil
1 Egg
1 Cup Sour Milk (I used regular 2% milk.)
1 tsp Vanilla
2 1/2 Cup Flour
1 tsp Salt
1 tsp Soda
1 1/2 Cup Rhubarb (cut real fine)
Nuts (Optional)

Topping:
1/2 C White Sugar
1 tsp. Cinnamon
1 TBSP Margarine (melted)

Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour. Makes two small loaves.

I poured the rhubarb mass into a measuring cup and ta-da! 3 Cups which means a double batch! It's a good thing you weren't in my kitchen to witness the happy dance. It was rather silly. :)

The kids and I measured, poured, stirred and generally had a blast working together again. I picked up a second mini-loaf pan at Walmart this week so I filled up both with the batter and put the remainder into mini-muffin pans.

The mini-loaves I cooked for 20 minutes. The mini-muffins cooked for 10 minutes. For this double batch, I spent about $3.00 on all the ingredients and I have 16 mini-loaves and 20 mini-muffins (after we ate our samples).

The only snafu I have right now with these is the taste. They turned out a little bland. I don't know if it is because of the type of rhubarb I used or if I should play with other recipes. I didn't make the topping because it's basically adding pure sugar. I'll whip some up tomorrow and see if it improves the taste.

My neighbor gave me the recipe for rhubarb cobbler. I plan on trying that next time I have rhubarb.

Freezer Meals Check Up

It has been almost a month since I started making freezer meals. I thought I'd let you how our family is taking it.

For convenience, freezer batch baking gets a B+. I haven't had to worry about what I am going to cook for our meals for weeks. It's already in the freezer and simply needs to be reheated. The ding down to a B is because I have to remember to pull the meal out the night before to defrost in the fridge. I have my fingers crossed that it will become routine for me eventually and this will come up to an A again.

Budget-wise this is definitely an A+! I'm not nearly as tempted to throw the kids in the car and drive to a restaurant for meals. It isn't hard to pull out food and throw it in the oven or microwave so even when I'm tired, I am still willing to cook. Now that I'm looking for great deals on foods on a regular basis and our garden is starting to produce, my cost per meal is dropping.

Nutrition-wise I give batch baking an A as well. Since I am cooking everything myself, I know exactly what is going into my meals. I have control over balancing our diets and integrating blends of ingredients that we like to eat. Also, I have been told by several nutritionists and people in the know that food retains its nutritional value longer when frozen over any other preservation technique.

In the end, I am excited to find more and more recipes and expand my knowledge of foods and home projects.

Chicken and Rice Batch Style

I couldn't decide what to do for dinner tonight so I decided to whip up a batch of chicken and rice. It's easy to make and I realized that I could make a huge batch and freeze more meals!

So, I started by putting about 3 lbs of chicken breast in my huge Pampered Chef sauce pan. I threw in 2 chicken bouillon cubes and put the lid on to seal in the moisture and heat.

I know that 2-3 cups of rice makes one meal for my family so I put 16 cups of water in my huge stock pot and 8 cups of rice. If you want to use this recipe, keep in mind that I used the regular long grain rice, not the instant rice. Instant rice you would use 1 cup of water for 1 cup of rice. I put the burner on high and brought my rice to a boil. Once at a boil, I reduced the heat to keep the rice simmering (not boiling over) and set the timer for 15 minutes.

I used frozen chicken breasts so as they thawed, I pulled the breasts out and diced the meat. I didn't do anything fancy. I just wanted the pieces bite sized. To speed up the cutting process I could have used my chopper but I shy away from using my meat in it.

I did use it for the frozen broccoli! My kids always complain about the broccoli being too big and they can't eat it. To avoid having that conversation again I threw the pieces in the chopper and after a few whacks I dumped it in the pot with the cooked chicken. If I had to guess, I'd say I used 3 cups of diced broccoli.

About this time the rice was ready. I poured in 2 cans of cream of mushroom soup. I only added 1 more can's worth of water though. The reason is I like my chicken and rice creamy, not soupy.

After mixing in the cream of mushroom soup, I took the pan of chicken and broccoli and dumped everything in the rice. Even the stock. The bouillon cubes I placed in there while the chicken was cooking added wonderful flavor to the dish.

After more mixing, the meal was ready. I took the whole stock pot to the table to see how much the family actually eats. We ate about a fourth of the pot which meant I had 3 more meals. Yes!

I took a picture of the dinner. I'm looking at my plate and realizing that I forgot a fruit but other than that we had a wonderful, well-rounded meal. The bread is a rosemary and olive foccacia loaf that I traded some lotion for at the farmer's market on Wednesday.

Needless to say, the meal was yummy and I have 3 more in the freezer for another day. Trying to calculate the price per meal was a little tricky for me. The rice was the conundrum. I buy rice in large quantities through my church's provident living program. I cannot remember what I paid the last time I bought rice.

Since you might not have access to this program, I decided to try to find another source for buying a large quantity of rice to give a better idea of the cost per meal. I found one at Amazon.com. Emergency Food Supply, Instant White Rice I use the equivalent of one of these packets in this batch meal so the rice would cost $4.91 to make the 4 dinners.

Hopefully you can find an even better deal somewhere else. I would look on the bottom shelf in the rice area at your local grocery store and see how much the big bags are. Just store the remaining rice in a sealed container and the rice stays good for 20 years or so. Lowes has sturdy paint buckets with lids that seal for around $5.00!

But I digress. In this scenario of buying the rice from the amazon.com resource, my cost per meal is $3.75. It isn't down to $3.00 a meal yet but I also didn't buy anything on sale and I know I paid less for my rice since I didn't have to worry about shipping.

Anywho, happy cooking and let me know if you have any recipes my family should try!

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.)

Pulled Pork

Today was my pulled pork adventure. Last night I put the 9 lb bone-in rump roast in the crock pot and I let it simmer on low all night. I chose a rump roast because the website I found the recipe on said to choose a very fatty cut. The meat shreds better if there is a high fat content.

I was nervous leaving the roast on all night because it spent 12 hours cooking and I was worried that the meat would come out dry or over cooked. I threw about a half cup of water into the crock pot just to be sure I didn't completely ruin the meat.

This morning I came down and the fat from the meat had melted and almost filled the crock pot! I'm not sure the water was necessary. I don't know of any way to use the fat so I drained it and threw it away. (My trash man hates me, I'm sure, but he has good reason. I'll have a post elaborating why in the future.) I thought about throwing it outside but the fat would attract vermin. I'm not excited about the idea of attracting possum and field mice to my home. I like guests but not the furry-get-in-my-food-storage kind.

After tossing the fat and juices, I poured the meat onto my large cutting board that I laid across the sink. I didn't want to clean up pork juices for the next week and this way anything that leaked just went into the sink.

When I dumped the meat out, the bone popped out of the roast. I wasn't looking forward to cutting it out so this came as a very happy surprise. I'm not an expert but I assume it is because I let it cook for so long. I didn't throw the bone away. I have neighbors with dogs so I will see if any of them need a new chew toy. (They are outdoor dogs.)

Next, I got to work separating the meat from the remaining fat and shredding the meat. I used two regular dinner forks to manipulate everything. The pork basically fell apart. The fat slid right off and I merely pushed it to the side.

When I was done, I had a huge mound of pork and a small pile of gristle left. Honestly, I was surprised how much meat remained after I was done. There seemed to be more meat after I pulled it apart.

I threw the meat back in the crock pot and it filled to the top! I grabbed one of the 40oz bottles of Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce and dumped the whole thing in the crock pot. After mixing, I realized that 40 oz. wasn't quite enough. I grabbed an open bottle of BBQ sauce from the fridge and poured the rest into the crock pot. Even then, I think the pork could have used a touch more barbecue sauce. I plan on buying three bottles of 40oz Barbecue sauce in the future since the chicken and potatoes from yesterday used one bottle and a little extra and the 9 lb pulled pork takes one and a little extra as well.

I wanted to try the pulled pork today so we had pulled pork sandwiches for lunch. We had carrots and watermelon to round out the meal. Of course, no recipe will please everyone except for pizza but over all, the kids ate. The Sweet Baby Ray's sauce was a hit. It's tasty!

As a tip, I used a pasta spoon to dish out the pork. In case you don't know what I am talking about, it's like a regular serving spoon with slots in the cup area then tines (like fingers) coming up from the sides. It's easier to serve pasta with it and it's also great for grabbing the shredded meat.

After the meat cooled more, I divvied up the rest into quart sized baggies. As I learned yesterday, I marked the bags before I filled them. I dated them just in case one gets lost in the back of the freezer and I find it 3 months from now. Knowing when I made the pork will help me decide if we can still eat it or if I should throw it out. I think the rule of thumb is throw it out after 6 months if it's in an upright freezer and 1 year if it's a chest freezer. If anyone knows for sure, please comment. I have an upright freezer so I will only be planning for 6 months or so of use.

At this point, I have made 5 bags of chicken and potatoes, 7 bags of cookie dough, 25 twice baked potatoes and three bags of pulled pork. I spent $52.51 on the materials for those 13 meals and 7 desserts. That's approximately $4.00 a meal (counting the cost of dessert). After adding miscellaneous fillers to dinners like fruit, vegis and bread, I'm estimating $5.00 a meal. The pork is a big part of what tipped the price per meal up. Also, I didn't shop any deals. After cooking all the meals with the materials and slowly building a reserve, I am going to start shopping only when there is a great deal on meats and other ingredients. My goal is to drop the price per meal to $2-3.00. This will be a challenge but I'm confident I can do it.

I wanted to get to the meat loaf and enchiladas today but I have errands to run. I'm grabbing 5 gallon buckets for the washing machine detergent I am making as well as to transfer some wheat. Tomorrow I'll elaborate on the wheat fiasco.

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.