Saving Dinner (and Myself)

At first glance, this is not going to look like a weight loss blog! And I suppose, on the face of it, it's not. It is about meeting two main objectives in my journey: 1) Giving my kids a good start in nutritional health (aka helping them avoid the addictions and dangers of highly processed foods). Instead of corn syrup, fillers and preservatives, they are getting intact foods like fruits, vegetables, brown rice, oats and whole-wheat flour.

(2)I am moving my own needs up the priority list so I'm not so distracted by feeding my large family that I just shove whatever I can find in my own pie-hole! A side benefit is that I'm not heating up my kitchen as much every day since the initial stage of cooking has been done already on all these foods!

Hence, I decided it was time to put some yummy home-made meals in the freezer. I took about a week to complete it all, but I did the bulk of the shopping and cooking in one 24 hour period with a lot of help from Chanelle (Allison was out of town at the time).

To put the sheer volume in proper perspective, Chanelle and I bought the majority of the ingredients at a warehouse club and it filled TWO carts and rang up a $550 bill! One of the carts was so heavy, it was exercise to push it! I estimate that by buying most of the ingredients in bulk, I saved 30% to 50% of the cost of producing each of these dishes individually.

Here are the results:

3 Meals of Shepherd's Pie
3 meals of Parsley Parmesan Chicken
24 cups of Spaghetti Sauce (about 6 meal's worth)






4 meals of Cheesy Taco Rice
3 batches of No-Bake Cookies
7 batches of Oatmeal Cookies
24 cups of Granola








6 meals of Mac and Cheese (bye, bye blue box)
12 cups of White Sauce (to go into the mac)
4 meals of Freezer Slaw



12 Breakfast Sandwiches (quickie breakfast for the girls for school)










4 meals of Pulled Pork
2 quarts of Barbeque Sauce
3 meals of Baked Ziti (not actually baked yet!)