Once A Month Cooking Round 2

We have officially been home for three weeks after our whirlwind of a summer.  Over the last few months we have visited family in California, spent time with family while remembering Tim's grandpa in Oregon and finished up by helping out with some youth camps in Colorado.  Whew!

While in Colorado I spent the majority of the three weeks cooking and by the time we got home the LAST thing I wanted to do was cook.  Of course, we came home to an empty fridge, freezer and pantry....sooo we went shopping and basically bought a weeks worth of food that would take 5 minutes or less to prepare.  Can you tell we were exhausted?

So we spent the week eating a lot of cereal and soup.  We also spent the week taking care of our 3 year old who came down with bronchitis, yikes.  A few days later I was hit by the nasty thing and was out of it for another week.  Did I mention I am 23 weeks pregnant and although I am feeling good I am tired ALL THE TIME?

Ok, so on to the OAMC part of this post.  When I was finally feeling better Tim and I decided it was time to have another go at OAMC.  We did it once before summer and ended up with 6 weeks worth of dinners (and leftovers for lunches).  It was awesome!  Last time we did this we spent about 10 hours on a Saturday and went nuts cooking and got it all done.  This time (because I get tired quite a bit more quickly) we decided to spread out the work over a week.  Here is what we ended up with:

- 20 homemade (yes I soaked and refried my own beans and all) Bean and Cheese burritos 

- 15 homemade Calzones (4 varieties)

- 50 Twice Baked Potatoes (can you tell I LOVE these things??  YUM)

- 6 Chicken Pot Pies (our favorite OAMC meal we have tried thus far)

- 4 Taco Soup meals

- 6 Cranberry Chicken meals

- 2 dozen Mini Meat loaves

- 3 Teriyaki Steak meals

- 6 Teriyaki Chicken meals

- 4 Green Bean/Chicken Casseroles

- 4 Shepard's Pies

- 4 Black Bean Tamale Pies

- 4 Carnitas with Peppers and Orzo in Mole Sauce (which after cooking I came to the realization I do not like mole sauce)

So overall we ended up with 71 meals for our family of 3 (Wowzers, I hadn't actually counted that up until now, good thing we bought a deep freezer!)

We will probably end up eating the burritos and calzones as lunches because you can literally throw one in the microwave for a couple of minutes straight out of the freezer.  The rest we will eat for dinners and enjoy the pure bliss of not having to cook for the next 2 or 3 months (depending on how often we eat out or are out of town, etc).

We spent a total of $300 on the ingredients using about 5 coupons total (I know, sad...I really had poor planning on this shopping trip)  But even still, that is about $4.00 a meal for the three of us (and we ALWAYS have leftovers).

If you want to try OAMC I would suggest going to Amazon and buying the book Don't Panic Dinners in the Freezer.  It has a complete guide on how to get started and a ton of helpful tips and on top of that the recipes are awesome!  After you read through the book and pick out some recipes the internet has tons of freezer cooking recipes.

Good luck and have fun!  If you have any questions, feel free to ask!