I precook and preprep a lot of stuff. We also rely on prepackaged items to make this all work. We utilize fresh, frozen and canned fruits and vegetables to round out our meals. We usually only end up sitting down for dinner as a family 2 nights a week and occassionally sneak in a breakfast or lunch family meal as well.
I'm posting some pictures for you to see how I spent one hour this morning preparing and cooking items that will make it easier for us to get by. This mornings adventure centered around the five pounds of hamburger I purchased last week at Walmart for $6.50. All other items came out of my pantry. The oats were a free after coupon purchase back in July that have been waiting for a day like this. The onion has been in the house for awhile as well and the eggs were purchased at Family Fare when they were on sale for $.99 and with a gift card.
I started with a plan for Meatloaf and just cooking down the remaining hamburger for use in other things later.
I put half of the roll into the pan.
I put the other half into the bowl and mixed it up with the other Meatloaf ingredients.
Then I just portioned it out into the pans I use and put it in gallon size zipper bags, removed as much air as possible, and put one in the fridge for tomorrow night and one in the freezer for next week.
Then I decided to make Goulash as well, so I pulled a box of elbow macaroni (free from Meijer earlier this year), tomato sauce ($.78 @ Walmart), tomato paste $.38 from Walmart) and other ingreidients out of the pantry.
Since I don't do Meatloaf very often, the pan doesn't look as full as it normally does when I do the full five pounds, but this is the hamburger cooking down. The pan was purchsed from Bed Bath and Beyond with coupons and a rebate for the final price of $3.90. They've put it on sale a couple times since I purchased mine, so keep an eye out for one. It has made bulk cooking a breeze.
After I drained the hamburger and the macaroni, I put the macaroni in the hamburger pan because there is more room to mix the extra ingerdients for the Goulash.
After adding the hamburger into the Goulash, I pulled containers out of my cupboard and set aside a family portion for the freezer and lunch portions for our lunches over the next week or two.
After the Meatloaf and Goulash were prepared, I still had enough hamburger left over to set aside two portions for the freezer. These will come out to be added to sauce for spaghetti, hamburger helper or lasagne, or they will be later turned into taco meat. Having them already cooked saves a lot of time later.
I also often will prepare several pounds of taco meat and freeze it for quick dinners as well.
Hope this helps!
Thanks for the ideas. I guess I've found that taking the time to plan ahead and doing my best to stick with the plan is what seems to be working. I need to spend a whole day cooking to get stocked up.
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