Freezer meals part deux

Cooking day did NOT start well. First we got a late start. Very late. As in, I thought we'd start cooking at 3 or 4. We started cooking at more like.. 7pm. Yeah.

Then when we finally did start, we found that the recipe we were supposed to start with (Chicken Cacciatore) was adapted not-so-well. See also: The instructions say to preheat the oven but you never actually use it. Color me confused. We spent, I don't know, like seriously 45 minutes trying to figure out if we were supposed to bake the chicken, maybe bake the veggies? Bake it all? In the end, we baked nothing.

Also, lesson learned: Zest stuff the night before while prepping the produce because it is not as easy or fast as the dudes on the Food Network make it look. Not even close. 

After the cacciatore debacle, things went really smooth and fast, relatively speaking. In total, we made 20 dinner entree servings in about 5 hours. Each of these recipes to serve two people twice:

• Chicken cacciatore
• Yogurt marinade Greek chicken pitas w/ Greek sauce
• BBQ meatballs w/ homemade BBQ sauce
• Teriyaki pork
• Crockpot mongolian beef

The finished product! Not much to look at, I know. And ignore the container of frozen breastmilk. You don't see that. I really should have taken pictures of everything before I froze it but I was a cooking whirlwind! I had stuff to do! Things to wisk! Chicken breasts to dredge!

The real test will be how good (or bad) the recipes stand up to being frozen, thawed, and then reheated. I'm not a leftovers kinda person (fast food lover, remember?) so I have my doubts about freezer meals. All in all, though, the experience was a good one. I'm a bit concerned about the amount of time it took for only 5 recipes even with two of us working at it. Perhaps in time we'll get faster. I know that in the future I definitely need to do more research before even doing the grocery shopping. I could have saved myself a lot of time by knowing what ingredients went into what, if I was chopping onions for 3 different dishes or all of them for one, etc. 

We spent about $70 for the groceries for all of this, making it $3.50 per person per meal. Not bad at all. A large part of that $70 was for spices that we obviously won't need to buy in the future, so this could potentially get slightly cheaper per cooking day the longer we do it. A monetary concern for me is that since we are not big at-home-cookers, we don't have a lot of the kitchen tools called for in these recipes. For example, if we had done the full menu, I would have needed an immersion blender, a regular blender, a muffin pan, and a crockpot -- that's just off the top of my head. For the mini menu, we ended up needing to buy a zester and a juicer. That's not too bad. Hopefully we'll be able to get by buying only one or two things per month to add to our kitchen tool collection, but it does increase the cost of doing this.

Look for reviews of the recipes as we try them in the future.