In the past, I have done a lot of freezer meal preparations on my own. I have even done a few meal swaps with other moms. Thanks to Pinterest and wonderful food bloggers, there is a crazy amount of information about this online. I have a close friend who is 7 months pregnant with 3 kids. She really wanted to do a freezer meal cooking marathon to alleviate some household duties and, conveniently, my freezer was running low. I ran out of chicken stock for the first time in.... I don't even know how long. I ALWAYS have it on hand.
We talked about what common meals we typically prepare for our families and I shared my experiences with projects like these. We went to the newly opened New Orleans Costco to see what products they offer for this endeavor since we needed some bulk shopping prices. After browsing for FOUR HOURS, with our FIVE KIDS... we started to formulate a plan.
We decided on 2 meats... chicken and ground beef. Mostly because Costco has organic options for these 2. The chickens are sold in 2 packs of whole chickens and the ground beef is sold in 3 packs of 1.3 lb sections (basically 4 lbs). With these 2, we would make Chicken and Dumplings, Chicken Pot Pie, Baked Cheesy Chicken Penne, Beef Enchiladas, Shepherd's Pie, and Baked Ravioli. Also, we would cook some extra chickens just to shred and be able to pull out to make chicken salad sandwiches, or to put on a salad, or to throw in anything else, something I love having on hand and recommended. We also decided to prepare Bacon Shallot Quiches and Chocolate Chip Cookies.
After feeling like my brain was going to explode making the shopping lists, I decided to start putting everything into a spreadsheet. It made everything so much easier. I just entered the ingredients, quantities, and units of measurement. This made it easy to enter how many recipes we were preparing and multiply, then reorganize the list to combine everything. The master lists:
The grocery shopping lists:
All food items were purchased at Costco and Whole Foods. From Costco, I purchased the chicken, ground beef, bacon, cheddar cheese, onions, chocolate chips, frozen organic veggies, butter, eggs, and organic spaghetti sauce.
Seriously. 10 whole chickens.
Two at a time, into my huge stock pot they went! For every 2 chickens, I added 4 whole carrots, 4 celery stalks, 4 onions, 20 whole peppercorns, 2 tablespoons of salt, and 4 whole dried bay leaves.
Then covered with water - about 20 cups is what my pot would allow. I bring it to a boil over medium-high, cover and lower to about medium-low for 2 hours. This should typically yield 32 cups of chicken stock, so after the chicken cooks thoroughly and is removed, I add the remaining 12 cups of water to the vegetables.
Every time we had chickens cooking, I prepared another dish while waiting. So the first night, after grocery shopping for hours for everything we needed, I went with the easiest dish. Unfortunately, this is the only picture like this that I took. I really intended on taking more photos, but just got too busy. We had our hands full cooking so much with 5 kids running around. Whole Foods has these organic cheese raviolis in their freezer section and we layer meat sauce, ravioli, meat sauce, cheese, ravioli, meat sauce, cheese. Buying as much cheese as we needed, we went with blocks of cheese and shredded or grated it all with my food processor. It didn't save us much money, but anything that we could cut, we did. My friend has a larger family so we did two 13x9 pans for her and four 8x8 pans for me. We did foil pans just to make this whole project easier. After filling pans, we covered in freezer paper, wrapped in foil, labeled with instructions, and put in gallon sized ziploc bags or wrapped the larger pans in plastic wrap.
After assembling the ravioli dishes, the chicken was done. We shredded the chicken and froze to keep on hand. To the stock, we added the water, strained and divided the stock into 8 quart-sized bags. The onions and carrots also got puréed and saved in bags to add as hidden vegetables to dishes (works best with ground beef dishes).
Our full day of cooking, we put 2 chickens in and in the meantime, started working on quiches. We made 6 quiches - 2 for each of us and one for us to eat each day of cooking. Seriously. They're that good. I have added garlic to this recipe in the past and it has been delicious. It slipped my mind this time. Costco had this bacon that was SO GOOD. Being that quiches are liquid, we flash froze these until hardened, covered in freezer paper, wrapped in foil, labeled and put into ziploc bags.
When the chicken was done, we shredded it and used the stock to make chicken and dumplings. We cooked 2 of these recipes. The only difference is we used 16 cups of stock instead of 12. We didn't do the dumplings. Instead, we measured and froze the dry ingredients, ready for the half and half to be added and dropped into the dish once heated. The 2 whole recipes were divided up into 4 gallon sized ziploc bags. One recipe usually feeds our families and has leftovers, so we divided it and the dumpling mix for 4 meals.
We put the next 2 chickens in and while they were cooking, we worked on shepherds pie. I get a lot of freezer meal ideas from Once a Month Meals. Even if I don't fully stick to the recipe, I use her blog to reference how to freeze and reheat meals. Instead of any cream soups, we made an onion mushroom gravy with a butter roux, chicken stock, and a little heavy cream. We mixed the ground beef with the gravy. The layers went ground beef/gravy mixture, frozen mixed veggies, whipped mashed potatoes, and topped with shredded cheddar cheese. We did two 13x9 pans of shepherds pie. I intended on two 8x8 pans but they were too shallow for this dish.
When the next 2 chickens were done, we shredded them for chicken pot pies. Whole Foods has whole wheat organic pie crusts in their freezer section. Before our next freezer meal endeavor, I plan on testing making our own pie crust from scratch, but was not up to testing for this round. Instead of using 2 cups of frozen veggies like in this recipe, we used one pound for each recipe. We assembled 4 chicken pot pies. And we used this seasoning mix. It is SO yummy! We flash froze until hardened, covered in freezer paper, wrapped in foil, and put in gallon sized freezer bags.
After cooking 4 chickens for the day, we had some stock leftover from what was used for the day's recipes. Enough to fill 9 quart sized bags. That was a wrap for our one real full day of cooking that our schedules allowed.
The next morning, I was able to fix 2 more chickens and the enchilada dish after bad weather caused my plans to cancel. While the chickens were going, I browned another 3 pack of ground beef and doubled the enchilada sauce from this recipe. This was the one time that my quantities were off. We calculated that this would make two 13x9 pans (10 enchiladas each) and four 8x8 pans (5 enchiladas each). We only got three 8x8 pans though. No biggie. I layered enchilada sauce, rolled enchiladas (seam down), covered in enchilada sauce, then topped with shredded cheddar cheese. When done, the chickens were shredded for the next dish and the stock set aside.
The last day, I put the last 2 chickens in and in the meantime made this chicken Alfredo dish with the shredded chicken from the previous day. I have done it before, but I don't do the sun dried tomatoes for this dish. I do add spinach though. This time I used frozen whole leaf spinach, but I have sautéed fresh spinach to add to this dish in the past. This filled 3 8x8 pans and 1 13x9 pan. The last 2 chickens were shredded and frozen for later use.
In the end, this is what I stocked in my freezer. Not pictured is the shredded chicken, 5 other frozen quarts of chicken stock, the cookies, pureed onions and carrots from the stock, and 3 gallons of chicken stock that will be used this week for different dishes. This is what is in my freezer only. There is also a huge stash in my friend's freezer. Marathon was a success!
