Allez Cuisine!

Granny Roady came to visit this weekend and help me with my latest project.  Since I got pregnant, I decided that I wanted to make a bunch of food and store it in the freezer so that when Baby got here I wouldn't have to worry about cooking for a while.  Our chest freezer arrived a couple of weeks ago and I have been anxious to fill it.  Monday and Tuesday, I gathered the recipes that I wanted to prepare and started to make my shopping list.  Granny Roady arrived Wednesday afternoon and that evening we went out in search of the ingredients for the meals I wanted to prepare.  We went to Costco and got the meat and some of the vegetables required.  Then we got to Sam's Club and got a couple more things and finally we hit the Target to get some containers to hold all of the food once it was prepared.

a few of the ingredients

Bright and early Thursday morning, I ran to the Harris Teeter to get the remainder of the ingredients and Granny Roady ran to Food Lion to get some Glad OvenWare for a few of the dishes that we will want to cook in the same dish that we store it in.  We then rendezvoused back at the house to get our cookin' on!

Granny Roady started off by chopping up 10 pounds of beef while I chopped 8 pounds of onions.

The giant bowl of chopped onions

the beef that Granny Roady chopped

By the end of the day, we had prepared three Chinese Chicken casseroles, four meatloaves, eight Moroccan hamburgers, three bags of spaghetti sauce, two giant bowls of black bean chili, three shepherd's pies, eight containers of beef stew (and a partridge in a pear tree).  Needless to say, I didn't feel much like preparing dinner last night, so Dave ran out and picked up some Chinese for dinner.

The first three completed meals!

mmmm, smells good!

Our freezer now has lots and lots of food in it.  We also have a bunch of meatballs that we can use for various recipes.  I have a few more recipes that I might make and freeze, but I feel like we have a good handle on things with as many meals frozen as we do.  We will be able to eat several of the dishes for a few nights at a time.

This is getting a little old now

Our bounty of food!