The other day we ran through a drive thru and grabbed two hamburgers and two kids meals and it was $33. Thirty Three Dollars. While financially we could afford this, I was not prepared for it because it was a fast food place! Nothing was healthy or nourishing to our bodies... or even hot for that matter.
When we got home I told J I needed to do better in having a plan for healthy meals, even on days when I didn't feel like cooking, because $33 burgers were not going to cut it in our tighter budget. So to Pinterest I went.
I found the *seriously* ULTIMATE collection of Whole30 Slow Cooker Freezer Meals!
I'm not new to making freezer meals. This used to be our one Saturday a month activity - we would do all the grocery shopping, then spend a few hours cutting and prepping a dozen or so meals that I would be able to put in the slow cooker before heading to work. Somehow we got out of this habit, and I have just prepared dinner every night... like a psycho.
What I love about this download, Kelly has given a monthly menu, all the recipes, a grocery list, and the labels for the bags! She makes it so easy for us, but here's a few tips for using this amazing resource!
1. Walmart pickup is a LIFESAVER!! By using the included shopping list, I was able to order all of the groceries, with very few substitutes. It took me maybe 15 minutes to order all of the groceries and as always, pick up is super convenient.
2. A few things could be substituted for frozen, pre-chopped items. Instead of buying a butternut squash- I bought frozen. To save time, you could also purchase frozen chopped onions and chopped sweet potatoes. Instead of buying all the garlic cloves, I used the Costco size minced garlic container. I could not imagine mincing all that garlic by hand.
3. It took me about five hours to unpack, chop, sort, package, and clean up the kitchen. This breaks down to about 10 meals a meal. On one hand, it would take me much longer than 10 minutes to make dinner every evening, but on the other hand, I wish I had organized the meals better to streamline the process. It took about 30 minutes to chop up all of the onions. If I would have had the frozen chopped onions, this would have saved me so much time where I could have been assembling.
4. To streamline the process, I organized the freezer bags by meat first. This way I could get all of the chicken meals prepped, then move onto the next meat type instead of going back and forth as the recipes are in order.
5. Once the bags are organized by meat, I organized by main ingredients. So, recipes 1, 11, 22, 29 all include coconut milk. I placed those cans on the bags with the other ingredients they called for so when it was time to make that meal, all the ingredients were already there and it made it go a little faster. Unfortunately, it did take me a bit before I figured out how to streamline this process.
