Cooking Day

Now that you have spent the past few days planning and preparing it is time to cook! I try to start cooking about 8:00 after a good breakfast and go for as long as I can. I wear my most comfortable shoes and make sure to drink water and eat. Will all the food in front of me I can forget to eat and then I am likely to make a mistake.

I started with the marinades this time around. There are a lot of them due to the fact that we will grill a lot over the summer months. All of my meat was all ready placed in the labeled bag from my prep the night before. I just pulled out the meal I was working on put the ingredients in and  mixed up up to coat the meat.After I mixed everything up I try to get as much air out as possible and flatten. It saves so much space in the freezer to do it this way. I weigh all my meats so that the portions are correct since I am making more that one meal at a time and it helps with my portion control when serving the meal.Some recipes call for a sauce that you put on while cooking or grated cheese to be added.  I freeze these separately in a smaller bag and then tape it to the main meal. My marinades took me 4 hours to complete. I then moved on to beef dished that did not need to be cooked. I made seasoned hamburgers and little cheddar meat loaves.Then I moved on to the more involved meals. I had 4 things going at once. I browned ground beef for burritos, taco salad, and taco pizza while I started making the gumbo. Gumbo is an easy recipe but it needs to simmer and then cool before packaging. So I put it on one of the back burners while I work on the other things. You an see that I have all the ingredients I need right in front of me so I don’t waste time. Now my kitchen looks like this. Normally my husband does the dishes to help out but he was away for the weekend camping. I could tell I had come to rely on him for this part as I didn’t wash as I went and then spent an hour catching up so I could use the bowls and measuring cups again. Lesson learned!!  Here I am putting the baked burritos together. This recipe makes 10 burritos and I tripled it to make 30. We only eat 7 burritos at one meal so instead of to many leftovers I made 4 meals with a small portion for my husband to take to work. This is a nice way of stretching you meal count that you couldn't do if you didn’t cook in bulk. I ran out of 9x13 storage containers so I had to put a couple in glass. Here you can see it made four meals. This is one of the last meals I made. I always seem to leave the most time consuming meals for last. At least I can sit down while stuffing the shells!Here is what my freezer looks like today! After everything is frozen I organize it and stand up all the Ziploc meals to make it easier to find what I am looking for.        Here is a list of what I made and how many meals.

• 
  
  Szechwan Chicken
• 
  
  Thai Peanut Chicken
• 
  
  Greek Feta Chicken
• 
  
  Chicken Lo Mein
• 
  
  Heavenly Chicken
• 
  
  Blackened Chicken
• 
  
  Chicken Gyros
• 
  
  Lemon Garlic Chicken
• 
  
  Chicken Gumbo
• 
  
  Honey Baked Chicken
• 
  
  Garlic Roasted Chicken
• 
  
  Creamy Ham and Pasta
• 
  
  New Potatoes with Peas and Ham
• 
  
  Spicy Green Beans with Pork
• 
  
  Brown Sugar Chipotle Roast Pork
• 
  
  Asian Pork Tenderloin
• 
  
  Pork Tenderloin Tandoori
• 
  
  Taco Pizza
• 
  
  Korean Fire Beef
• 
  
  Baked Burritos
• 
  
  Taco Salad
• Hamburgers
• 
  
  Haystacks
• 
  
  Chili Crusted Flank Steak
• 
  
  Cheese Steak Casserole
• 
  
  Manicotti
• 
  
  Shepherd’s Pie

I will share some of the recipes soon! If you see something that interests you let me know and I’ll try to share those first!