What's for Dinner? Testing Monthly Freezer-Based Meal Prep

I'll start this post off with saying, I love to cook. I also love meal prep. However, I can't pretend that keeping up with meal prep when my husband and I are busy can get tedious. I spent some time looking through Instagram #mealprep posts hoping to find an meal prep system to try this December since I knew we were going to be busy with our normal work-life balance and the holiday season.

So the AIM of this experiment was to try a new meal prep technique to take some stress out of figuring out what the heck we were going to eat this month.

I stumbled upon The Family Freezer (@thefamilyfreezer) run by Kelly and her family and was wowed by her meal prep skills and also the amount of resources she provides (a lot of which are free) on her website (thefamilyfreezer.com).

The basis of her meal prep is bulk prep of a months worth (or more) of uncooked meals, frozen, and ready for you to slow cook/pressure cook throughout the month.

I now had the OBJECTIVE for my experiment: I was going to use her December Menu to prepare all our meals (minus Christmas Dinner) for the month of December. 

My METHODOLOGY was easy to prepare, since The Family Freezer provided me with a handy PDF file with my menu, recipes, and complete grocery shopping list. You can see the menu plan I used here: https://thefamilyfreezer.com/2018/11/30/12-healthy-freezer-crockpot-meals-to-make-in-december/

I now had 13 meals for December. To make my life and WW Tracking easier, I entered all the recipes into my WW App and made some slight modifications shown below to keep the points for each serving down.

1. Shredded Chicken Quesadillas (1 SP/serving)
2. Kale and Chorizo  Italian Turkey Sausage Soup (2 SP/serving)
3. Mississippi Roast with Carrots and Sweet Potatoes Butternut Squash (note: swap EVOO for Butter) (11 SP/serving)
4. Orange-Ginger Chicken (3 SP/serving)
5. Taco Soup (used: extra lean ground beef) (4 SP/serving)
6. Italian Pork Roast (5 SP/serving)
7. Chicken Fajitas (1 SP/serving)
8. Zuppa Toscana with Sweet Potatoes Squash (note: sub Flax Milk for Heavy Cream and used Italian Turkey Sausage) (4 SP/serving)
9. Beef Roast with Carrots (7 SP/serving)
10. Red Pepper Chicken (3 SP/serving)
11. Beef and Cabbage Soup (used: extra lean ground beef) (4 SP/serving)
12. Chinese Pepper Steak with Green Peppers and Onions (6 SP/serving)
13. Chicken and Sweet Potato Hash 

So I headed out grocery shopping and managed to get all the ingredients for just about $200 which breaks down to about $2.50 per meal (we were definitely going to save on groceries doing this). It took me one evening with some Netflicks playing in the background to prep all the meals, with most of my time being spend chopping onions and garlic (next time I will cheat and buy the froze chopped onion). 

 My husband and I then looked at our calendar and wrote out when were were going to cook each meal. We took into account our busy days, date nights, pizza nights, and holiday parties. To make life easier I had us eating soups over the weekend vs. bringing them to work.

And so I have been following our schedule and cooking the meals as we go throughout this month.

RESULTS (mid-month): I FRIGGIN' LOVE THIS MEAL PREP SYSTEM!!!!!!!!!

So far we have enjoyed several tasty and nutritious meals this month. They have been a breeze to prepare and our weekly grocery shopping has been greatly reduced to breakfast and snack items along with the fresh vegetables etc. needed for each week. We have been enjoying a greater variety of meals than I would have prepared on my own and my husband is pretty happy to be getting beef more regularly.

I will be back to update you at the end of the month with how the complete challenge went and discuss it further...........