Freezer Meal Palooza

I had a lot of paloozas this weekend. Phoebe AND freezer meals in the same day. But before I tell you about the freezer meal adventures, here's a little bundle of laughs for you. Wait til you hear the new word Ryan has concocted for his Shafferland dictionary. Cracked me UP!

Take a listen here!

Now. Back to freezer meals.

So my mom is getting ready to have surgery soon, and she is the resident chef at their house. And when I say that, I mean my dad couldn't cook if he had to. Toast...maybe. Apparently he has recently learned to make oatmeal. And possibly he could pour milk on cold cereal. After that? It's burgers and buffets all the way, because he just simply cannot cook. {No judgment, Dad. You have many other gifts. LOL!!}

So with Mom down for the count, I thought it would be helpful if she had some meals she could warm up as needed. I know some of her friends and neighbors will probably stop by in the weeks following with random meals and food gifts, so I have no idea when she'll come upon a day when she needs something and doesn't have it. Enter the freezer meals.

Also, Mom had expressed to me that because there are just the two of them, she didn't need big 9x13 servings of things. Totally understandable! So I took that concern into consideration when preparing the meal palooza.

One other little twist in this story is that my dad is a very picky eater. I promise I'm not trying to be mean to him in this post. It's just true and he'd admit it! So I was challenged to think of things that made good, healthy, balanced meals, in individual portions, that my dad MIGHT eat. {And if not? No worries. More for Mom!}

This past Saturday, whilst I had Miss Pheebs all day, I also cooked all day. Ryan had to work, so I just organized the kitchen in the best way I could think to do it and created thirty single-serving meals to freeze and transport to their house. Thought I'd tell you what I did and how I did it, in case you never need to know for yourself!

* First, I created three menus and did all the shopping for ingredients I didn't already have on hand. (I just used spices and such that I had here, but I shopped for all the main ingredients.) Ryan and I did that the night before, so everything was good and fresh.

* I also went to GFS (Gordon Food Service) and purchased containers that had individual wells so I could portion out the servings. and freeze them.

* The first meal was the sloppy joe meal. I made Mom's sloppy joe recipe, with three pounds of ground beef, and when I portioned out the cooked meat, I ended up with eleven servings of sloppy joe meat. I put them in sandwich zip bags and flattened them for easier storage. Then I took a package of regular buns and pulled them all apart, put each bun in a separate sandwich bag, and paired the buns with the bags of meat. I put both sandwich bags down inside a quart bag to make the meal. I also bought an assortment pack of individual servings of chips to pair with the sandwiches.

* The second meal was the meat loaf meal. I made two meat loaves and while they were baking, I whipped up some macaroni and cheese that I baked when the meat loaves were done. I also got 3 cans of green beans to portion out. I was able to get five servings out of each meat loaf for a total of ten, and I had enough macaroni to get ten servings plus two taste-tester size portions for Ryan and yours truly. The three cans of green beans were enough for the ten meals, too. I took my containers and spooned servings of all three things into the wells and called it done!

* The last meal was the chicken nugget meal. I used 9 large chicken tenders, added cheesy potatoes (no recipe on the old blogaroo for this one yet) and made cooked carrots for the first time in my life, and that made the last meal. The chicken nuggets took the longest because I had to cut the tenders into pieces and coat them and turn them all individually. The cheesy potato recipe made plenty for me to have enough for my 9 meals and leftovers for Ryan. I used 2 pounds of carrots to cook, and I used them all in the meals.

* And then for dessert, I made chocolate chip cookies and snickerdoodles, and after reserving some out for us, I bagged the rest, four cookies to a bag, and froze those as well.

* I found this site from Pinterest, and if you download the label the lady made, you can actually edit the label and put it right on your meal. That's what I did!

So last night we drove all the meals over {stuffed into various boxes, bags, and coolers} and surprised her! And boy was she ever surprised!

The freezer meal palooza was a little gift from all three of her girls, actually. I was just the self-designated cooker. Ha! Glad we were able to do it for her and hope it makes recovery a bit on the easier side! I hear those physical therapists can really work you hard and I can only imagine that can make you hungry!