I did it!!!

This is an "aside"...no verse directly related to this, but I had to post it.

Today I cooked over 30 meals (dinners and some lunches for the next month) and I am so excited!!!

I have been doing some reading about Once A Month Cooking (OAMC) and thought it would be fun to try, but with our income the way that it is, I didn't think we'd ever be able to have enough money to buy all the stuff we needed for the whole month in one shopping. Well, we got a gift card in the mail on Friday for $150 from Verizon (for signing up with FIOS) - free money basically. I decided this might be the chance we needed to "get ahead" and went to the grocery store on the hunt for good deals on meat.

This is what I came home with:

8 pounds of Lean Ground Beef

10 pounds Round Steak

3 1/2 pounds Rib Eye Roast

3.7 pounds Flank Steak

4 pounds chicken drumsticks

4 pounds chicken breasts

2 pounds shrimp

After a couple more grocery stores (Sprout and Trader Joe's for produce) and 13 hours in the kitchen, it turned into over thirty meals, inlcuding:

Hamburger Patties

Taco Meat

Meat Loaf

Albondigas

Shepherd's Pie

Chicken Soup

Shrimp Soup

BBQ Chicken Pasta

Chicken Pot Pie

Crunchy Chicken Sticks

Fajitas

Stir Fry

Swiss Steak

Beef Stroganoff

Broccoli Chicken Casserole

And oh so much more...

So, for less than $110 (which, really, net it was $0 because I used the gift card from Verizon) and a REALLY long day in the kitchen, I have my entire menu planed until the middle of May and all I have to do it remember to take the "dinner" out of the freezer the night before, heat it up with some side dishes (some of which are also already in my freezer -- thank you!) and dinner is served!

So much fun! You should try it :-)