Counting down to school

I'm trying to be proactive with Nursing school this semester. For the past month I've been making several freezer dinners each week so we can use them in the next few months. Cooking dinner at the end of a long day was always the worst part of being in school. I really don't enjoy cooking anyway. I had started doing freezer meals last year with a co-op in our area.

We have a group of women that all swap freezer dinners each month. For example, if there are 10 women in the group I would make 10 complete meals of my choice (like sweet and sour chicken). I'd bring 9 of the meals (keeping one for myself) to our meeting site and we'd all give everyone one meal to take home. So I would come home with 9 different meals to use anytime during the month. I really loved it! It's such a great way to change up our regular food routine and it saves so much time. It's much easier to make 10 meals of the same thing than it is to cook 10 different meals. Make sense?

After getting hooked on the freezer meal concept, we started doing it more frequently in our family. One of the best results of the freezer exchange group is the wide exposure to recipes. Over the course of the year we've found some GREAT recipes that are now regular meals. The best ones are fast to put together and absolutely delicious to eat. If you care for some of our top recipes, please let me know, I'd love to share! It's really blessed my life and I'd love to get other people started on it.

I stocked our chest freezer entirely full of meals. I have felt much like a squirrel getting ready for winter. I've made 4-6 complete meals of each recipe so we can use one each month from each recipe. I also love the versatility of making wholesome, nutritious meals that we enjoy. Store-bought freezer meals are usually full of preservatives and fat. We really enjoy eating simple staples- like beans. You just can't find commercially-produced freezer meals just full of legumes. We try to eat those several times each week, so we have lots of bags just full of cooked beans.

Here are some of our current meal menuchoices-

Chicken Pot Pie (Our very favorite freezer meal EVER!!! It's SO flavorful and easy!)
Sweet and Sour Chicken
Shepards Pie
BBQ casserole with cornbread
Turkey Peanut Soup
Meatballs for pasta
Lasagna
Turkish Lentil Soup
Split Pea Soup and ham
Cooked Turkey breasts
Chicken Noodle Soup
Chili
Chicken/Black Bean Magic Mix (Our other favorite! It's SO cool! The same recipe can be used to make nachos, tacos, quesadillas, enchiladas, taco soup, mexican pizza, mexican lasagna or breakfast burritos! I LOVE this recipe! It's SO versatile and SO yummy!)
Santa Fe Chicken Tortilla Wraps
Chicken parmigiana
Herbed Roast whole chicken
Cooked black beans (we love to pour salsa over them and eat it with chips. Yum!)
Dozens of muffins (to throw in school lunches for the children):
Blueberry Streusal
Chocolate chip
Pumpkin-apple-raisin
Pumpkin-apple-chocolate chip
10 loaves of zucchini bread (a ready dessert for Sundays)
gallons of cooked wheat berries (great for breakfast or adding nutrition to dinner)
gallons of wheat flour (I ground it in advance so we can just add it to our homemade bread each week...we don't own our own electric wheat grinder, so we borrowed the stake grinder for a week and went through 100 pounds of wheat. We froze it so it won't lose nutrition or go rancid before we use it.)

Usually we pull our a freezer meal, make a few sides to go with it (like a big green salad) and have half of the main dish left over at the end of the meal. It's perfect for sending with Nate for lunch the next day, or perhaps even having for dinner again the next night (especially with our favorite recipes, like the chicken pot pie. No matter how much we make, it's always a SAD thing when the last morsels are eaten). Theoretically, I can pull out 2 freezer meals each week and count on eating them 3 nights of the week. The in-between nights I have planned relatively easy meals, like spaghetti or baked potatoes with chili or omelets, etc.

I really think it will help ease the stress with school demands. I have more homework than usual this semester because Pharmacology and Microbiology both presume that I have background knowledge prior to the class. I have never taken chemistry - even in high school- and it's been 6 years since I had a college math course. I'm already trying to catch up on the curriculum and school hasn't even started!