30 Day Cooking

Whoa! Yesterday was shopping and cooking:

• 7 lbs of taco meat
• 8 lbs of sloppy Joe
• 4 lbs of browned hamburger with diced onion
• 16 lbs of shredded beef (for sandwiches)

Today was cooking:

• 16 cupcake sized individual pumpkin pies
• 2 full-sized Paradise Pumpkin pies
• 2 mini (pot pie) sized blackberry pies with lattice
• 1 Blackberry Cobbler
• 1 Batch of fudge

It was really a "If You Give A Mouse A Cookie..." type of cooking.

• I had left-over canned pumpkin in the fridge from this week, so we started the individual pumpkin pies.
• When we'd mixed that up we had more pumpkin left, so we made Paradise Pumpkin pies.
• We'd made my grandmother's pie crust recipe for the individual pies and had left over crust, so I made more crust and let ds6 make his own mini pies and he chose Blackberry from the options I gave him.
• That only used up half the Blackberry filling, so we made a cobbler.
• We were out of evaporated milk, so I substituted 1/2 whole milk and 1/2 condensed milk for the paradise part of the pumpkin pie, so I had 1/2 can of condensed milk left over and had to use it - so I found a fuge recipe...

I really love 30 Day Gourmet and what they do for my freezer. I find myself proselytizing for 30 Day cooking all the time! I'm just so excited at how much it helps:

1. my physical exhaustion at the end of the day
2. my mental exhaustion after teaching all day (I don't have to think about what I've got in the pantry, what that recipe takes...)
3. my emotional exhaustion (I end up screaming at the kids more when I'm cooking dinner than at any other time of the day).

Tips from today - wear hot mitts to sort the freezer. This made a HUGE difference for me! I sorted the freezer - basically, took everything off 1 shelf at a time and sorted it into "breakfast, sweets / side, sauces & condiments / chicken & fish / meat / and a it won't fit anywhere else shelf"

Other Tip from today - As I have just a few spoonfuls leftover from rice, vegetables, the main dish, desert, etc. - I put it in a freezer bag labeled as a "Frozen Meal" and the contents. Then when Dave comes home from working late and asks the inevitable "is there anything to eat in there?" He can pull out a full and varied dinner and nuke it. Otherwise, he might wake up in the middle of the night and find my stash of cookies or raid the penut butter...