New Food

It is Sunday night again and I am excited to write another post.  I mentioned previously that thanks mostly to Pinterest, I've been trying a lot of new recipes.   I don't have any pictures to share but I do have a lot of links.

We've also been trying to do a lot of frreezer cooking.  I've found what works best for us is recipes that yield  several nights of dinners that we can freeze separately.  These meatballs are great, although the second time around I omitted the red pepper flakes.  I doubled the recipe and froze them 8 to a bag and I think I filled 6 bags?  So it isn't an entire meal but it does make dinner a lot faster to just throw these in the oven and then boil some spaghetti or pasta.  

Probably our favorite freezer recipe is chicken wraps.  The first time we made them (last October when we were getting ready for Guinevere!) they started out as enchiladas but we have slowly tweaked the recipe each time until we realized they weren't enchiladas anymore.  The wraps are a mix of shredded chicken, spinach, cheddar cheese, onion, shredded carrot, and black beans.  They are frozen in sets of 4, wrapped in aluminum foil so they can go straight from freezer to fridge to oven, no unwrapping necessary.  

We have also tried the teriyaki chicken and sausage and peppers recipe from here and they were both really tasty and easy.  I haven't looked through all her recipes yet but I want to, I like how the dinners are frozen to have just enough in a bag.  I may love lasagna and casseroles and I think that is what you see most of the time with freezer cooking, but with just the two of us eating real food so far they just aren't practical (yet).  

I made this crock pot orange chicken twice but I didn't really like the sauce - the first time I thought I had made a mistake but it turned out that was how it was supposed to taste.  I really like orange chicken though so I am still keeping my eyes out for a better recipe.  I also made pumpkin butter twice.  Great recipe, although even doubled I find I need to stir it a bunch and it cooks faster than the recommended 5-6 hours.  

There were a few more recipes I wanted to write about but I just glanced at the clock and I'm out of time.  See you next week!

Howdy

So I think I am ready to start blogging again.  I've been thinking about it for a month or so, as I think all the dust from the past year has finally settled and it is safe to poke my head out again.  Not only does it seem like a routine is finally emerging from the chaos, the predictability has even given me the courage to finally add in some new things.  I've been knitting again, trying new recipes, trying to encapsulate every part of our lives into some sort of organizational system (ha!), and planning a birthday party.  And every time I do one of these things, I get excited to share it.  So here I am.  For now, I am hoping to update weekly, on Sunday nights.  We'll take it slow and see how it goes.

I'm back!

Well, sort of. This is going to be a quick post but at least its something!

For anyone who can't get enough Guinevere photos (and who can, really?) on facebook and is unaware that I also have flickr, you can check out more photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/elizabethextraordinaire/

Freezer Meal Weekend

Over the summer we bought an extra freezer from a friend's estate sale with the intention of making lots of food before baby arrives. It sat out on our back patio for months before Paul-John finally cleaned it, and then sat out on the patio a little longer before he managed to bring it into this basement earlier this week.

Friday my mom and I went to Costco, Saturday she made a quick stop at Stop&Shop to pick up a few more things and then came over and helped me get started, and today I did some more cooking. This is what we have so far:

I know the picture isn't really that exciting and I probably should have taken "in progress" photos, but it just seemed like too much of a hassle so this is what you get. I still want to make some soup for Paul-John for easy work lunches but I am really impressed with how much we were able to get done without actually spending too much time working. Saturday we probably got started around 11 or 11:30 in the morning and we were done by 4, and we that includes a lunch and quick shopping break. Today I got started only slightly before 11 and stopped for lunch at 2, which then led to also hanging out with Paul-John, going out for coffee and to look at cameras (more about that later this week). I spent about another half an hour working before dinner and maybe another hour and a half to two hours after dinner, and that's it. I'm sure if I had started early in the morning and didn't take such long breaks I maybe could have gotten it all done in one day.

What I really like about what we bought and made is that its a nice split of big meals we can either make for when we have guests (since I know we'll be having a lot of them!) and meals that are portioned for just me and Paul-John. For big meals, we have:

• 4 whole chickens
• 2 casseroles: one is a basic mac and cheese with chicken and spinach, and the other is chicken spaghetti but with onion, peas, carrots, and celery
• 1 meatloaf
• 1 pork roast with apples, sage and rosemary

For smaller portion meals we have:

• Enchiladas: 6 packages of 4 enchiladas each, plus one more with just 2.5
• Stuffed Peppers: 6 dinners (of two each) plus an extra one
• Pork Chops: 10 bags of 2 pork chops each. Two bags have a liquid sesame ginger marinade, four bags have a liquid balsamic herb marinade, and four bags have a dry garlic pepper rub. We also have a bag with three pork chops and the scraps from the end of the pork loin that we plan on using for pulled pork.
• 4 bags of already browned and seasoned ground beef for tacos
• 4 bags of 2 chicken breasts

We also have a bag of leftover ground beef that we haven't decided what to do with yet, and hopefully tomorrow I'll be adding in 8 (2c) containers of clam chowder.

Considering this was my first go at this, I think the way we went about it really helped with time management. Saturday I mostly just did prep - chopping the potatoes, onions, carrots, celery, peppers, etc. Mom started with prep - grating the cheese - but then did all the ground beef stuff. She browned some up for tacos, made the meatloaf and the stuffed peppers. We also boiled the chicken and shredded it. So today for the enchiladas and two casseroles all I really had to do was boil the pasta and everything else was ready (or could have been ready, I did end up needing to cook more chicken and grate more cheese, but luckily those were both easy). All the ingredients for tomorrow's soup are ready as well!

What else went really well is a lot of the ingredients are in multiple dishes but I think all the dishes are really different. There is cheddar and onion in pretty much everything. The two casseroles both have chicken but totally different veggies. There is apple in the meatloaf and the pork roast (and two jars of applesauce in the fridge). There is spinach in the enchiladas and a casserole, etc.

The only thing that I sort of didn't like about this whole process is I ended up getting a lot of other things at Costco that weren't for the freezer meals so it was a little hard to calculate the cost per meal. But it was all great stuff to get (with the exception of one "treat" item for Paul-John) like stocking up on toilet paper, or foods I'm not counting in the whole freezer thing like English muffins or butter. I spent about $100 on other stuff so when I first tried calculating the cost per meal I was nervous I spent too much. Luckily I saved the receipt so I was able to take a better look and I spent about $30 on freezer supplies - big boxes of the quart and gallon size freezer bags as well as a 30 pack of foil tins. Necessary but an expense we won't have the next several times we do this. I then spent about $105 on the food for the freezer meals. The next day my mom spent about another $50 at S&S but not all of this was for freezer stuff, but lets say about $45 was (I didn't save this receipt). And then today I had to pick up just a couple more things for another $10 So thats $160 on food and we have 8 big meals, 31 small meals, and (hopefully) 8 lunches, or 47 meals at $3.40 per meal. If you add in the cost of supplies, it is still only $3.83 per meal. Granted some of these will be complete meals with leftovers, and some are just parts of meals that will still need other sides, but I'm feeling a lot better about how much I spent!

I could probably write more but I think for one post this is enough. I'll be sure to write about each meal once we start eating them!

More photos!

I have been pretty inconsistent taking the profile bump photos but I finally got around to taking another one! This is one day shy of 36 weeks.

Another thing I am bad at doing is finishing knitting (or crochet) projects. I always get really excited about starting the next project. And I like the act of knitting and crocheting, while I do not like sewing buttons, tucking in yarn ends, or seaming. Once I get around to actually doing it its never as bad as I think its going to be, with the possible exception of seaming which at least is pretty easy to avoid. Anyways, this evening I finally got around to putting the finishing touches on two baby cardigans, which you can check out either on flickr or Ravelry. Tomorrow I am hoping to finish and photograph one more cardigan and maybe some mittens, so stay posted!

Cuddle Bump

Countdown

With less than six weeks to go, we've officially entered countdown mode. We've made a countdown checklist of all the projects and shopping we want to get done in the next few weeks and so far we're making pretty good progress. (I prefer "countdown mode" to "nesting" because it feels more accurate and less cheesy, not to mention that since I've made the checklist I've had The Final Countdown/visions of Arrested Development stuck in my head, which is fun.) I can't wait for everything to be ready. Only a week or two after we finally moved the hutch and the rocker out of the dining room and into the nursery, the dining room is once again filled up as our default storage space, now with all the items from the baby shower and a newly painted dresser.

Last week my main focus was washing all the clothes and linens we got at the baby shower. I've done most of it, but stopped when I ran out of room for all the clean items since the dresser wasn't finished yet. Paul-John painted the dresser yesterday, so now that its dry we should be able to get it upstairs fairly soon. Hopefully this weekend we can get all the furniture and everything else in place and we can put up all the wonderful decorations we got at our shower!

In other news, I am now going in for non-stress tests twice a week! It just started last week, and I'm lucky that my schedule is pretty flexible but it still is time consuming. At least I'm able to bring my knitting, there aren't any extra co-pays and it is always nice to know that everything is going well. This week I also have another ultrasound to check on baby's size. I had one just after I was diagnosed with gd and she was measuring fine. Now its been 5 weeks and since I've been managing my blood sugar levels, hopefully she should still be a normal size! Although I have heard from a lot of people that their weight guesses aren't very accurate, I'm still looking forward to checking in on her size.