A few weeks ago, I purchased the e-book, Frugal Mom’s Guide to Once a Month Cooking. So, I finally had enough time [took a break from my business for 36 hours] to put together a shopping list, shop and cook. So here I sit, after a whole day of preparing and cooking meals [the girls helped, well they tried to anyway]. My feet are extremely sore from standing all day, but I am pleased. No, I wasn’t entirely successful. My plan was to make 30 meals, I successfully completed 27 of them. All I have left are bean burritos, which I would probably be putting together right now, but my twice baked cheesy potatoes are flash freezing and there’s no room for flash freezing anything else at the moment. Sadly, I’m misplaced our camera for the 567,342nd time, so all I have to show you is this very poor image taken from my phone.

Cheesy Potatoes are Flash Freezing, which means I freeze them on baking sheets and then once they're frozen, I transfer them to freezer bags.

If you’re counting the bags in the freezer, you’ll notice there aren’t 27 of them. The rest of the meals are in our deep freeze, but all the ones that aren’t frozen yet are in our main freezer so they’ll freeze flat for better storage.

Shopping for all the items to make 30 meals, was an exhausting task I did last night after my husband got home. I was also buying up all the Halloween candy sales as we’re participating in our Church’s Trunk or Treat on Saturday. So I went to 5 different stores and it took approximately 4 hours. I was also stockpiling on various sale items that I had matching coupons [and found out that my Hy-Vee does double coupons on Thursdays!]. And, I went to ALDI for the very first time so I was price comparing to items on my list for other stores. More on my fab ALDI trip later.

So what all did I make? Well, chicken was on sale, so we’re going to have chicken a lot. And we still have beef left from my father-in-law, although it is running low. However, cleaning out the deep freeze to make it a little bit more organized, I discovered steaks! Alright, so here’s what I made [I picked 10 recipes out of the cookbook and made 3 meals for each recipe, hence 30 meals]:

• Pineapple & Orange Chicken
• Sweet & Sour Chicken
• Herb Baked Chicken
• Thursday’s Chicken
• Lemon Chicken
• Hashbrown Casserole
• Beef Manicotti
• Mini Pizzas
• Cheesy Twice-Baked Potatoes
• and what I haven’t gotten to yet: Bean Burritos

I also am going to make chicken nuggets that I can use for lunch for the girls [as that is one thing I can always count on them eating].

I plan on making the burritos in the morning, but after that I will definitely be OFF MY FEET!