My friend Bridgette and I did another round of bulk cooking on the spur of the moment (well, we planned it the day before, went shopping the morning of, and didn't have child care!!!). We are speaking at her MOPS Group later this week about bulk cooking for the freezer, so we did a run through. We'll be posting all of these recipes (unless they're already on here). Here's our line up (we ended up canceling a couple of things--this is what we ended up with):
Chicken Tucson (1 recipe per person/family)
Chicken Pot Pie (2 recipes per)
Cheeseburger Meatloaf (2 recipes per)
Best Scones Ever (1 recipe per)
Apple Dumplings (1 recipe per)
Stuffed Braided Bread (1 recipe per)
Fish in Parchment (1 recipe per)
Spaghetti Sauce (lots!)
Creamy Peanut Chicken (1-2 recipes per)
Slow Cooker Chicken Fajitas (1 recipe per)
Maple Honey Mustard Pork Chops (1 recipe per)
Tater Tot Casserole (1-2 recipes per)
We'd planned on Twice-Baked Potatoes and Herb-Roasted Chicken and left them off the list partly for time, partly because we forgot some ingredients! Also, we took some shortcuts with the above list that are worth noting: we made sauce only for Creamy Peanut Chicken since that's the easiest to store in the freezer and the rest is simple to prepare on the day you eat it. We browned the beef and onions and grated the cheese for the Tater Tot Casserole and will assemble the casserole the day we eat it.
We learned: to make this truly efficient/effective, you really should have child care!!! Even if there are two of you to handle the kiddos, child care would have helped us out significantly! Also, if you are doing this with two people, it would be worth it to make up task lists the day before or at the beginning of the cooking day. We spent lots of time during our cooking day trying to figure out what we should be doing next and who should be doing what. It went pretty smoothly and we had a great time of fellowship, but we wasted some valuable time not knowing some of those little details in advance. And finally, if you have a lot of recipes that use chopped cooked chicken, do that the day before! That was the biggest time waster in our opinion. We took some funny pictures of our kids running around together and of the chaos in the kitchen--someday, maybe I'll post them!
Happy Cooking!
The funniest thing about the whole day was that Betsy must have said this statement 5 or 7 times: "After we finish ______ let's take a break."
ReplyDeleteNot once did we sit, but we did fellowship through out all the cooking!
Another tip is don't wash the food processor until you are SURE you are done grating cheese:)