Five Meals in the 'Bag'

I came across Hip2Save's link last week and thought about it some.  While the recipes were pretty much in my ballpark taste-wise, there were a couple of curves.  But I thought I would broaden my horizons and give it a try.  The thought of having 5 meals all ready to go was the deciding factor.

I also wanted to see if it would help drop my grocery bill a bit.  Tuesday, after work, I did my grocery shopping for the month - or at least my main purchases.  I did come in under $200, but that also included stocking up on diapers, a bag of laundry soap pods, and a few staples that needed replenishing.

So Thursday morning, while waiting for UPS to deliver a package, I pulled everything out, labeled my bags and started chopping and dicing.

Please note the large glass of sweet iced tea in a prominent position on my counter.  We finally hit the 90's here in Helena and we don't have air conditioning.  Luckily, a fan, open windows and the fact it really cools off here in the evenings and doesn't heat up until later in the day, makes it tolerable.

So with Lady K happily getting into everything and Texter on the couch monitoring her activities (and the status of the UPS delivery), I put together my 5 meals.

So we shall see.  They are all in the freezer now, awaiting use.  One thing I noticed was that the meals made up enough for what I consider 6 - 8 servings a bag, especially since you serve them over rice or noodles or as tacos.  I did change out the sausage in the far right bag for polish sausage instead.   The cilantro lime chicken I included the cilantro, even though I don't really care for it.  

My biggest issue with this, and it's just a quirk on my part, is I'm not really into 'mixing' my food.  I like everything in it's own place on the plate.  So, for example, to have the green beans in the Creamy Italian Chicken mixed in already is a bit hard for me to take.  But my desire for good meals with easy preparation won out.

I figure that we can get at least 2 dinners out of each bag, with leftovers for me to take to work for lunch from each bag.  That means these meals should last me about 2 weeks if I did nothing but these meals.  I will do sandwiches, salads and the like in between preparing them.  

A taste report will be forthcoming as I fix each of them.  If it works out, I may check out the cookbooks on fixing a month of meals in a weekend.  I don't have the freezer space for it, but I could do half a dozen meals and have them ready to go. 

Dutch Babies or "They Didn't Warn Me"

I was looking for something 'different' for breakfast the other morning and I had seen this recipe on a blog I follow and it looked good.  The recipe was simple enough and I halved it since I would probably be the only one eating on it.

Now all the pictures for "Dutch Babies" come out all golden and FLAT.  Mine, however, came out of the oven looking like this...

It looked like something out of a horror movie that was going to come and get me.   I was scared to pull it out of the oven.

But once out of the oven it did 'settle down' some and became flatter, easing my mind about attempting to eat it.

The verdict?  The recipe is quick and easy and it tastes like a really thick crepe, so you do have to put powdered sugar and syrup on it to make it really tasty.  The recipe of easy to divide in half so that I only had an 8X8 pan rather than a 9X13 pan.

In fact, I have some strawberries in the fridge, so there might be Dutch Babies in my future again shortly.