Crock Pot Meals

It's so nice to come home at the end of the day and have dinner ready to eat.  Although I don't have a private cook on staff (or any staff at all), I do have a crock pot.

I enjoy eating the meals.  The prep work, I can do without.  It takes sometimes 30 minutes or more to get the ingredients together and cut the meat & veggies.  In the morning, before work, is not always the best time to do this.  I recently read about prepping more than one meal at a time and freezing the ingredients for easy use any day of the week.  I decided to give it a try.

I found a few websites that offer recipes for just this style of crock pot cooking.  I decided on this one for it's simple recipes, easy to find ingredients and delicious sounding recipes.  It includes 6 different recipes, two of which are doubled, for a total of eight meals.  There are two pork recipes, two beef recipes and four chicken recipes.  At the end of the recipes is an ingredients list.  How sweet.  I didn't even have to make a shopping list!

I came home with all of the ingredients to make the 8 recipes.  After getting a few additional items out of the pantry I was ready to go :-)

all of this will make eight tasty dinners :-)

Step 1 is to write the name of the recipe on a gallon size freezer bag.  I decided to write all eight of the recipe names at the same time.  Good idea!  My hands were pretty gunkie and needed rinsing too many times to count...

According to the website, I should be able to put together the eight meals in 35 minutes.  It actually took me more like 1.5 hours.  But, it was time well spent.  The biggest time spent was getting the fat off of the beef.  Next time I'll buy a leaner cut of meat.

eight dinners ready for the freezer

I added up the cost of the purchased ingredients and the estimated cost of the ingredients I had in the house.  I estimate the total for all eight dinners is $55.  That's less than $7 per dinner, which means less than $2 per serving!  Talk about a great money saver!

After I was done prepping the meals, I looked around me.  You'd think a tornado came through the kitchen.  No tornado, but what a mess...

spices and measuring spoons

meat cutting area, I admit some of the dishes were here already

empty cans and meat fat scraps

open cabinets and full sink

I'm confident I could do this same prep work in a trailer.  I would likely change the order of what ingredient I add to the bag by putting the spices in first, followed by the meat, followed by the wet & canned items.

The next step is to put the filled bags into the freezer.  When you want to use one put it in the refrigerator the night before so it can thaw.  Then simply empty it's contents into the crock pot in the morning.  Dinner will be ready when you come back at the end of your day!

After I was done prepping the meals I asked Ron which one he wanted the next day.  He chose Pepperoncini Shredded Beef.  This recipe has four ingredients: beef chuck roast, pepperoncinis, garlic and pepper.  OMG!!  This meal was delicious, fantastic, over-the-top terrific!  I served it atop mashed potatoes.  The next day our lunch was the leftovers on a sandwich roll.  Another great way to eat it:-)

just as good the second time around!