How I got 12 dinners in under 3 hours and for $4.50 apiece!

• Tweet
• 
• Sharebar

• Tweet
• 

My friend Becca is a whiz at planning meals for her family. 

This girl plans her menu out a month in advance and gathers her food items accordingly.  She'll also cook and assemble some of her food ahead of time so every night isn't wasted in the kitchen.  Which is a good thing – she's a busy mom of three little ones! 

After getting tired of hearing how she avoids shopping for weeks at a time, a few of us demanded she show us how she does this.  (In the nicest possible way, of course.)  The result was a fun-filled Saturday morning where 12 of us ladies prepared meals we could freeze and have on hand.  I asked Becca if I could snap a few photos of our event and share what we did.  (She said OK in case you're wondering.)

STEP ONE: PLANNING

Becca hosted a separate planning evening where everyone got to select a recipe.  That way, we were sure not to duplicate recipes and to select a wide range of meals.  It was also a great way to discuss ingredients that could be shared across recipes - for instance, one gal was able to bring the cornstarch, and another brought minced garlic. 

Everyone agreed to make 12 batches of their recipe.  My recipe was Sweet and Sour meatballs, so I had to buy and bring all the ingredients to make 12 batches of that.

STEP TWO: SHOPPING

Since I needed large quantities of my ingredients, I headed to Winco.  Winco is a store in my neck-of-the-woods that sells a fair amount of items in bulk.  I was able to buy my bread crumbs, brown sugar, and minced onion this way.  Winco's prices are also good across the board, which helped keep my costs down further.  All told, I spent $54 on my meal.

No, this is not me pictured below.  But it is a lovely picture courtesy stock.xchng that illustrates bulk shopping.

STEP THREE: COOKING

Our church was gracious enough to permit us use of their amazing commercial grade kitchen.  If you have a resource available to you like that, by all means, go for it!  We had three hours and amazingly, it all came together.  Those with less complicated meals assisted those with more time-intensive recipes. 

I thought making 12 pounds of meatballs would be a royal pain, but surprisingly, it wasn't, and the time passed quickly!  Once I'd made my meatballs and Sweet and Sour sauce, I divided them up among 12 freezer bags, one for each of the ladies to take home.

STEP FOUR: SWAPPING

This was the best part.  At the end of it, we all created a "pickup station" with our meal.  Each lady brought a box or bags and went around and gathered one of everyone's meals.  So in the end, I had 12 dinners to take home.  Remember how my meal cost $54 to assemble?  With the math broken down, that works out to roughly $4.50 apiece!  AND, think of the time saved not having to cook!

This table had the stations for the Cheesy Chilada Bake and Lasagna (both of which we ate this week and enjoyed a lot!):

Pictured here, Salisbury Meatballs and to the right, my Sweet and Sour Meatballs:

This event was great for my pocketbook, and great for my time management!  It's been fun selecting different dinners each night and not having to spend much time at all in the kitchen.  I truly hope we do this again.  (Hint, hint, Becca…!)

In case anyone's interested, here is the book we used for all of our meals.  Everything I have tasted so far has been WONDERFUL: curries, teriyaki chicken, meatballs, lasagna… This would be a great resource to have on hand and I plan on picking up a copy myself.  It appears that there are copies for less than $10.