Freezer is FULL!

Goal MET! I wanted to have at least 30 complete meals in the freezer before this little guy arrives - I now have 39 meals ready to keep us fed in the next few months!

Saturday I spent the morning shopping at Aldi's and Price Chopper stocking up on lots of fresh veggies and ground beef. I upped my grocery budget for this month by $100 so I could stock up and get these meals under way. Hopefully I can cut the grocery budget by a bit over the next 3 or so months because of all the hard work up until this point!

My parents came to visit yesterday and my mom and I had a plan... we had to defrost the freezer so we'd have room to fill it back up. We took everything out and put it into totes and lugged them out into the snowbank. Defrosted the upright freezer and Richie helped a lot with chipping off the ice blocks and getting it all drained out. We also went through and cleaned out the freezer in the kitchen - tossed the freezer burned/half used bags of veggies and tater tots. While Richie was working on finishing up the freezer defrosting and Laura was sleeping and the turkey was cooking in the oven and dad was catching up on his ebay auctions - Mom and I headed to Joann Fabrics for a couple things and then hit up Old Navy's 50% off clearance sale. I had a $10/$50 coupon begging to be used! We walked out with two huge bags of clothes - 2 shirts and 2 PJ's for Laura, a TON of clothes including 2 pants, 5 shirts, 1 onsie, 1 winter jacket for next year, 5 sweatshirts for this little guy, and a bunch of LONG shirts to get me through the next few weeks. I couldn't belive that XL regular cut shirts fit me better than L size maternity shirts. This season it seems long is in, I guess I'm lucky it's not a season for crop top shirts! I think I got 2 tanktops and about 5 long sleeve shirts.

Got home and served up a nice turkey dinner for all of us plus Richie's parents.

Up and early this morning at 6:20 so I could get Laura's lunch packed and a bath for her - and Richie got himself ready for work. The two of them were out the door by 7:30 and my mom and dad and I had a quick breakfast before the long day got started. Dad left shortly after breakfast and at 9am mom and I started in... cutting, chopping, peeling, crying (from the onions!)... we got all the veggies prepared at the beginning of the day. Then we browned up the ground meats and started assembling all the meals. I wish I'd taken pictures as it was quite a sight seeing all the veggies cut up waiting in bowls on the table, the PILES of dishes, the stovetop filled with pans cooking everything from beef to onions to mushrooms to boiling pastas. We set big pots of food out onto the porch to cool before divying up into dinner size containers. By 12:20 we were both ready for lunch and a rest. We headed downtown and grabbed a quick lunch at the Queen Diner. Home a little after 1 and started right where we'd left off. By 4:40pm, we had the following meals cooked and packaged up for the freezer (each portioned to feed Richie, Laura and I one meal and possibly a lunch for one of us):
3 meals of stuffed peppers
2 lasagnas
1 stuffed shells
3 cheeseburger soups
3 cabbage kielbasa soups
5 mushroom turkey tetrazzini's
2 meat loafs
3 sloppy joes
1 turkey/gravy
1 turkey/mashed potatoes/gravy
That's 24 meals in one day! ... sadly, as I was taking one of the cheeseburger soups downstairs tonight, it fell and spilled so I only have 2.5 meals of that in the freezer now (so 2 meals plus a lunch or 2)...
That brings my total for the freezer to 39 complete meals!! We should be set for a few months!
This is what's been in there since tbe chicken cooking spree a couple weeks ago:
1 Chunky Tomato Pasta Bake (12/30)
2 batches Chicken-n-bisquits (minus the bisquits) (1/2)
4 Chicken and Rice Casseroles (1/5)
2 Italian Chicken Spaghetti (1/6)
1 Chicken Paprikash (1/9)
2 Apple Onion Chicken (1/10)
And here's what my mom and sister have contributed :) THANKS!
1 Ziti (my sister made)
1 Italian Wedding Soup (my sister made)
1 Ruben Soup (mom made)
1 stroganoff soup (mom made)

Tips for mass cooking:
Choose 1 type of meat to work with for the day. Today's theme was ground beef. Made everything go together much quicker than if we'd been using 1 chicken meal and 1 turkey meal and 1 beef meal etc. The turkey was precooked (as of yesterday) so at least today we weren't dealing with raw poultry. Had to defrost/cook that "poor turkey" as Laura referred to him - so that we'd have more space in the freezer.

Do all vegetable prep for all recipes first so the rest of the day is just assembly line style.

Wash all the dishes as you go along - we had a constant wash/drip dry going on - once we had a few dirty dishes we'd wash them up so they'd be ready to go and we never had a sink full of dirty dishes staring at us. By the end of the afternoon, we didn't have to wash a whole bunch of stuff because we did it all as we went along. :)

Ice water and Oreo cookies will keep you going.

Crocs are your friend for a long day like this.

Have the following supplies on hand:
2 stock pots
2 3qt pots
2 deep 2 handled "fry" pans
(We only had 1 of each of these and we found we could have gone quicker if we had more to shuffle around)
Lots of 8x8 aluminum pans (for freezing casseroles) - if doing this often - I'd probalby look into getting some cheap reusable pans or dishes.
Lots of foil to cover meals with
Cling wrap to put between tomato sauce meals and the foil on top
1 gallon ziplocks to store casseroles in and also meals like sloppy joe, chicken/gravy, meatloaf
2 gallon ziplocks for taller meals like stuffed peppers
pen and paper to label meals with date/item/cooking directions