OAMC Real Food Style

When most people go to grab dinner out of the freezer is usually consists of something in a box, and most likely is involves cheese and pepperoni along with about 35 other ingredients. Well as of right now there are no boxes in my freezers. Please don't talk to me later after the co-op is delivered as I broke and ordered some deeply discounted fish sticks:-) Hey we can't always do it all.

Well blogger was down over the weekend so here is my OAMC, once a month cooking, marathon I did last Thursday.

First I boiled 10 pounds of red skin potatoes and 4 pounds of sweet potatoes to make mashed potatoes for shepherds pie and dinner that night. I chose red skins so I'd only have to peel a few sweet potatoes, it was going to be a long day no sense making it harder than it needs to be.
The night before this was full of ground beef, 27 pounds to be exact. Good this it was blinging hot because come morning they still had a long way to go before they were thawed.

As the potatoes were cooking I assembled three 8x8 pans of meat/ veggie loaf.

Meatloaf

1.5 lbs ground beef

chopped carrots

shredded zucchini out of my in laws freezer

chopped onion and a few chopped mushrooms

Sugar free ketchup

Seasonings- lots of them

Sorry I never use a recipe. (Meatloaf ingredients)

After the meatloaves made it to the freezer I browned three packages of beef for Shepherds Pie. Again no recipe. Pretty much beef with layers of carrots, onions, canned tomato, broccoli and topped with mashed potatoes.

After those were assembled and in the freezer another batch of meat was cooked and seasoned with taco seasoning, three meals worth.

While the taco meat was cooking yet another pot of beef was cooking. This pot I added onion and a few leftover chopped carrots. These will be used for spaghetti and what not. Three meals again.

And again I made another pot of meat to make three meals of sloppy joes.

Finally I chopped up a package of these chicken sausages from Costco, onion and mushrooms and bagged three meals out of it. These are lunch sized meals.

(Ice bath to cool meat before putting it is freezer bags.)

Here is how I cooled the pots of beef before putting them in freezer bags. I just plopped the whole pan in a ice bath. Please never put warm food in plastic bags unless you like to eat plastic.

The meatloaf and Shepherds Pies were put in glass pans covered with parchment paper then wrapped with foil and plastic wrap.

The final tally-

27 pounds of beef

5 pounds of chopped carrots

14 pounds of potatoes

2 bottles of sugar free ketchup

5 canned of diced tomatoes

lots of onions

1 package of chicken sausages

a few packages of mushrooms
salt and seasoning

= 20 meals -YIPPEE!!

By the way it only took about 5.5 hours with five kids under foot.

This is liked to Gratituesday at Heavenly Homemakers.