The meal prep learning curve

We have learned a few things in our experience over the last few weeks in food prep.

1. These containers are wonderful for meal prep! We like the sections and they freeze well and heat up well. They also have a tight seal. While all of these are wonderful things, you need to be careful with them this one took a nasty fall out of the freezer and shattered on impact. :(

 

 2. The three meal options we shared with you on our last post are great for this they heat up well no problem, however one can only eat the same three meals over and over for so long.

3. The crockpot is our friend. It makes it go so much faster to just cook over night, put in containers in the morning and done. My issue now is finding more crockpot recipes.

 4. These mini apple pie muffins are amazing! However, they do not heat up well, so not a good plan for lunches :(

5. Skipping a meal prep Sunday is a bad idea! You will end up making sandwiches and going back to your old ways of going to the gas station and buying chips. It's just stressful not to have everything ready when you are trying to get out of the house in the morning. So you MUST make the time, it is for your own sanity no matter what more fun thing happens on the weekend. 

We have one new meal planned for the week ahead we will let you know how it goes.

An Easy Chicken Treat

A friend of mine shared a picture with me on facebook of this idea done with corn, but we eat a lot of corn at my house so I decided to try something we had extra of in the cabinet which was peas.

Just empty a couple cans of the veggie of your choice into a muffin tray, add water and then freeze them. On a hot day it's a nice cool treat for your feathered friends.

All of our friends were very excited about their treat. I would say it was a success!

Spring Cleaning

Ah it was a beautiful weekend and we got outside and spent a little time with the garden. Let me tell you after not being touched all winter it was a mess. 

We got out the mower and the weed-eater to trim up around the gardens we raked up  all the leaves that had landed in the garden beds and pulled up all the dead plants from last year.

Put a garden bed back were it belongs that was washed away by a flood from last year. 

We uncovered the strawberry plants, which are looking great by the way. We used the dirt rake and we even planted a few leafy greens.

Overall I think we had a great first day.

Meal Prep Sunday

Since Patrick got a new job he has been able to bring his lunch and we have been purchasing frozen meals. To help with the budget as well as improving his diet, we decided to start prepping meals ahead of time. 

Now as anyone does in 2016 we got online and researched this meal prep thing quite a bit. What containers to use, ideas of what to make, how other people plan their time to get it all done, etc. 

On Friday we took inventory of our cabinets. If it is food, in our kitchen, we know what we have and how much of it. We took that into account when finding recipes for the week so we could clean out some of the stuff in the cabinets and not have to purchase as many ingredients.

We decided to make a breakfast and 3 different lunches.

Breakfast Burritos
Pork Roast (in The Crockpot with Potatoes, Corn and Carrots) and a roll

Ham and Beans with cornbread
Roasted Chicken with mashed potatoes and Broccoli cheddar rice
oh and brownies for dessert

Once we knew what we wanted to make and found our recipes we made our shopping list. That is how we started Saturday, shopping.  Since we haven't done this before I was afraid we would run into a time crunch on Sunday trying to fit all this cooking in, so we cooked the breakfast burritos on Saturday night, as well as, starting the roast before bed.


On Sunday we Started the Beans and we Roasted the chicken, which were our most time consuming things. We also made the sides which were no big deal, and we finally got to get out our new containers and put the lunches together. 


We purchased these containers to put his lunches in. 

We made 10 meals so he is covered for 2 weeks worth of moderately healthy frozen lunches and breakfasts and even some more leftovers and it only cost a few dollars more than what we normally spend on frozen meals for one week.
I will tell you that I washed dishes throughout this entire process so while Patrick was cooking I was washing, Otherwise we would have ran out of bowls, and oh how our feet hurt after standing in the kitchen all weekend. We might need to invest in some kitchen mats.

We spent the majority of our Weekend working on Meal Prep "Sunday" in the Kitchen, hopefully we will get really good at this and it will start to take us less time to get it all accomplished. Maybe at some point we can fit all of it into Sunday.

Carrots?

We were disappointed in our carrot crop in the fall our carrots were super tiny. We just kinda gave up on them. Today was a pretty nice day so we went out and dug up the garden, and here is what we found. THEY FINALLY GREW! 

I don't know what it is about our garden but every year we go out after we have given up on a crop and there is a late spike in productivity. It is always a different crop but it happens every year. I will say it is nice to have fresh Carrots in February.

Cooking up a Storm

Well our garden has been doing wonderful which has in turn made me more domestic which I am pretty sure my husband is loving. On Sunday I got up and weighed our tomatoes we had accumulated quite the bowl full in our fridge and voila we has 6lbs, perfect! So let the process begin! Gabe and I spent most of the day in the kitchen we made 4 more jars of tomato sauce but this time I didn't have to buy anything from the store!! I was pretty excited and while that was working I decided to make zucchini bread, since we had just picked one the night before. So here is another recipe I found on the Internet.

As with everything at our house we omit the nuts (safety first) and my hubby had one suggestion put sugar on the top for a sweet crunch. 

Otherwise it was a success. Here's Gabe enjoying all of our hard work 

Zucchini

I just realized that I never shared what I decided to do about which way to grow our zucchini. Our choices were:

1. Just letting them grow as they please.

2. Growing them Vertically. Whether that be using a tomato cage or stakes.

We ended up making a cage out of some fencing we had, so it was kind of like a tomato cage. (I didn't take any pictures of it on the plants where you could see it, sorry.)  

In this picture the cage in in place and you can see how the plant is growing upward.  

As the plants started to get bigger I trimmed up the leaves on the bottom so the Zucchini had room to grow. The plant started to get pretty big for the cage and it was becoming difficult to reach in and trim up the plant. 

Right before we left for vacation I removed the cage. I knew I wasn't going to be there to remove the pesky leaves that were in the way and we did have some little Zucchini popping up. We switched to the free method.

I think it worked out quite well because when we got back this is what we had waiting for us.

Now to make something delicious out of them!

When Life gives you Tomatoes

We have been getting tomatoes from the garden lately and we decided to try a tomato sauce recipe with the ones we had plus a few extra from the store since not all of our tomatoes were ripe at the same time. We thought starting with a small batch was a good starting place since it was a new recipe.

Seasoned Tomato Sauce

INGREDIENTS

• • 12 cups chopped ripe tomatoes (about 6lbs)
  • 1 cup chopped onion
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 2 tbsp chopped fresh oregano (or 1tsp dried)
  • 2 tsp granulated sugar
  • 1/2 tsp fresh ground black pepper
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 2 tbsp lemon juice
  • 1/2 tsp salt

---

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Combine tomatoes, onion, garlic, oregano, sugar, pepper and bay leaves in a large stainless steel or enameled saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce heat and boil gently, uncovered, until very thick, about 1 1/4 hours; stir frequently. Press through a food mill or coarse sieve to remove seeds and skins. Add lemon juice and salt.
2. Ladle sauce into hot jars, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Wipe tops clean. Put on lids. Process in a boiling water bath for 35 minutes. Remove and cool.
3. Makes about 4 cups

What I did a little different: We don't have a food mill to remove the seeds and skins so we started by blanching the tomatoes so we could peel them before we started. We just left the seeds in.

Blanch Your Tomatoes

• Fill a large 7- to 8-quart pot with 1 gallon water; bring water to boiling. 
• Using a sharp knife, cut a shallow X on the bottom of each tomato. This encourages the skin to split during blanching so you'll be able to slip off the skin easily with your fingers once the tomatoes have cooled. 
• Working in 1-pound batches, immerse tomatoes in the boiling water.
• Cook until the tomato skins split open.
• Using a slotted spoon, transfer tomatoes to a large bowl of ice water.

Between Harvests

From time to time I get really fed up with the weather, it seems like all it does is rain. The grass is constantly wet and I can't mow, which of course means it is taking over and that stresses me out plus the chicken run is a muddy mess, because no mater what I do, it rains and makes it worse. I JUST WANT SUN! 

Then the little voice in my head says "It could be way worse! We could be the state having wild fires!" OK OK you are so right little voice and I am so glad we aren't that state by the way. Plus it is making taking care of the garden easier so I should just count my blessings. Let me tell you what, the rain is doing wonders in the garden division. 

Our Blackberry bush started to produce this year! We got a hole 4 or so berries, but I'm sure next year will be awesome!

.

Everything is really looking great which is awesome but then at the same time we are in the hurry up and wait part of the process again. We were so excited to have lettuce and strawberries earlier in the year and now that the strawberries have stopped producing we are just kind of hanging out and waiting for all of our other plants to come into harvest season. 

As you can see the tomatoes are doing amazingly well and are probably the next to be harvested we are just waiting for all of those beautiful things to turn red. 

Happy Gardening!

James and the giant peach

We planted a peach tree in the summer of 2013 and this year we got our first little peach from it. Hopefully next year we will get at least 2 peaches :)

Yummy Grass

Took the smaller chickens out for some fun in the grass. 

We also took out the babies to the garden and used them as weed control and as fertilizers.

The Fruits of our Labor

Our garden is doing great and we have already been eating the fruits of our labor! 

We have been picking strawberries like crazy, the last couple of weeks, and mainly eating them as soon as they are picked. This weekend we did something other than just eat them straight out of the garden, we had strawberry shortcake.

Shawn and Gabe have also been steeling lettuce every chance they get. I'm just glad that all of the boys are eating fresh food from the garden as their snack of choice! This is one of the things that we were wanting when we moved here and started this blog.

We added a new garden bed this year with multiple types of corn.

Garden

I wanted to update you on our Garden Projects and show you how well our seedlings are doing out in the garden.

Here is a picture of our new trellis for Green beans and Peas, you can also see the plastic that we have put down between the beds to get rid of the grass. We haven't gotten rocks put down yet but it is a start.

The Cucumbers are growing nicely

Peas, Lettuce and Green beans have all sprouted.

The Zucchini are getting bigger. We haven't ever grown Zucchini before so this is a new experience. I have done some research and there are different methods to growing them. 

1. just letting them grow as they please.

2. growing them vertically. whether that be using a tomato cage or stakes.

I am going to have to pick one soon because they are growing fast.