Trying New Ideas Can be Good and.... it Can be Bad

Football, dance, Scouts, school (kids and me), work, farming, marriage, house cleaning, laundry, 2 hour drive/day for work, the list goes on and on about how busy I am at this moment.  So much so, in fact, that I SHOULD be paying bills right now and balancing my virtual checkbook, but nah.... I wanted to write about some things I tried.

First, let me tell you, if you are not on Pinterest then you are missing out on some cool ideas.  That is where I got the idea of cooking freezer meals.  I found another blogger's blog, "The Test Kitchen of Mellisa Fallis" where she has a couple of posts on making freezer meals that can go in the oven or the crock pot.  She even set it up nicely by having a shopping list and she lists the recipes in a logical order.  How cool is that?

So... I went grocery shopping.  My cat thought these bags were all for her to play with.

If you ever need to do massive shopping like this, doing it on a Tuesday morning at 6:30 am is a good time... there is NO ONE around!

That task done, I was ready to cook...

Pork rump roast cooked all day long so I could make pulled pork to freeze.

   

Chicken boiling for chicken pot pie.



Washing potatoes for twice baked potatoes!



Here they are baking.



Beautiful carrots getting ready to be chopped up for the pot pie.



Not sure why this is sideways as it is not on the picture file... oh well.  But here we have the carrots, celery, onions and potatoes cooking.



I bought cheap pie crusts for the bottom and top and had to piece them together because the actual recipe says to put them into a pie pan... our family eats a lot more than what a pie pan would hold so I picked up the bigger casserole type pans instead (no clean up) !!! 

   

Close up of all the yummy goodness in the pot pie that my kids and husband loved!



Ready to be wrapped and frozen for dinner later.



Potatoes are all dug out.

 

And now filled with yummy goodness of sour cream, cheese and butter.

 

I added a few other items to my cooking day that was not on the blog.  This is lasagna sauce for amazing lasagna from a cook book I have named "No Time to Cook".  I'm not sure why this recipe is in there, though, as it takes about two hours to cook this from start to finish... but it is oh so worth it!



Here are four meals of pork chops and chicken.



My big helper.  I did this the first day of school and since he didn't have any homework, I put him right to work!



My kitchen was SUPER dirty even though I did dishes about a zillion times!



LOVE Healthy Harvest whole grain noodles for lasagna.  For some reason, they keep everything together better than the regular noodles.

One lasagna for dinner, the other for freezing.  Yummy!



Another helper of mine doing dishes.  Love my kiddos!



And of course I had to make some chili to freeze for those cold fall evenings.



I had so much meat, I had to use the roasting pan to stir it all together!

Now, before you scroll on, and decide that cooking all day is a good idea for you... let me reiterate that you NEED to read all of the directions BEFORE you start cooking so you know how much of the ingredients you really need.  I had pretty much everything... but not enough of it all.  So when I was waiting for my husband to get home with our son from football practice and bring me lemon juice, the final ingredient needed for the steak marinade, I did this while cleaning up.



A better look of the full extent of how covered I was with the sauce.

 But in the end, it really was worth it as our extra freezer looked like this before cooking:

 

And like this afterward.

With all of this colder weather coming in, I have been in a baking kind of mood.  I remembered that when my grandma in law passed away, my husband came home with some of her old church cookbooks.  That is when I found a recipe for these yummy banana oatmeal cookies that are really more like little cakes of delicious goodness.

Here is the recipe for them:

Hope you may find something new to try every once in awhile.  Who knows, it may work out amazingly, or it may end up in a big mess.  Either way, you tried it and THAT is all that counts.

And a little note of happiness to end on.