Thursday, January 13, 2011

Progress

I hate grocery shopping - what a royal waste of time!

But - If I have to go grocery shopping, nothing beats "buy one get one free," BOGO!

Anymore, if it's not on sale I don't buy it. And if I can find a coupon for what is already on sale I'm very happy. This week I got some great deals in the meat department. So tonight I packaged everything for the freezer:


From left to right: 6 pork chops, 12 skirt steaks, 6 boneless skinless chicken breasts, 4 boneless skinless chicken thighs, and 14 bone in and skin on chicken thighs. The pot in the back has all the skin, fat and bones I trimmed, plus celery, garlic, salt, pepper, paprika and sage for the stock I am making.

At the very least, that's meat for 15 meals, and I could easily stretch it to 20.

Shopping for groceries took about 2 hours, including travel time and unloading the car. Packing up the meat was half an hour or so, and stocking my little pantry with the canned and dry goods, about twenty minutes. Caroline and I, between us, spent at least an hour reviewing the ad and making the list. As for coupons, I couldn't say because that's sort of an ongoing activity at this house. I believe that  I am getting closer to my goal of cutting the time and expense involved in food shopping and storage. This was my first major shopping trip in January. Let's see how many times I do it again this month.

In the meantime, I sure love a neat (and full) freezer!



Soon - hopefully - I'll begin the fun part. That, of course, is a garden. It'll be trial and error, because I've never gardened in Florida, but I have help and expert advice available. And I have my first seed packets:


My choice of cantaloupe and pumpkin was purely by chance. I was getting seeds for Caroline to use in a lesson and I bought three kinds that were relatively large seeds that first graders could see easily. Caroline took the corn to school and I kept the other two.

If that funny white pumpkin grows I'll have another challenge - how to cook it!

I'm tellin' ya - this retirement business is great!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't it though! And, more to do than there are hours in the day! Love it! Good for you being so organized in your shopping and putting up. And you say you are NOT organized? I beg to differ.....

Anonymous said...

The various pieces of meat seem to be just loose in the containers. Shouldn't be a problem for the chicken breasts (a meal for 2 in each container) but what about the massive icebergs of meat in the other containers? Planning to thaw and cook it all at once?

Wish I was that organized or had the time.

Paul

Carol Shoemaker said...

Glad you asked, Paul. The chicken thighs in the big box are separated by plastic wrap (freezer paper would be better but I'm out and it wasn't on my list).

One thing about frozen meats: "They say" and I've experienced, that if you thaw it just enough to separate, the rest can go back in the freezer OK.

A nice feature of the very shallow boxes is that the pork chops, for instance, are in one layer, making it easy to remove one or two and put the rest back.

When I do take the time to plan, package, pre-cook or whatever, I'm always glad later in the week (grin).