Second Group Bulk/Freezer Cooking Day

We did our second cooking day on March 28. We did Chicken Tortilla Soup, Twice baked potatoes, bacon, egg and cheese on English muffins, Teriyaki Chicken, Indian Butter Chicken, French Dip Sandwiches, Chicken Lettuce Wraps, Cranberry Apple Pork loin, Cilantro Lime Chicken, and Hawaiian Chicken. Eight of us each went home with 3 containers of potatoes and soup, 12 breakfast sandwiches and 3 bags of each of the other meals. I made the chicken lettuce wrap filling on Friday and had that bagged and frozen. Obviously, we didn't freeze lettuce. Again, the first thing we did was to get the 30 pounds of potatoes cooking. (Next time we're going to have Brenda buy the potatoes and either cook them Friday night or start them early Saturday morning.) We found a system that works pretty well - have someone label all the bags first and then fill them with everything but the meat, then someone else weighed the meat and put it in the bags. A couple weeks before the cooking day, I put up a poll in our Facebook Group Bulk Cooking page and had people vote on which recipes to make. The ones that got the most votes are the ones we made. I typed all the recipes on one document in Word so I would have them all in one place. Then I used a spread sheet that I have printed out and filled in the names of the recipes and then how much of each ingredient for each recipe. I then totaled it and made out the shopping list. I then make up a list of instructions of what order to do the prep and bagging steps in and what amount of ingredients and print out a few copies of that to use on the cooking day. I think this time I'll also do a check list for each person to make sure everyone has all their bags and also to have a list of what is in your freezer. It was fun and we have had quite a few requests for more people to join. I think we will have 12-14 people cooking at our June 6 cooking day!!!

I have done my own freezer bulk cooking before. Sometimes I did it all on one day, sometimes I spread it out over several days. I did a mixture of types of meals. Some were just bag and freeze. Others were ones that I cooked first and then froze. Last Saturday, I planned a group freezer bulk cooking day. There were 6 of us that participated. Brenda, my sister, offered to host it at her house, which was a blessing, because she has a nice big kitchen with lots of counter space. We made twice-baked potatoes, breakfast sandwiches, pork barbecue, zuppa toscana soup, sweet and sour chicken, chicken cacciatore, mongolian beef and buffalo chicken. We had a lot of fun and got a lot of meals, but we also learned what not to do. For one thing, we won't be frying 24 pounds of bite sized pieces of chicken. That took way too much time and we ended up only frying about half of it and just froze the other half raw to be cooked when we prepare the meal. All in all, I would say it was a success. We all want to do it again and we have others that said they want to join us. We will definitely be making twice-baked potatoes again and probably breakfast sandwiches, but instead of sausage, maybe use bacon or Canadian bacon this time. We will probably do more bag and freeze meals too, since they went so much faster. I cooked the 30 pounds of pork butt with some barbecue sauce overnight in a large roaster pan at 250 degrees. Then took it to my sister's house and let it cool before bagging it. The first thing we did was get 25 pounds of potatoes baking in the oven. Then we chopped onions, peppers, potatoes, kale and carrots. After that, we prepped the chicken for the different recipes we were using it for. I wrote out a list of steps/instructions and each person just took an item and started in on it.

Starting up again.

So, I started this blog a while ago and haven't really done much with it. I wanted a place where I could organize and record my money-making attempts and also to keep a record of freezer bulk cooking information. Doing it this way, I can have it accessible and also be able to share it with everyone. Look for my post about our first group bulk cooking adventure. What we learned, what we won't do again and what we will definitely do again.