We live in a house with NO dishwasher - yes you read that right, and we cook every night. I don't mean I throw together some Hamburger Helper (no offense if that's where you're at) but we prepare homemade meals that are not processed every. night. Some nights are easy, throw a chicken breast on the grill, make a salad and cook up some spiced couscous - other nights I feel as if every pot in the kitchen is used and its 9PM until I finally sit down.
Some friends and I decided we would try a meal making day - you know a poor man's version of Let's Dish or Dream Dinners. And we would further simplify by making them all crock pot meals!
Now I will say that my husband strongly dislikes the crock pot - I don't know if there was some childhood trauma or the sous chef in him (from his college days) is just totally turned off by the laziness of the thing...but he reluctantly agreed to go along with this experiment.
I'm going to give some credit to the group of women over at whoneedsacape.com for coming up with the idea of 40 meals in 4 hours. "C"stumbled upon this blog post and we ran with it.
Now these ladies REALLY took away a lot of our leg work - selecting recipes (hopefully testing them out) and creating a master shopping list. All good things can be made great though, right?
Because we like to go big and make everything a social event - instead of one person making 40 meals, how about four people make 80 meals? What on earth could go wrong? Just made sense - no one has enough freezer space for 40 meals and what if they are awful? Who wants duplicates - not us!
So "C" and I - the organizers of the bunch - decided that we would go shopping for everyone and "L" & "P" could just reimburse us. We would take the master shopping list provided by the gals at WNAC and get it done after our Saturday AM kickboxing class. After a quick review of the list as we sipped our post work-out lattes we noticed our first hint of trouble...pantry items - jalapenos? Who keeps jalapenos as a staple? Also - amounts/measurements of spices and sauces were conspicuously absent as well (and we were doubling everything!)...with no time to review each recipe with a fine toothed comb we had to roll with it. Some awesome things about these recipes 1) they are mostly healthy 2) they are super inexpensive - roughly $6 per meal per family - yes way! 3) they are so easy some ladies full of pinot grigio can prepare them.
Ok - so meal making day arrives and we are loaded up with canned vegetables, sauces, meats and produce. Everyone was asked to bring some spices (again, from the list of pantry items since we were flying blind), knives, and cutting boards. Here's what we would also include in our list of to do's if we are/were to attempt this again and/or if we were advising others:
1) Everyone bring a can opener - the more pop tops you can buy on your shopping list - the better!
2) Everyone bring soy sauce - good god there was a lot of soy sauce...make it low sodium while you're at it
3) Compare the master shopping list with the recipes and then compare the list to your cupboards. I know it's a pain in the a$$ but it will save you time and money in the long run.We found ourselves without Island Chicken and Orange Chicken because the MSL instructed us to buy meats by weight but the individual recipes were for numbers of drumsticks or chicken breasts.
4) You don't need that many diced tomatoes - we had a shit-ton leftover -we still don't know where they got those figures...
5) Better buy the gallon freezer bags
6) You're going to need more wine
7) You're going to need longer than 4 hours, take your time and enjoy yourselves - cheers!
Next post - some recipes and reviews as we all start to sample our handiwork!
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