Future Plans

It's looking like the recipes are the favorite part of this blog. I need to take pictures of my meals as I prepare my recipes. WHEN I GET MOVED, I plan to get out my pretty dishes and set up a pretty "photo" area. In this house I just have bad lighting and NO ROOM! I used to take pics of my meals for my cookbook on fatsecret.com. I stopped because I quit making new recipes. Now that I am adapting old recipes to make them healthy and trying new recipes, I find myself lacking pics lol! So I promise when I get moved I will remedy this!

I enjoy cooking. I enjoy cooking great tasting healthy meals. I do NOT enjoy spending hours and hours cooking. Most of my meals require less than 30 minutes to prepare AND cook. Some have to bake so that adds to the time. I have always LOVED my crockpot, but evidently it is underutilized! This week I made 3 freezer meals of my Crockpot Chicken and Veggies! Instead of a whole chicken, I bought a 10 pound bag of leg quarters. I got 3 gallon ziploc freezer bags and put them on my table. I divided the leg quarters evenly among the bags. I ended up with 3 quarters per bag. I cut up 1 1/2 onions, 1 bell pepper, 6 red potatoes quartered, and 2 pounds of carrots. After these were all cut up I divided each one evenly among the 3 bags. Then I seasoned each bag with Italian Seasoning, Seasoned Salt, etc (whatever I felt like that day). I had frozen chicken broth from the last time I made this dish. I froze it in a large (too large) container. I let it defrost just enough to "let go" of the container. I sliced the broth into 3 pieces and added one to each bag. I got as much of the air out of each bag as I could, then sealed the bags. I then placed them in the freezer (making a mental note that I need a deep freeze at the new house). This was Wednesday. It didn't cost any more really to buy this much as compared to what it would have cost to buy a whole chicken. It may have cost an add additional 3.00 total. BUT I got 3 meals instead of my usual ONE meal. It didn't take me any more time to cut the veggies either. I always cut them up and save them for use in other meals (and usually throw out the bell pepper since I didn't use it and it went bad). So last night I pulled one bag out of the freezer and moved it to the fridge. Today I checked it and the chicken is still partially frozen. By tomorrow morning when I need to put it in the crockpot, it should be ready to cook. This will be perfect for those days when I am in a hurry and need to just toss it in the crockpot! OR OR OR when I am going out of town, Chris can do this all on his own and have a fresh hot meal to eat instead of eating a frozen leftovers meal! I will post a pic tomorrow of the steps, lol. That'll be 2 pics! One as I pull it out of the freezer and 2 as I pour it in the crockpot! So excited!