The Love of a Crock pot & Pinterest

Within the past 9 months, my sisters have been sharing their love for pinterest and all the wonderful 

new meal ideas they have found for their families. I have frequently requested for some good recipes that they have tried, so that I can ultimately create more of a variety of meals for us here! They will freely say, "Check out my pinterest page" there are several good ones I've pinned and actually made! I finally broke down and started my own account, as I had begun to gain an interest in all the creative meals, crafts, decorating ideas etc that pinterest had to offer, but still didn't know how to use it very well :-) With their help, I was given tips in searching, pinning and creating your own boards to collect ideas for later use! Now, I can hardly stay away from it. :-)

Just before the Christmas and the New Year holiday, I had come across where many on pinterest were posting about putting together freezer meals for MANY days worth, if not enough for a whole month! I guess I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around this one. How am I to create a grocery list and produce a bill that to me would be overwhelming, and then still hope that I can create enough meals that I FEEL like it's worth it? It's an area I've struggled with in regards to limiting my trips to the grocery store. When I first moved out here I was going either everyday or every other day to the store just for that nights meal. I love shopping, and most times don't even mind grocery shopping either. Mom and I use to go a lot together and it was just nice shopping with her and spending that time together. I have to say though, in the first couple months, I was getting tired of it to say the least.. and was nearly dreading going like I had been. Since being a wife, I have longed to prepare dinners for Tim and have them nearly on the table for when he gets home from work! I know he likes variety and FLAVOR :-) I knew that I needed to do something different. Again, with the help of my sisters, they encouraged me to come up with meal ideas for the whole week and then do all your shopping on whatever day I chose to for that week. This definitely helped. I felt like since I wasn't running to the store everyday, that I had more time to research new meal ideas and actually wanted to do so, without burning myself out at the idea of it, plus get other things done!

Tim & I were talking one day after I had previously been looking at all the freezer type meal options that people had created, and I mentioned that this was something I wanted to try in the new year. I knew that there would be some trial and error in the organization of producing each meal, learning just how much of each major ingredients were needed when at the store, and trying to save money in the process. I decided the beginning of the week that I was going to try this. Our grocery stores here, have all their new sales starting on Wednesdays so I planned to get everything then. Today I started putting some meals together. Right now it is truly a trial stage, as I'm trying TOTALLY new recipes and want to see which ones we like versus cant stand. I say this because the people that really have a hand on the freezer meal plan, make enough to separate everything into 2 freezer meal bags( which ultimately gives them more meals for down the road.) Im starting out with only making 1 bag per meal idea (cutting recipe in 1/2) until we know it's a good recipe and I get a better handle on it & the portions. We've thought about getting a membership to Costco for more bulk items, which may help too, but haven't done so just yet!

I'm excited, and it was actually fun working on it this afternoon! It's kind of like a sense of relief knowing if you didn't have time to prepare something after getting home from work, etc that if planned right, one could just throw something in the crock pot and a decent dinner would be ready with minimal effort after a tiring day!

Hey, it's a new year... so why not try something new! :-)