The $1,000 Plan: Day Thirty-Eight

It's Day Thirty-Eight of The $1,000 Plan and I spent time cooking up several items to go into the freezer. I am pleased with the resulting outcome and it will certainly be nice to have things ready onhand in the freezer, that can simply be defrosted and then put straight into the oven (minus the plastic lid).

I plan to do further bulk cooking tomorrow, if time allows and hopefully then we will have a good stock of items onhand for the weeks ahead. It is so much nicer to be able to take a prepared meal out from the freezer the night before, and not have to do all the preparations from scratch each and every time.

There are some days when it is just so busy, and when the day proves to be also tiring, having a prepared freezer meal helps to lessen the load. I have also grocery shopped this evening, so I am hoping that alongside the soups and fruit crumbles I prepared today, I will also be able to put together several bulk pasta and rice dishes. These will all be good to have sorted out and ready onhand as well, and it will add a bit more of a selection into the mix also.

Our grocery bills have lessened over the past month, and I am a lot more conscious of where the grocery budget has been going. Menu planning really is advantageous on so many levels I am finding. I am planning to fine tune it even a little more over the coming weeks, and then I am aiming to recruit another household member (one at a time) to come onboard and learn how to do a bulk menu plan for a month also.

Until then however, I am personally being kept quite busy. Some days, (like yesterday and today, when there is a bit of a 'soup-fest' occurring at the stovetop alongside homeschooling the children), are proving to feel quite like longer and more tiring days at present. Yet, they are also days where there is an extra sense of accomplishment occurring because they are so productive on the food planning and budgeting front.

Rome was most certainly not built in a day, and each step IS proving to be very conducive to positive change. Step by step, day by day, the good habits needed to achieve The $1,000 Plan's hoped for outcome are all gradually being literally worked out. Yay! Yippee! Yay!

The $1,000 Plan: Day Thirty-Seven

It is Day Thirty-Seven of The $1,000 Plan and today was a day of making bulk lots of soup and pasta sauce. Having cleared the chest freezer, it was apparent that we could make a lot of delicious and heart-warming soup and sauces for the coming weeks, with what we had tucked away and onhand.

While the children were horse-riding I went into town to do errands, and I also looked at what options I could potentially explore for setting up a better storage system within the chest freezer also. The Warehouse had quite a good range of freezer-to-oven options of glass storageware.

Having received some birthday money, I thought it might be a worthwhile investment to purchase and try some of them out, over the next little while, and see if we find it works well to have a dual purpose type of food container for bulk cooked ready-to-cook meals. I personally like the idea of having less containers to wash up and clear, if a container can be used both in the freezer and in the oven. We shall therefore see how it goes.

In the meantime, around our usual day to day activities this week, there is most certainly a huge cook up happening, and I am sincerely hoping this will lighten the load for a while when it comes to thinking through what to cook each day for our main meal.

I found a lot of fruit in amongst the freezer contents also, so I am thinking such things as fruit crumble, perhaps some fruit pies, might be on the cooking agenda this week also. We shall see how time and energy allows for this to happen.

In the meantime, what soup was had today by everyone was enjoyed, and the country vegetable soup that was busy still cooking, yet sampled by a few keen taste-testers, was deemed most yummy also. The freezer makeover is most definitely already making a difference for the $1,000 Plan.

The $1,000 Plan: Day Fourteen

It is Day Fourteen of The $1,000 Plan. Over the weekend we managed to sell one of the items we have had listed on Trade Me for a few weeks. This shed was previously used to house firewood, however we have shuffled things around and now plan to store firewood elsewhere, in another shed.

It is good when you can look at what you have and weigh up what is really now able to be regarded as surplus. This small shed was now surplus to our requirements, so selling it was a good step to now take. We plan to look at what other items in and around our property we may be able to part with and sell also, over the next little while.

I spent time also thinking through some meal options for the coming week. The days have definitely started to get colder, and now that it is officially winter being able to keep warm, with warm, filling food, is going to be more on people's minds.

Sorting through the larder (a cupboard I store canned and preserved food in, that is separate from the actual food pantry in the kitchen), I found I had several jars of stewed plums that I could look at perhaps using to make some fruit desserts with. Looking through the chest freezer I also found a bag of dried apple slices that I had dehydrated several months ago.

After making some sweet crust pantry I made two fruit pies, one with a pastry topping and the other with a meringue topping, as I had several egg whites leftover after preparing the pastry from scratch.

I also spent time preparing some curried mince with vegetables in the slow cooker, and we should get several meals out of this, alongside rice or perhaps pasta.

To date, I have found it helps time-wise to aim to do some bulk cooking over a weekend, so that less time is required during the week when it comes to food preparations. Bulk cooking and planning ahead what meals are to be had during the week really is proving to be a great step forward, time-wise, energy-wise and also pocket-wise.

I hope to continue to gather momentum on the food preparation front, and also see more prepared meals build up to be onhand in the freezer. A busy weekend is a productive weekend, and it does make a difference for the week ahead. Each new habit is making a difference, and I think The $1,000 Plan has had more than one positive outcome to date.