20 Costco Meals for $150

I decided to write this more as a journal entry than a flowing "article", so sorry if it feels choppy. I'm copying my "in the moment" thoughts from Facebook, so they might be familiar to some people...  


1/12/14
Ok, we did it. We bought the stuff for the 20 Costco meals for $150. Had to get a few things at Grocery Outlet, and next time will probably go there first to save a little more, but I meal planned it out and that will give us dinners through February 1. Probably longer cause some days we do other stuff for dinner...

In prepping to make it all, I'm finding it's not as organized or clear as I'd like. But once I go through it all once I'll figure it all out. I'm thinking I'm going to make a spreadsheet with my actual costs as a lot of the Costco prices she has differ from ours (she's in TX). The biggest was mangoes. She has them for like $6 for a box and they were like $11 at our Costco. I ended up getting 5 at Safeway for $1 each (the list says you need 8-9, but I figure we will just use a little less since some of them are as sides).

One meal is quinoa with corn and beans, and Josh doesn't like quinoa or beans, so I'm doing rice and hominy instead. But, without the quinoa it doesn't have protein, so I will have to add something...  

1/13/14
PHEW! Just over an hour and I have prepped 9 meals, including dinner for tonight in the crockpot. There are 6 of the meals (grilled chicken & mango salsa, Potato & egg breakfast tacos, & Quinoa with corn & black beans) that you can't really do much prep for. But I'm going to try to at least pre-chop stuff for them this evening...

It's really about finding the flow and a system within the sort of chaos of her blog. They're all super basic recipes, too. And that's nice for the less adventurous in my family... So here's what I did today:

I started with Italian Chicken.  
I froze one and we had one for dinner.

I used my trifle bowl to hold 

the baggies as I filled them.

Next I did the Beef Stew. 
It was very similar to the Italian Chicken...

 I don't like touching raw meat, so 

I used a sandwich baggie as a glove.

I did the beef stirfry next since I was using the stew meat.  I cut the cubes into slices (which isn't mentioned in the recipe).

Her recipe calls for frozen broccoli, julienned baby carrots and sliced onions.  We couldn't find the broccoli, so we bought this.  It has the carrots and onions (and other veggies in it) and cost the same.  I have 1/2 a bag left, too.

I had about 1lb of stew meat left after making the 2 Beef Stews and 2 Beef Stirfry, so I split it up and will use it with the "quinoa" meal I mentioned earlier.

Then, I moved on to the ground beef.  I made a double batch of the spaghetti sauce and froze them both (in bags).  I didn't take a picture, cause it's spaghetti sauce.  I made 2 batches of meatballs and froze them as well.  The meatballs stick to the pans a bit when you flash freeze them, so next time I'll use parchment.

There was a little more than a lb of ground beef left, so I made 5 patties.  We'll use those for hamburger and gravy with mashed potatoes I'm going to make and freeze tomorrow.

I prepped the Chicken Parmesan next.  She says to freeze it with the sauce, but that seems like it would get soggy, so I'm not doing that.

We couldn't find the chicken she was talking about, plus we wanted organic, so we only got 1/2 of the chicken the list calls for.  I had 1lb of frozen chicken left (from before), so that's defrosting to make this for dinner tomorrow.  I'll get the other 2lbs of chicken later this week for the grilled chicken.

 

The last thing I did was bag up the dinner rolls and labeled them by meal.  It calls for 36 rolls, but we actually ended up 4 short based on which meals she said they go with, but I figure we'll just buy a fresh loaf of bread or do something else as a side to make it up when the time comes.

Anyway, it was a lot easier to prep everything by meat type.  As I finished one package of meat I moved on to the next.  It really didn't take that long.  I had to buy Italian Seasoning (you use a lot) and breadcrumbs and I was missing garlic for a couple recipes.  I marked on the bag how much garlic to add when I cook it.  I figure that's easy enough to add in at the last minute.

I'll add reviews of the recipes as we eat them (tonight's will be up tomorrow)....