chicken and freezer meals...

So a few months ago I found THIS blog post (probably on Pinterest) about some freezer crockpot meals. And in my effort to make dinner more often, not spend so much money on food, and to make thinking about what's for dinner less stressful I decided I would try it. After buying the ingredients, it took me a good week (or  more) to get to the "putting together" part of it. I ended up doing it one night when Hubs was out of town  and was a good way to spend my evening alone after the kids were in bed. Surprisingly it was pretty fun to put together and not hard at all. And if I remember right it didn't even make very many dirty dishes. But the best part of it was that all five meals were fantastic!! My pickiest kid would even eat them. 

I don't know how many of my readers have heard of Zaycon. But I have heard a few friends and a couple of family members talk about Zaycon for the last couple of years. It is a company that provides good food and decent prices in bulk. They tour the country and you can only get certain foods at certain dates in certain towns. They sell honey, all kinds of fruit and all kinds of meat. I recently made my first purchase with them and bought 40 lbs of boneless, skinless chicken-breasts.  It cost me $67.60 and they are natural with no hormones or other yucky stuff straight from the farm and never frozen. They are HUGE breasts and had very little fat on them. 

It was interesting going to pick it up. They give you a location, date and a one hour time slot which is the same for everyone buying in the area. I didn't really know what to expect, but when I got there, there was a huge semi truck parked in a parking lot with a long line of cars driving buy it. I actually ended up parking and  walking over to the truck to get mine since I just ordered one 40 lb box. I handed them my receipt and they gave me a box straight from the truck. It was pretty cool actually. 

The pickup time was between 6 & 7pm so I didn't get to "processing" my chicken until the next day. Thankfully my  mom  was visiting and she was a HUGE help. I was a bit overwhelmed with what to do with 40 lbs of raw chicken, but after asking others I figured out what to do. I separated mine into meal size portions (after cutting of the fat) and made 4 bags with marinade, 2 bags of chopped, 6 bags of freezer crockpot meals (I chose three of the recipes from the link above and doubled them) and 8 bags of just chicken for other meals. And then my mom suggested I make chicken broth from the fat trimmings and got about 6 or 7 cups of chicken broth that I separated in baggies and froze. 

I was a little bit worried about how we would fit it all in our freezer (especially since we are buying 1/8th of a cow next month) but all of that fit on one of my shelves (see picture above) no problem. 

I am so excited and happy that I did this and I will for sure be doing it again. 

And now bring on the cow...