3 moms — Cooking During Stolen Moments

Since spending the month in my kitchen for the 3 Moms, 3 Kitchens, 31 Days series, a lot has changed around our house!

In fact, our entire house has changed. After waiting and searching for months, after watching a deal fall through and turning in a few offers just a little too late, we finally found OUR house. We moved in on June 18th. Our summer has been filled with unpacking, settling in and making this place truly home. We’ve gotten a ton done, but there are still quite a few things on our to-do list. Fortunately, most of those things can wait a while since we’re also getting ready for October 19th. That is the day baby #5 is due.

Here are a few shots of my new kitchen. I love it! It’s wonderfully functional and neither too small nor too big.

One of the things on our to-do list is to paint those two white walls a light green apple color. I think it will add tons of character and coordinate really well with the blue on the other walls.

In the first picture, you can kind of see the back door and mud room. We are working on turning that mud room into a mud room/pantry. There will be hooks on the wall for jackets and backpacks, plus a shelf for shoes. The other side of the will have a built in “closet” for the pantry and a chest freezer.

Our new neighbors have been extremely generous in sharing their garden bounty with us this summer, as well with offers of helping us till a section of our backyard for the garden we are planning to put in next spring. The kids love going across the street and filling up their baskets with lots of fresh veggies. And I’ve put all that fresh produce to good use – a yummy batch of Creamy Tomato Basil Bisque, a huge pot of homemade spaghetti sauce (6 bags in the freezer so far!) and lots of other fun dishes, including my first attempt at cooking swiss chard (recipe later this week).

At the top of my priority list right now is tackling lots of Bulk Cooking Before Baby. My goal is to have at least a few weeks worth of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and baked goods in the freezer before the baby is born. I’m also attempting to do this while still sticking to our monthly budget of $400. So far, the plan is working really well. There have been some great sales that have really helped in this regard.

I spent the day on Saturday making a few things for the freezer. I veered a little from the list above, but I’m pleased with what I got done – 2 dozen grilled cheese pockets (recipe later this week), 3 dozen mini banana muffins, a dozen tortillas, a dozen cream cheese & chocolate chip cinnamon rolls. There is still a ton to get checked off my list, but I plan on making at least one thing each day this week and in the coming weeks to add to the freezer. Hopefully I’ll sneak in a more all-day cooking sessions too.

And just to keep it real, here’s what my kitchen REALLY looks like in the midst of a baking marathon.

It’s been a fun and busy summer for our family, and we’re looking forward to more of the same in the coming months.

Make sure you check out what the other 3 Moms have been up to this summer as well. Toni, The Happy Housewife, has been challenging herself with a smaller-than-usual budget for groceries in August and she is sharing her budget update. Meanwhile, Jen has been stockpiling groceries and feeding a crowd! Looks like it’s been a busy summer for everyone. How has your summer been?

And if you’re interested, I recently put together an eBook filled with 110 breakfast recipes to help get your mornings off to a better start. Lots of our favorites fill the pages!

Our shopping is done for the month. The fridge, freezer and pantry are completely stocked. It feels so good to have that all accomplished and to know that all we’ll need is some produce, eggs and milk to round out our weeks.

We ended up splitting our shopping trips into two days instead of just one. Saturday morning was a busy, get-stuff-done-around-the-house kind of morning. There may have a Wii competition or two going on also. So by the time we made it out the door, it was already 2 pm. And since Sam’s Club really does become an event for us (browsing all the aisles, looking at books, enjoying samples, etc.), we didn’t get home until almost 5:30.

But it actually worked out perfectly since I got to take our 5 year old son on a date to Kroger today. It seems like he and I rarely get to do stuff together alone anymore, so we both really enjoyed our time at the store. He is becoming an awesome little helper and such a gentleman too! Makes my mama-heart proud.

Anyhow, on to the shopping. Here’s where we started from.

And here’s where we ended up.

It’s definitely a huge difference.

Some of the highlights from this months’ purchases include:

17 lbs. ground beef
3 lbs. each bacon and breakfast sausage
6 lbs. chicken breasts (+ the 6 lbs. already in the freezer from last month)
A huge bottle of olive oil that will probably last a year
Loads of snack foods for the kids at school and after school
6 lbs. of nectarines (If these start to good bad before they’re all eaten, I’ll slice and freeze for use in smoothies.)
6 lbs. of coffee
Enough rice, barley and elbow macaroni to last 2 months, at least

Altogether, we spent a grand total of $368. That leaves $82 for two or three quick milk and fruit runs the rest of the month. Judging by what we have on hand now and my plans for putting it all to use in the freezer and such over the next few days, we probably will not need to use all of that. But, we’ll see.

Here are the post-shopping pictures:

From the Sam’s Club trip.

From Kroger. My helpers were just too anxious to start unpacking for me to get a picture with everything unloaded, but hopefully you get the idea.

Now the fun really begins! I’m formulating batch cooking plans over the next several days to put all of this to good use without any going to waste. The freezer will be stuffed, that’s for sure.

Settling In and Filling The Freezer: A 3 Moms Update

Grocery Shopping Results

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