The original blog is great, all 10 recipes and a shopping list are provided which I personally loved.
Here are my tips from my experience:
- Pre-write on the bags (gallon or bigger-I used all gallon bags except for the potatoes), I did this while sitting on the couch watching a movie. Write what it is and what needs to be done the day you cook it. Ex-thaw for 24 hours or cook on low 8 hours. There are only a few that need items added the day off.
- I bough a 5 lbs bag of potatoes and probably used about 2/3 of the bag. I also did not put them in the bags with the main recipe as there was a decent amount of liquid. I put them in quart size bags, labeled the bag to match the recipe and put them in the freezer separately. While the beef stew says to add them the day of cooking (due to liquid in the bag) I just wanted to be done with the prep so I froze them separately. Add them later if you can, let the main dish melt a little bit other wise they cook too fast.
- I personally LOATH cutting onions and garlic so I buy them pre-cut and frozen, this helped on prep time. I always have them in the house. I used about 3 bags of frozen onions while she called for 6 medium onions, I used about 1 cup to 1.5 cups per recipe, and some times just eyeballed it. The frozen garlic I buy is 1 frozen cube = 1 glove. I got both in the frozen vegetable aisle at Walmart.
- Yellow peppers were a little pricey when I went shopping so I just got 3 green and 3 red.
- Brown the ground beef first and give it some time to cool before putting it in the bags.
- This list calls for 6.5 lbs of chicken breast, well the bag at Costco -their brand- (which is about $20) is 6.5 lbs. I used my kitchen scale to weigh out what was needed for each recipe. I also like they the individually frozen. Some of the comments on the original blog brought up putting raw chicken in with the other ingredients. So having them already frozen was a suggestion. The pre-frozen chicken made things simple, I just cut each package open dumped it on top of the other items and threw the bag in the freezer.
- Like with the chicken I didn't want to put raw stew meat in the bag, so I laid it out on a cookie sheet and froze it for a little bit (I went shopping in the late morning and prepped after dinner)
- Don't buy ground sausage, you need links. I made this mistake. Luckily I had some kielbasa in the freezer so I just substituted that for the sausage.
- Same with the flank steak, I tossed that in the freezer before adding it to the bag
- If you don't like V-8 juice (like us) buy the pop can of it. The can is 11.5oz. You technically need 12 oz but .5 oz won't really make a difference. I have no left overs to worry about.
- Beef and chicken stock are things I rarely use so I was weighing my options in the grocery store. I went with Knorr Homestyle Stock for 2 reasons, 1) my store had a coupon for it and 2) it would be less wasteful. Each package comes with 4 cups. You boil some water, add the contents of the cup and voilà! You have stock, and 3 more cups to make more later without having to worry about an open container in the fridge.
- Some grocery stores have bulk spice bins. See if you can find sesame seeds there, rather the buying a whole container you can buy just what you need. I got what I needed for 14¢ from a bulk bin at a local store, better then $5 for a jar I will stare at forever.
- The dairy items are added in the day of cooking, so while some may have them as staples in their home if you don't thats ok, you don't need to buy them right away or have them for prep-day.
- Wear shoes! My feet were killing me by the time I was done.
While it took over 2 hours it didn't seem like that long. I'm excited to see how these turn out!
