When Jackie first proposed the idea, my heart jumped up and down with excitement as my stomach turned over with nervousness at the same time.  Jackie wanted to see if any of the women in our life group were interested in a “CROCKPOT DAY”, a day to shop for and prepare multiple meals in just a few hours.  When we finished, we would combine the ingredients for each recipe in gallon bags and set them in our freezer until we were ready to cook them in the crockpot!  As a wife who would rather go out for dinner every night than cook…this sounded like the perfect solution!  I would spend one day preparing meals with my friends and have delicious/healthy dinners to feed my husband for the next few weeks. 🙂  AWESOMENESS!

This past Sunday was the day!  Jackie, Suzanne and I all gathered to make 38 meals (6 different recipes) in just a few hours!  We started at the Shop Rite in Fair Lawn, NJ to pick up everything we would need.  Jackie (our captain) had created a ginormous spread sheet detailing out the exact number of each ingredient to buy. We split up, and in a little over an hour, we had filled up two shopping carts with food and checked off every item on our list.  Now it was time to check out.  Captain Jackie had also collected coupons to help us save money on our purchases.  I am not going to lie, watching our final total go down with each swipe of a coupon made me really excited.  At the end of the day, I believe we saved over $50!  We pilled our goodies in the car and headed back to Suzanne’s house to start cooking.

The next few hours went by pretty fast!  Suzanne cleaned over 70 pounds of meat, Jackie washed and chopped the veggies, and I tried my best to keep up, slicing green peppers, onions, and garlic.  Once we had prepared all the food, we began combining the needed ingredients for each recipe in gallon baggies.  In just a few hours we had made 4 bags of beef and broccoli, 6 bags of lime salsa chicken, 6 bags of chicken teriyaki, 7 bags of chicken cacciatore, 5 bags of black bean taco soup, and 4 bags of BBQ pulled pork.  This brought us to a total of 38 meals!  We finished off our hard work with hugs all around and a large pizza to share. 🙂

I don’t think I have EVER purchased this much food at one time.  We had two shopping carts filled to the brim!

Check out this shopping spreadsheet!  Isn’t it incredible?!

COUPONS!

To save the maximum amount of money, we decided to do three different transactions.  Watching the total go down on this last one was so fun.

Captain Jackie chopping away! 🙂  Thank you so much for leading us…we couldn’t have done it without you.

Suzanne washing and trimming the meat.

Me cutting garlic!  Thanks Matt for the picture.

Our husbands helped a little.  Nate wrote all of the recipes and names of who they were going to on gallon bags and the boys ran back to the store for forgotten cilantro.  Thanks guys!

If you are planning a crockpot day…make sure you have plenty of bowls handy.  You will need them!

The best part of the evening?  Taking home 12 yummy meals for my family!  Fun fact: each meal came to $8.85…a much better deal than what I am used to.  Thanks again to Jackie and Suzanne for making cooking so much fun.  I am already looking forward to the next crockpot day!