Stocking Back Up

We always try to keep the house stocked with food and basic necessities, however after the crazy last semester of school we were pretty low on everything. Yesterday, I started stocking back up and working on filling up the freezer for the upcoming semester of school. Paul will do all the cooking (and all the other household duties) again in the fall, so I try to make up a bunch of meals that are easy and quick to make.

Friday we put together 3 large containers of homemade vegetable soup. If you aren't making your own vegetable soup, you should start, it's so easy to do and tastes wonderful. We keep a tupperware container in the freezer and after every meal any left over beef (preferably roast) and veggies goes into the container, once the container gets full, it's time to start thinking about making some soup. It worked out perfectly this week that we were going to have company over for dinner so I made a huge pot roast with tons of potatoes and carrots, at the last minute though they had to cancel, so we were left with a huge amount of leftover. We took the leftover pot roast, shredded the beef, took broth, vegetables and the soup bucket containers (we had 2) and dumped them all in the large soup pot. Add a can of tomato juice and in a few hours you have great homemade vegetable soup. Sometimes if I don't have enough vegetables in my soup bucket and I'll add them when I make this soup, like this time I added corn. One of the things I love about this soup is it reminds me of my mother, growing up every weekend usually starting around October she would make a big pot of homemade soup, she rotated between vegetable, chili and potato. I also love the fact that this is a cheap meal, it saves food that otherwise would have been thrown out, every penny saved helps.

My next task this weekend was chicken. Kroger had an amazing sale on split chicken breasts ($1/lb). I didn't end up buying as much as I planned but I brought home about 12 pounds of chicken and Paul and I started de-boning the chicken. We had three piles, one the bones, another for the little pieces of meat that came off the bones and another for the breasts. Some of the pieces of breast were huge and we were able to split them into two servings. After we were done, I threw the bones into a pot, added onion, celery and carrots, filled the pot up with water and salted well and set it on the stove to simmer. While Paul was bagging up the chicken into serving size bags, I took the little pieces of meat and cooked them on the stove in some oil, salt and pepper. After everything was done we ended up with enough chicken for 20 meals and several gallons of delicious chicken broth.

It's wonderful to see the freezer starting to fill back up.