tiny freezer, lots of food

The other day I opened the fridge and it looked like this:

No milk, I think there were 2 eggs in the carton, no fruit or veggies. As you can see, there was bread and salsa, some minced garlic, grape jelly, Hershey's syrup and whip cream.  The only things in the freezer were half a bag of peas and corn and a frozen pie shell.  It would have been an interesting meal.

A trip to the store was sorely needed.  So I went to Sam's Club (I used to have to drive 2 hours one way to get there, now it's 15 minutes away!) and did some bulk shopping.  One of the nice things about living in Austin is that you're only charged sales tax on non-food items at the grocery store and that includes Sam's.  So if you only buy food, you get out of there tax free.  I've never "just" bought food at Sam's, but I digress.

After Sam's I hit the grocery store and got the rest of what I needed there.  Then it was time to go home and cook!

Now, I've done once a month cooking before, see here, but I've always had a deep freezer along with the one that's apart of my fridge.  I've never just used the little freezer before.

Let me just say that after employing some mad packing skills I got the following in there:

2 bags of taco meat

2 bags of chicken tortilla soup

1 chicken and wild rice casserole

3 pans of chicken enchiladas

2 balsamic-garlic pork tenderloins

10 dijon burgers

4 bags of spaghetti sauce

2 bags of meatballs

2 bags of honey-orange chicken breasts

10 twice baked potato halves

12 egg & sausage sandwiches

6, 2-packs of waffles

a family size bag of peas, corn and green beans

(and I have all of my frozen pumpkin puree in there too)

The pie shell previously in the freezer didn't fit, so it was turned into pumpkin pie.  :)

All in all it comes out to about 20 dinners and then some breakfast items.  I had planned to freeze some pizza dough as well, but it won't fit.  Dough is easy to make the same day however, so not a big deal.

Oh and my fridge looks happier better too!

Now that I know I can get quite a bit in my little freezer I will definitely get back into the "bulk" cooking.  It saves me quite a bit, I think it was around $200 for all of this (I used no coupons and I had to replace/purchase quite a few staples that didn't survive the move like balsamic vinegar and a big package of tinfoil pans from Sam's) so that comes to about $10 a meal.  Now that I have some basics, my next trip will be even less.

Phew, I think after all this cooking and blogging I need to go enjoy some of that pumpkin pie!