On Friday I stood in the garage in Matt's work jacket with a clipboard and took inventory of the chest freezer, the same way I used to count the walk-in at the catering kitchen at the end of a season. It took twenty minutes, and my fingers quit working around minute twelve. The freezer was about three-quarters full, which sounds great until you notice that most of it was odds and ends I'd bought "for later," and later had never come.
January is when I cook the freezer down before I buy more. I did it last year too, and January 2025 was one of only two months we came in under our grocery budget. This year the budget went up to $265 a week, and my goal for the month is to average about $245 by shopping mostly for milk, eggs, produce and bread.
What was in there
- 6 one-pound bags of ground beef, some bought on sale back in October
- 2 family packs of bone-in chicken thighs, about 7 pounds
- Half of a Costco pork shoulder, about 4 pounds
- 2 pounds of Matt's smoked Thanksgiving turkey, vacuum sealed
- 4 quarts of turkey stock
- A dozen tamales left from Christmas Eve
- 7 quart bags of roasted Hatch chiles from August, three of them Matt's hot ones
- About 3 pounds of shelled pecans from the backyard tree
- 2 balls of pizza dough
- 5 bags of frozen vegetables, 2 bags of frozen blueberries (Rosie's, do not touch) and half a bag of tater tots
- One glass container with a blue lid and no label
The unlabeled container turned out to be cranberry sauce. I thawed it thinking it was chili. That's my honest mistake for the month, and the reason a roll of blue painter's tape and a marker now live on top of the freezer.
The meals it turned into
I planned the first two weeks of January around that list. This week, which started Sunday, looks like this:
- Sunday: smoked turkey and green chile enchiladas, using the turkey, a bag of Hatch chiles and a tortilla and cheese stop at Aldi.
- Monday: our first EveryPlate box arrived (I'll write up that test when it's over), so dinner came out of the box.
- Tuesday, office day: pork carnitas in the Crock-Pot from the pork shoulder, started at 7:45 before I left.
- Wednesday: another EveryPlate meal, with leftover carnitas for anyone who'd rather.
- Thursday, office day: turkey tortilla soup in the Crock-Pot with a quart of the stock and the last of the turkey.
The third kit meal is saved for Saturday, since it's too cold for Matt to want to stand at the grill. Next week brings hamburger steaks with onion gravy from the ground beef, and the tamales go to a fend-for-yourself Friday with charro beans. The pecans are already becoming a double batch of granola.
Cooking ahead with what's left
The other half of the plan is turning raw odds and ends into finished meals. A freezer full of raw chicken doesn't help much on a sick day. A freezer full of King Ranch chicken casserole does. So this month, two pounds of the ground beef become two bags of chili, one family pack of thighs becomes a King Ranch casserole and a double batch of chicken tortilla soup, and a pan of white chicken enchiladas gets assembled and frozen unbaked. Each one is sealed or wrapped, labeled on tape with the name, the date and the reheating directions, and stacked on the left side of the freezer, which is now the "ready to heat" side.
It's the same idea as setting up my station before service. Do the slow work on a quiet day so a hard day only needs heat.
What it saved, so far
Monday's Aldi run was $96.14 for milk, eggs, bananas, apples, bread, tortillas, cheese, onions and a bag salad. A normal Monday is $140 to $160. Add a $21.48 Kroger pickup yesterday for more milk and coffee, plus the first EveryPlate box at $41.69, and this week should land somewhere near $190.
The weeks after this one will run higher, since the easy freezer items go first. But if the freezer carries us the way I think it will, January should average around $245 a week, or roughly $90 under the new budget for the month. I'll know for sure when the spreadsheet closes on the 31st.
The cranberry sauce, by the way, ended up on Sunday's turkey enchiladas. Wyatt said it was good. Eli said it was touching his rice.
