Efficient or Lazy....I haven't decided which

Pregnancy has really taken a lot of energy out of me, and it started to become a problem when it came to meals.  Joseph and I would get home from work and I would either be too tired to make dinner, or too hungry to wait for it to be done, so we have been eating out a lot more than we have in the past.  Eating out isn't exactly budget-savvy so we needed to come up with another idea.

Introducing our bright idea...making meals for the whole month in advance. (It works great when you're poor college students and have a practically empty freezer)

We thought of our 12 favorite recipes, wrote down all the ingredients for them on our shopping list and $100 later we had a TON of food.  It took us only about two hours working together, and we were able to make 2-3 of every recipe for a total of 34 meals!  It was one giant mess and half a day of insane energy, but now we have dinner for the entire month!  

We made:

Manicotti

Hawaiian BBQ Chicken

Enchiladas

Ravioli

Meatloaf

Stir Fry (several different kinds)

Broccoli Cheese Soup

Stew

Beef Stroganoff

Curry

Chicken Noodle Soup

Chili

That comes out to less than $3 a meal!  Of course we'll add some fresh veggies to the meal (don't worry mom) when we actually cook it, so the whole meal will cost a little more than that.  It helped that a lot of the meals had similar ingredients, so we could buy in bulk and save.  I love it because it saves times, energy, and we saved a lot of money buying is higher bulk and making 2-3 meals out of it!  Now we have a variety of meals and minimal effort for the next month!  I feel so proud of us!  We will be sure to do this again before the baby comes so we don't have to worry about dinner the first month she's here!  Depending on how this month goes this may become a tradition from now on!  I use lots of exclamation points because I really am very excited about it!