Freezer Meal Swap

Recently my friend, Meghann, organized a Freezer Meal Swap.  She got the idea and all the guidelines from a blog, which she passed on to us.

I thought it was a fine idea and I wanted to support her so said yes, but I had NO IDEA how awesome it was going to be.  AWESOME!

We ended up having 15 participants.  15!  So, that meant we each had to make 14 identical meals to pass out to the other ladies - which was a lot!  A lot!  Just the packaging and labeling took me nearly 1.5 hours!  Sheesh!  But, what I wasn't anticipating during the hassle of it all was that I was going to come home with 14 different ready, prepared, pull-out-of-the-freezer-and-cook-with-little-to-no-thought-or-planning meals!  Genius!

I chose to take the easy way out and contribute pulled pork sandwiches with buns.  Marc helped by smoking all the meat and even babysat it through the night.  I felt a little guilty for contributing something so easy, but I figured anyone else could've chosen to do the same thing.

There was a variety of meals - quite a few casseroles like lasagna, spaghetti bake, and soups like chili or taco soup and then some mexican meals like fajitas.  I chose to try some of the most "normal" meals at first, hoping to ease Marc into it - so we have had BBQ meatballs and Raspberry Chipotle Chicken in the crockpot this week.

My natural tendency is to hoard things like this for when I "really need them" - like when I have a baby in 6 weeks (six weeks!!!) or when I don't have anything else I could possibly make or on the days I don't have time to prepare something or for some special occasion.  But, I decided to throw caution to the wind and jump right in, and it's been so great!

I'm hoping to use some of my "extra" time, that I would normally have to spend planning and preparing meals, to get ready for baby #2 (in six weeks!!), which looks like sleeping/resting and cleaning out/organizing my house, for now.

We brought our meals frozen in coolers and met at a local church to have plenty of space.

Chelsea participated but didn't attend the swap, so I was in charge of divvying out her meals she prepared and collecting the ones from the other ladies for her.  Al and Shirley delivered them to her in Garden City the next day since they were up there for church.  Worked out great!

We all commented that the initial sticker shock was hard to swallow, along with the amount of time it took to prepare 14 meals, but when you did the math and divided out the time and realized that you could most likely feed your family for the next MONTH with that amount of money and time and energy, it was totally worth it.

I told Meghan that this is something that people talk about wanting to do but that no one ever does because no one wants to initiate and organize it, and it's true!  If you ever have a chance to do something like this, I would TOTALLY recommend it (well, maybe you should ask me in a few weeks to see if there were very many "dud" meals).  Wanna organize your own?