Something new I'm excited about...

We had a nice weekend, low key, David doing a lot of working, but that was ok. On Saturday, I did something new and fun! I went with our friends Jenny and Sean to Let'sDish in Bethesda. If you've never heard of this place or concept, it's super cool. I love the idea. Basically, you go in to the store and they have everything set up for you to package up meals to freeze. You put on an apron and a head scarf (they're actually cute), and then you go to different meal prep stations where they have everything out and chopped for you. They have all the measuring spoons and directions and packaging there. You just follow the directions, and in 10 minutes, you have a homemade freezer meal in a bag. You slap a sticker with prep directions on that baby, initial it, and toss it in your freezer space, and you move on to the next one. And the best part is that they clean up behind you! Clean up is the thing I hate most about cooking. Jenny had signed up for an 8 meal package, but since each meal has 6 servings, she split up her meals into 16 meals total. They had easy directions for doing this on each station. I think they had about 12 meal choices, and the choices change every month. She just picked out her favorites, and we customized them to the Richardson family tastes. They're not big onion fans, so we added less onion than called for, etc. The options were definitely mouth watering. There was this moroccan tagine chicken with cous cous that looked delicious and some sort of chicken with cranberry chutney thing I would've liked to have tried. Now for the down side. I came home and told David about it, and he figured out that each meal for us would cost somewhere between $10-12. I know that the dinners I already make probably cost half of that because I'm already a little obsessive about making cheap, homemade meals. It was a disappointing discovery. But...when we have a new baby, and I'm exhausted, spending the money to do this might be a cost savings if I'm tempted to order take out or get fast food a lot. So what did Ellen do? Last night when I couldn't sleep for some reason (it's probably Baby's fault), I got online and found some cookbooks on Amazon that tell you how to do the same thing at home. It'll probably be a lot more work, but it might give me some new freezer recipe ideas to try, and I can keep better track of what I'm spending per meal and customize ingredients. I ordered one, and I'll let you know how it goes if I try it. But anyway, I enjoyed the feeling of satisfaction of seeing all those hours of meal prep in the kitchen melting away in a pile of plastic bags when I did this with Jenny. It was really satisfying, even if they weren't my meals. =) If you've been thinking about doing this, I recommend trying it. It's fun!