I was exhausted yesterday after doing a big Costco Shop, but I think we are set for a while.  Having 30 pounds of butter back in the freezer eases my mind a fair bit.  Only 10 pounds of it was on discount, but I was down to 2 boxes (4 pounds), and I want to get another 30 pounds in there come June, July at the latest.  I am planning on making up some of my herb garlic butter and repackaging it for the freezer, so I have it for making garlic bread, ravioil, salmon, shrimp, and vegetables like zucchini and broccoli.

I'd like to have at least ten pounds of it made up in 4 oz portions to keep in the fridge one at a time.  I should start keeping the whipped cream cheese containers.  They would be the perfect size.  Plus save me money on containers, since we don't buy individual yogurt anymore, just the big plain one we put our own fruit in.  Now that I have a label maker it would be easy to know what is what at a glance.

We bought 6 of those bags of broccoli that have 4 4 pound steamer bags in them, so we are set on broccoli for a while.  That will make meal prepping easy for a while.  And the ingredients for breakfast burritos, which I am making before I go to bed tonight.

Last night for dinner I made chicken and mozzarella ravioli with my garlic herb butter and a Caesar salad and strawberries.  It was a nice simple dinner and did not take long and cost the same amount for the whole family as one entree at Olive Garden would have cost.  And we had leftover fruit, salad fixings, and garlic herb butter.

Tonight for dinner I made creamy chicken taquitos using my home canned chicken, some salsa verde, 4 oz cream cheese, cumin, chili powder, a bit of lime juice, cilantro is optional, and tortillas, preferabbly corn, but we only had wheat in the house.  To that we had garden salads and a fruit salad of honeydew, cantaloupe, pineapple, and grapes.  And we had a dozen leftover taquitos to go in the freezer.

In the morning, I plan to do some breakfast sandwiches.  Since we bought bagels at Costco and only planned to buy six, but they had a buy one get one free going on, we have six extra, so I thought I'd make those into bacon, egg, and cheese everything bagel sandwiches and put those in the freezer for DD.  We have an egg sandwich machine that does two at a time, so it won't take but fifteen minutes to do six.  Plus, I will do up and peel some eggs for the fridge and make some breakfast tv dinners of 2 scrambled eggs/2 sausage patties/hashbrowns for DH and 4 2 oz sausage links and 4 egg bites for me or a low carb omelet.  Depends on how hungry I am.  Given my energy level after that I may make up some pancakes as an alternate to hashbrowns for DH.

I'd like to do some lunches for the fridge for the next few days, but we will see, since I want to go pick up my tomato and pepper plants.  If possible, we want to get them planted, too.  

The plan for Saturday or maybe Sunday freezer cooking is:

3 meatloaves (1 for dinner)

2 pans mashed potatoes*

4 pans Italian meatballs

2 pans Swedish meatballs

3 pounds taco meat

2 pans hamburger steaks with gravy

2 pans spaghetti and homemade sauce*

2 pans lasagna*

*It is more important to me to get all the meat based items taken care of, but I am sure there will be downtime to peel potatoes and to boil pasta while waiting for the meatballs to cook.  The pasta sauce will only start in a skillet until the onions and then garlic are ready and then transferred to the crockpot to finish off, so I will still have burners available to make gravy and boil pasta and the potatoes will be in the Instant Pot.  If not, than the pasta, sauce, and potatoes can wait a day or two or even until the next week.

The next weekend I want to do:

3 pans jerk chicken (1 for dinner)

2 pans chicken enchiladas

2 pans chicken fajitas

2 chicken pot pies with buttermilk biscuit top crust only

2 pans Meditteranean chicken bake with vegetables

2 pans Southern stewed chicken

Some of these may not be in pans.  They may be in bags, but I mostly like the pans with the lids because I know exactly how much food I have without weird guestimating and stuff stacks properly while freezing and after freezing.

I may just have to raise the grocery budget up higher than expected at first, maybe by $200, but eliminating the takeout budget entirely, except on trips, it should way more than compensate.  Of course, we have been working towards this, but I'd say each month has had at least a week's worth of spectacular failure when you add all the days up.  Just have to find the will power, the energy, and the strength.

DH keeps forgetting his food at home and so he is still buying takeout at work.  So that's what I mean by adding up to takeout failures of a week's worth.  And he's buying soda to keep himself awake because he doesn't like coffee or tea.  So I can't do much about those expense, though I will keep encouraging.  He's got a lot going on at work with deadlines and he's under a lot of stress physically from this systemic illness.  I don't want to nag too much.

At least I've got him going to the doctor and to physical therapy now.  And he's finally got an appointment with wound care Monday, about a year into this leg thing, which is a staph infection, by the way.  I don't know if I ever said.  They finally did a skin scraping early last month or late March and we finally found out.  So I called it.  It didn't have to become systemic if they would have done things right from the start.  Well, at least we won't be paying for it.  We've met our out of pocket max now.

Okay, it's late or actually very early, and the yesterday I started talking about when I began writing this post is now two days ago.  I'm rambling and will probably stop making sense soon, so I will wrap this up now.  I'm going to calculate my net worth tomorrow.  I hope I break even.