So Much Spaghetti Sauce...And Some Tacos

On Thursday, I went to El Rancho because they had some great deals on meat that I wanted to take advantage of.  Sometimes getting paid once a month can be tough, but one upside is that you have all of your grocery money for the month already when the month begins.  Knowing this, and seeing the prices this week, I decided to stock up on meat for the whole month (perhaps longer!).

I bought chicken breasts, country style pork ribs, sausage, and tilapia.  All of those went straight into the freezer.  I also bought 10lbs for ground beef.   I kept that thawed, and this afternoon, I cooked it.  ALL of it.  At once.  In a *really* big pot.

Once cooked, I separated it into two pots, and one portion I added some of my homemade taco seasoning (thanks Pinterest!).  That made enough for 4 packs of pre-cooked and seasoned taco meat to go into the freezer.

The rest went back into the really big pot, and was turned into a huge pot of spaghetti sauce  (just added a few jars of spaghetti sauce--I had 4 and I probably needed 2 more so I improvised with some sauce/paste and seasoning).

We ate some of the sauce tonight...over bows.  My daughter thought the bows made better accessories...

While we ate, I boiled some lasagna noodles, and when we were done, I assembled three big pans of lasagna  (one pack of lasagna noodles perfectly made 3 pans with 3 layers of noodles each).  We had some bows left over, so I set some sauce aside to go with them for leftovers tomorrow, and had enough for one more big bag of sauce for the freezer.

The lasagnas should each feed us two meals, and I'm thinking the sauce might as well, so in less than 4 hours time, including a dinner break, I turned $18 worth of meat (it was on sale for $1.79/lb.) into 10-14 meals.  Including the cost of cheese and sauces, the cost averaged out to about $2.50 per meal (before any sides), or roughly $0.63 per person, since there are 4 of us.  We couldn't even eat that cheap at Taco Bell, and don't even get me started on restaurant lasagna prices!  *shakes head*

With all of this in my freezer, and all the other stuff that was already in my freezer  (I've been doing an awful lot of cooking lately, just haven't had an awful lot of time to blog about it), my goal for tomorrow is to come up with a menu plan that will get us through the entire rest of the month using what I have on hand in the freezer.  I've been struggling to menu plan lately, mostly because my freezer was bare and I've been trying to decide what to cook!  But now my freezer is full, so I should have no trouble at all!