Crock Pot Mania

After seeing about a zillion things on Pinterest about how easy and inexpensive it can be to feed your family on crock pot meals-- I decided to give it a try.

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I prepared a total of 7 crock pot freezer meals in about 1 hour. You basically do your shopping, prepare each recipe in a gallon sized freezer bag, freeze and when you're ready- toss it in the crock pot for dinner.

So far we've had three crock pot meals and, although they're a far cry from Weston's normal gourmet cooking, they were easy, healthy and pretty tasty.

Here's what I made: (sources and recipes linked below)
Chicken Curry (x2)
Beef Burritos
Garlic Honey Chicken
Teriyaki Pork Chops
Hawaiian Chicken
Chicken Fajitas


Chicken curry recipe found here.
All other 5 recipes found here.

Pros:
1. It truly was inexpensive and easy to prepare everything.  1 shopping trip, 1 hour to prepare, 7 meals.
2. I love knowing exactly what is in each dish.  Meat, veggies, seasoning.  That's about it.
3. Aubrey is able to eat everything prepared.
4. Almost every recipe we have tried so far has provided enough for dinner and lunch the next day.

Cons:
1. Eating your dinner out of a crock pot every night can be pretty boring.  We got tired of it and ended up making yummy granola banana pancakes one night, even though we had a meal all heated up and ready to go.
2. Too mushy.  Since I only prepared recipes that included meat and veggies-- everything pretty much has had the same, mushy consistency.  All of the chicken or beef is supposed to be shredded before eaten, so it just feels like you're having the same thing every night.
3. Forgetting to put your meal on to cook can leave you in a bind.  If you forget to put your meal on before work- then you're forced to go hungry or put it on at lunch and cook on high heat, which I just isn't nearly as good.
4.  Hubby is a really good cook and he can normally whip up something spectacular in about 30 minutes.  I'm blessed because crock potting is not always necessary at our house :)

**notes-
Teriyaki Pork Chops- we bought at least 1 inch thick pork chops and they still turned out pretty dry.  To prevent them from drying out I recommend either 1) buying bone-in pork chops, 2) SLOW cook them-- don't cook on the "high" 4 hour setting like I did, or 3) make this recipe with chicken or beef.
Chicken Fajitas- yummy!  They were delicious.  The recipe calls for 1 tsp of salt, which I recommend leaving out.  Our dish was a little on the salty side.
Hawaiian Chicken-  Yum!