Choppin' (not quite cookin') up a Storm

Ingredients galore!

The adventure has begun! Went to the grocery store, list in hand - prepared to make 8 different dishes (multiple servings per person). We had an amazing (and I really do mean amazing) Excel document that my mom created for us. She listed more than 20 recipes we had collected in columns, and then laid out the ingredients in rows. When we entered the quantity (whether we wanted a single listing or to double or triple the amounts), the math was magically done for us!

I headed to the grocery store without Aslyne, because she had to stop by work (like I said before - we could be major players in workaholics anonymous). By the time she found me in Giant Eagle, we were about a half dozen ingredients away from checkout. As we waited in line, we decided we were missing two very important things - orange juice and champagne. While not technically on the grocery list, mimosas seemed appropriate.

The cart was loaded up with chicken. Honestly, I was nauseated by all of the chicken we were looking at....yikes. but, Aslyne is not so much into the beef and we haven't found a lot of turkey or fish freezer crockpot meals just yet.

The bill was something like $330, but with my 12% food perks, we made it under $300. Not bad for the many meals we ended up with! Strangest item on the list? Ribo Amino Something or nother.

At home, we began chopping right away, well after a couple of YouTube videos and a glass of champagne. When we had made it through the unbelievable amount of onions, sweet potatoes, zucchini and the like - we double-checked our recipes with our purchases...we'd forgotten a few things. Some of the items didn't show up on our Excel shopping list, but I am attributing this to user error (i.e. me) and not Mom's Excel skills. We also discovered that those 16 bags of green beans (by the way, we only bought 8 because that many was making me ill to look at), also had no discernible place in our shopping. Hamburger meat? Also a mystery. Mom is going to go through the Excel soon and figure out where I went wrong...because I really did.

Why is this much meat hard to look at? Gross!

Aslyne headed back to the grocery for the few things we forgot: pineapple, mango and tapioca and I began to put together the bags. It was like an assembly line. I laid out all of our chopped up veggies, spices and other ingredients and set to work! The awesome recipes from Mama and Baby Love made it easy to split things into two bags without having to double any numbers! Bag assembly was kind of fun.

What was not fun, was all of the cleaning of the chicken. Aslyne was a trooper with onions and chicken breasts. And Hook, our ever present "helper" is now enjoying all of the chicken scraps atop his meals!

While we started out with nine unique meals in mind, we ended up making 11 in total because of extra ingredients we had and the simplicity of the last couple we stumbled upon at Texas Fit Chicks. Bonus! Still have to figure out what to do with this hamburger meat...and all of those green beans!

Listing of the meals we made to come next time!

PS: Don't tell anyone, but...I hate green beans.

Hook is always really, really, really helpful...and by that I mean super distracting and nosy.