Three mommies and bulk cooking, aka "So, how did it go?"

Rikki, Ethel and I all got together and did bulk cooking. We learned a few things, so I'd better put them here while they are in my mind.

We DID have fun. I want you all to know that.

It also took from 10 am -4pm and we got about 10 meals out of it each. Not bad, but with more of an assembly line style, it could have been better. I had a book on that, but someone lost it in her house... yes, she is looking for it. When she finds it, that will help. We have all done the Dinner's Ready thing, and it is super tasty, but if you can get things on sale, you can do it a lot more cheaply yourself. Time and energy might add up to how much they charge, though, depending on the person. We loved using Dinner's Ready, but we wanted to give this a try. Another reason is that there are three ingredients we were avoiding for two different people. DR will accommodate this, but it's a pain to ask and avoid things. The ingredients are:

MSG: causes migraine-like headaches
Partially hydrogenated anything: causes awful gas (run away)
Wheat: causes much of the above, my husband to get sick, and a certain baby to stay up all night crying.

So we all found recipes that would accommodate us, and that might be where part of the complication came in. It's worth it to have good food. A lot of bulk cooking/freezing recipes contain cream of mushroom or chicken soup, and they mostly have MSG in them, or the second ingredient, or even all three, which is a recipe for disaster in certain people's houses. No, she's not exaggerating. I used to live there!

The other things we all should have done is to do the prep work in our own homes. I should have precooked the onions and the mashed potatoes and the hamburger. I should have pre "squinched" the potato chips before making chicken nuggets (a huge hit, by the way). Ethel had tons of dehydrated ingredients she buys online, and while a little spendy up front, if you are going to make crockpot meals that will last til Armageddon, it's the way to go! And all natural, too.

Perhaps things were slightly slowed down by one of us needing the brakes replaced in their car, like, now. But I also happened upon a mechanic who did great work and really super fast, right near here. Thanks to Joyce and Heidi! Now we know where to take our beater, too. I was really impressed. I drove said owner back and forth, but that only took 15 mins total.

Also, we had a husband around to keep the kids sort of in line. They did pretty good, really. It was a good day, but I am tired, because after that, I rushed home to put food away, hug the husband, leave him with two kids, take the oldest to soccer practice, pay someone back for a Lands End order, go to the library to get books on hold, pick up said oldest kid, get peed on by the baby I was wearing on my back (and you don't want to know what else was in that diaper), rush home to company for Rosary night, enjoy the heck out of that, and then watch some Fr. Corapi until I just could not stay awake anymore. Darn. It was really interesting, too.

Did you know that Guadalupe is an Arabic word? This makes sense. Spain and "Arabia" were at war for a long time, so it makes sense that Spain adopted a few Arabic words, especially if they sounded sort of Spanish. It means "Wolf River". And when Spain also took over Mexico, of course those words would be passed on to the New World. How cool is that?

Also, when I was in CA in June, I stole a few things from Grandma's house (sorry Dad, I really couldn't resist, for homeschooling's sake!). There's a globe in my dad's childhood room that I've always loved, because it has words on it like "French West Africa" and "Belgian Congo" on it, and Hawaii is a territory. Through the use of Wikipedia, Mr. C. and a few other interested types spent til about 10pm figuring out that perhaps the globe is from 1946. Poland being a nation at that point had a lot to do with our calculations. It was so fun. We had conversations like "the war was over in 1945, so it had to be after, but this happened in 1947, so it had to be before that!" It was such a fun thing to do. Thanks, Dad, for keeping it!

Ok, that was long. On with the day.