A Wrench

A wrench has been thrown into the gears of my carefully-planned freezer meal machine. A friend in need has moved in with us for the time being, we'll call this friend "Wrench." Wrench may be with us for 6 days or 6 months, I don't know, but he's a good guy and we're happy he's joining us. Since we will have an extra person dining with us for potentially the entire month, my plans for how many dinners each recipe would make were thrown off. I sat down to look at it all again and realized that, while we won't have any lunch leftovers, everything else should still work out.

I am going to do The Big Shopping tomorrow at WinCo. (For those of you in the Salt Lake Valley, I highly recommend WinCo. Their prices are phenomenal but they have a full selection of brand-name, high quality foods, unlike an Aldi or something like that. And their prices aren't low because all of the boxes are partially crushed- they're low because the company is employee owned and magical. Like I said, I recommend it. Even if its a drive, its worth your time. Have you ever seen an entire parenthetical paragraph before? I didn't think so.)

To aid me on my flour-in-the-eyebrows-kitchen-warfare OAMC day, I have found some handy, printable lists to keep the chaos down to a dull roar.

Advanced Preparations List- so I can have everything ready to throw together, and thereby reduce the number of burns/knifewounds I will incur on C-Day.

Freezer Inventory List- Although the freezing temperatures cut down on the "science experiment" factor, I still want to keep track of what we've eaten and what we have left.

My shopping budget is $250, but I think I'll come in pretty far below that. I am buying my 20 lbs of chicken breasts from a relative who works at a food distribution company, so I'm getting them for like $1.50/lb! Woot!