OAMC prep

So tonight I started getting the meat ready for my OAMC dishes...I grabbed some really good sales between last week and this week, and I'm left with plenty for both freezer cooking and fresh meals for a good while!

I bought 3 packages of boneless chicken breast on Saturday (on sale for $1.69/lb), which gave me 18 really big breasts for a total of $20.41 spent - that works out to about $1.14 per breast (each is around 9 or 10 oz). I split them up this way:

3 breasts for this week's cooking - $3.40
6 breasts for OAMC cooking - $6.80
9 breasts for fresh meals later - $10.21

I froze the 2 breasts for later this week, and diced up the one for tonight's dinner. While that was cooking I wrapped the 9 individual breasts in saran wrap, and put them all in a gallon ziploc bag - I can take out as many as I need individually later on! Then after dinner tonight, I sliced the last six breasts into thin tenderloins for this recipe - I think 6 might have been too much chicken, but I figure if I don't use all the tenders for that recipe I can make the rest into chicken finger lunches another time. All told, it was about 30 minutes worth of extra work, including trimming fat from the chicken right out of the package...but since some of that was done while dinner was cooking, it was probably just an extra 15 or 20 minutes aside from my usual kitchen time!

On to the pork - the store had half boneless tenderloins on sale for $1.79/lb, so I got 2 of them (just over 10 pounds)...I had the store butcher cut them into two 1.5 lb roasts and the rest in 1/2" pork chops, I ended up with 18! The roasts were wrapped and frozen right away. I will be using pork chops for this freezer recipe, so I needed to freeze them in groups of 6...I decided to flash freeze them so they wouldn't stick together when I add the marinade later. (I ended up flash freezing the chicken tenders too. it'll make things easier later on.) Total cost was $18.37, here's roughly how it broke down:

Two 1.5 lb roasts - $5.37
12 chops for freezer cooking - $8.67
6 chops for fresh cooking later - $4.33

Wrapping up the chops took all of 10 minutes, so for a total of 30-ish extra minutes I got a lot of the meat prepared for when I assemble the OAMC meals!

I still need to tackle the ground beef, but that will be a project for tomorrow :)







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