I arrived back home on a red-eye flight form San Francisco this morning, so I slept in and didn’t go to work (hey – I was “working” on the flight home!), so I went grocery shopping for our freezer cooking session.  I had already put together the shopping list in plan to eat, so I was ready to go – along with other errands that needed running.  I first looked at the All You grocery circular tool, and discovered that boneless, skinless chicken breasts – of which I needed almost 30 lbs – were $1.99/lb.  Not the absolute best I can do ($1.98/lb), but better than Costco – and hey, it was at the local Wal-Mart – which is our “normal” grocery store.  So, I stopped there first, to check out the quality of the chicken breasts as well as buy the rest of the items I needed in smaller quantities.  The quality looked good, so I bought them out of chicken breast packages (6 5lb packages).  I also picked up almost everything except the other meats and the hard liquor we need (blackstrap rum for a molasses/rum chicken).

After running some other errands, I went to Costco to get the rest of the meat – and a bunch of things we’d been putting off until the beginning of August.

Wal-Mart grocery receipt

At Wal-Mart, almost 100% of what I bought was for cooking, there were a few spices that Dad needed for his pickling habit, and some Picante sauce for our taco nights (and we really didn’t need an entire box of Chardonnay for cooking, but Dad requested it).  I ended up spending $141.94 at Wal-Mart – for a cart full of stuff.

Costco receipt

At Costco, almost everything I bought was not related to our cooking session – not even all the meat.  I have a particular fondness for Filet Mignon, so I tend to buy some at Costco when I go – very high quality and not too expensive ($13.99/lb).  We also bought some ground beef for a BBQ we’re hosting next weekend, and anything left over will become tacos for dinner.  Our total Costco bill was $257.97, but only about $99 of that was related to our freezer cooking session.

Tomato-Basil Soup before its blended

We’re going to have an estimated 280 servings (140 meals) out of all of this.  Tonight, we started the Tomato-Basil soup – which is the only recipe we have to actually cook before freezing.  This picture shows it before it’s made its way into the blender.