Freezing For Later

A few years ago we got into saving a bunch of money by signing up for a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program with one of our local farms and holy shit has it saved us so much money in the long term! I know that it's often easier to just get food every few days from the grocery store but as we all know, that gets expensive fairly quickly. To be able to get ultra fresh food from a local farm, support a local business, keep families and others around us employed locally that's real freedom and one of the most important things that we can do in the economic challenges we are facing right now.

With that CSA and all of the food that we get from it, towards the end of the summer one of the things that we make sure we do is take some extras if they offer it, and cut them up and freeze them for the winter time! There is nothing like fresh veggies right from the farm, cut up that day and freshly frozen in little baggies. Yes I Know the baggies are not the best and we likely have microplastics abound but you have to pick and choose your battles here.. lol

One of the things that we started to do last year was also visit the local butcher every couple weeks and get some fresh meats that we would also put into baggies for the freezer. Every morning we take a baggie of the veggies from the freezer, take a bag of the meat and pop it in the Instapot pressure cooker and set it on the meat soup setting and away we go!

This has been incredibly helpful and convenient in a lot of ways. Yes I would like to get everything cut up and cooking in a regular cooking pot on the stove but the challenge I have is having a really busy work schedule and I would likely forget to come down and stir the soup and end up burning it or ruining it. That would be pretty annoying so we do what we can and use the Instapot pressure cooker as a way to be convenient but also keep doing that home-cooked meal stuff!

No joke we've saved thousands of dollars every year just in grocery costs by doing this CSA program. I bet if we did calculations right now, we would likely have saved 4,000 dollars last year with the cost of groceries and all of the food that we were able to get every week, make into salads and take the extras to cut them up and toss them in the freezer. We've been doing this religiously for the past 6 years and it's been wonderful!

My new favorite thing though for sure is going to these local butchers and stocking up on meats for the freezer. We get a mixture of stew beef or stir fry beef strips and put those in their own baggies. A lot of the butchers will also give you a discount if you buy a certain amount. For this one we went to recently, you got a 1$ discount per pound if you bought 3 pounds or more. You better believe I got 3 pounds of stir fry beef strips and 3 pounds of ground beef!

The little man has been on a meatball kick lately which is great! He hasn't been loving steak all that much which is fine, some of it can be a little tricky to eat but I was getting a little concerned that he wasn't consuming enough meat in his diet. He eats incredibly well when it comes to veggies and stuff, often eats peppers, cucumbers, brussels sprouts, potatoes and all kinds of other things that we cook or cut up at home. That part is good but I wanted to make sure that he also ate meat as well for the other complex mineral and vitamin profiles that those offer, particularly for growing little boys! The kid is a little machine with how much he is eating and growing lately hahaha.

It definitely feels good to prepare and store these things. One of the things that I'm looking forward to very much is when I can go hunting! I am going to take a hunting class this coming spring so that I can prepare all of the things that I need in order to go hunting, starting small and try to go turkey hunting first and graduating up to deer. Being able to hunt and get my own meat would be such a game changer for me, filling my freezer for my family with something that I was able to harvest myself and use as many pieces of it as possible. That's really an amazing thing! One step at a time that's for sure!