Cooking, Cole's Room & More

Last Saturday was cooking day in our house. Last month we started doing monthly cooking or freezer meals. Last Saturday I prepared 4 meals for the next 4 weeks. It was so much fun. I love to cook. I decided to make chicken vegetable soup, turkey meatloaf with mashed potatoes, shepherds pie and baked ziti.

These are all of the ingredients that I started with. It made it easier to have all of the ingreadients in one place when I started to cook.
I started off cooking the baked ziti and the soup. Those were very easy to make. Once the ziti was done I divided it up into 4 plastic containers, let them cool on the counter and then in the refrigerator for a while then labelled them and put them in the freezer.

Then with the soup I let it cool in the pot I made it in, put it in the refrigerator to cool and then divided it up into quart sized freezer bags.

Then I made the meatloaf and mashed potatoes. This was super easy because the meatloaf you just mix everything together, make into four mini loaves and freeze. Then when you are ready to eat it you thaw it and cook it for 30 minutes. The mashed potatoes I made like I usually would and then just divided them up into freezer bags.
Then I made the shepherds pie. With this recipe you make the meat mixture (which I modified by adding frozen corn and peas) and freeze that. Then make mashed potatoes and freeze them. When you are ready to eat this you add the meat mixture to a small casserole dish and put the potatoes on top and bake.
So far we have eaten the soup, meatloaf and potatoes and shepherds pie. They were very, very good. I would recommend all of these recipes for freezing. It has made life so much easier for us. We can eat something different every night and it is super easy to fix when we get home from work.
We also started painting Cole’s room this week. We have finished painting and now we need to get the chair rail and crown molding up. Here is the room before we started.

Here it is with just the bottom portion painted.


Here is the finished product minus the crown and chair rail.


Here is the bookshelf Jon has been building for the room:


Here is my 20 week photo :) My eyes were more squinty than usual as it was bright outside...

We are working on some more projects this week and I hope to update more then. Everything is going great and I am feeling good. My feet hurt a lot of the time and I have leg cramps at night. But, other than that I don’t have many complaints. We go back to the doctor in a week and I am excited about that. I hope everyone has a great week!