I never knew until we bought 1/2 a cow last December, and brought home 1/2 a pig this spring how wonderful it was to be able to "grocery shop" from my garage. I write out the weeks menu, and instead of heading to the butchers at New Seasons, I just skip out to our big freezer, pick out the meats I will need for the week and head back inside with them. Round trip less than 2 minutes, and I get to wear my jammies the whole time. Pretty awesome.
So when the opportunity came up to make a bulk purchase of chicken breasts from a local food buying co-op, we jumped at the chance. The chicken wasn't labeled organic, but it was raised humanly on a 100% vegetarian diet with no hormones or antibiotics and that's good enough for me. The same chicken breasts sold at Whole Foods for $7.49 a pound, but by buying them in bulk we paid only $3.00 per pound! They came in 40 pounds boxes, and at that price we decided to buy two boxes. The kids and I drove out to Portland to pick it up, and came home with 80 pounds of fresh chicken breasts to repackage and freeze. In case you are wondering, yes. It is a WHOLE lot of chicken (my foot is in the picture for size reference):
After dinner Matthew and I got to work and set up our chicken packaging assembly line. He had bought a food vacuum sealer a few months ago for freezing his leftover hops, so we got that out and started cutting bags to size, filling them with 1 or two chicken breasts, and sealing them up:
It was a long, messy process and probably took us about 2 1/2 hours to complete. But the finished product was a freezer shelf full of vacuum sealed chicken breasts (with an additional 10 pounds of it in the door):
We are now A) Totally ready for summer BBQ'ing season and B) Living in fear of a extended power outage! I am so glad that we can fill up our freezer with meats from local farms who really care about how their animals are raised and who do it the right way (our grass fed beef and pastured pigs are from Barefoot Farm and Flowers). We truly enjoy supporting them, and we are grateful that we can feed our family such wonderfully nourishing foods.
So when the opportunity came up to make a bulk purchase of chicken breasts from a local food buying co-op, we jumped at the chance. The chicken wasn't labeled organic, but it was raised humanly on a 100% vegetarian diet with no hormones or antibiotics and that's good enough for me. The same chicken breasts sold at Whole Foods for $7.49 a pound, but by buying them in bulk we paid only $3.00 per pound! They came in 40 pounds boxes, and at that price we decided to buy two boxes. The kids and I drove out to Portland to pick it up, and came home with 80 pounds of fresh chicken breasts to repackage and freeze. In case you are wondering, yes. It is a WHOLE lot of chicken (my foot is in the picture for size reference):
After dinner Matthew and I got to work and set up our chicken packaging assembly line. He had bought a food vacuum sealer a few months ago for freezing his leftover hops, so we got that out and started cutting bags to size, filling them with 1 or two chicken breasts, and sealing them up:
It was a long, messy process and probably took us about 2 1/2 hours to complete. But the finished product was a freezer shelf full of vacuum sealed chicken breasts (with an additional 10 pounds of it in the door):
We are now A) Totally ready for summer BBQ'ing season and B) Living in fear of a extended power outage! I am so glad that we can fill up our freezer with meats from local farms who really care about how their animals are raised and who do it the right way (our grass fed beef and pastured pigs are from Barefoot Farm and Flowers). We truly enjoy supporting them, and we are grateful that we can feed our family such wonderfully nourishing foods.