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This month on Talk of the Town Appearance, I shared what my friends and I have just discovered to help cut back on our grocery budgets AND our cooking time in the kitchen: A food swap!
Since this was our first go-round, we decided to keep it easy and start with soup.
Here were the basic ‘rules’ of our soup swap:
-Fill two gallon bags (approx 3/4 full) of soup for each family and then freeze flat
-Use the most natural ingredients possible (e.g. butter, not margarine; no artificial sweetener; no processed ingredients, etc).
-If possible, attach any necessary directions (probably not a big deal for our soup round) and add a recipe card so we can re-create your delicious offering 😉
We did this with our small group, so at one meeting we came up with some mutually agreed upon soups to try to start out. They were:
Potato soup
Beef Vegetable soup
Chicken Tortilla Soup
White Chicken Chili
Chicken Tortellini soup
and of course, my Easy Lentil Soup Recipe
We meet every two weeks, so we decided to have everyone bring their soups to our next meeting. Taking into account that not everyone eats at home every night of the week and you’re going to want to eat some other things besides soup, we thought these would see us through about two weeks.
The beauty of this is that when you find something that’s on sale, you’re able to buy enough of it to feed all the families in your group and you don’t have to search for as many sales to fill out your weekly meal plan!
Here are some other soups we wanted to try but didn’t get assigned this time:
Pasta Fagioli soup
Italian Wedding soup
Broccoli cheese soup
Chicken Corn Chowder
Chili
Vegetable soup
Here’s the video from today’s show in case you missed it:
In our next food swap round, we’re hoping to try more main courses. We also discussed going to a restaurant supply store to get disposable food trays to freeze the dishes in.
It’s just great to know that you can spend one night cooking and end up with meals that will last your family almost two weeks! Of course the key here is to find enough people who you trust to ‘follow the rules’, deliver on time and stick with the program.
Have you ever tried anything like this?
I share my Meal Plans every week here on SamiCone.com, but keep in mind many of my dinners are based around eMeals (although they now offer breakfast & lunch plans too!).
