This week’s menu is all over the place as I’m trying to clean out our inside freezer. Our new meat shares will be ready shortly and I want to clean out the chest freezer and defrost it before adding our 2015 meat. We don’t have much left from 2014, but I need a little room inside to store what is left.

When I plan an ‘eat from the freezer’ week (usually once every few months) my goal is to clear out as much as I can and shop for as little as possible. I create a list of what I have and look for recipes that will use the ingredients, or just make them up.

One jar of chicken broth and a bag of frozen cauliflower is in the fridge, turned into one of my favorite fall soups, Golden Cauliflower Soup. One of the few bonuses to rainy, cold season is that I start making and consuming a lot of broth.

For Sunday dinner we enjoyed this recipe for beef shank. A friend at work gave me a sugar pumpkin and I made my own puree with it for the first time. As a side to the beef shank we had pumpkin spaghetti squash, featuring the puree. With the rest of the pumpkin and a big chuck steak (not pictured) that I ground up, I’m making pumpkin chili for dinner tonight and lunches the rest of the week.

I made an egg casserole with the shredded sweet potatoes and cubed pork for our weekday breakfasts. Greg is now eating breakfast (yay! my first NTP success!), but that means I have to have ten servings of breakfast ready to go each week. Two big casseroles is usually the easiest way to make that happen and we end up with a two extra serving bonus for the next week. I cleaned out my spice cupboard on Saturday (a project I started back in March and maybe will get around to sharing on the blog before the new year) and found a few spice blends that need to be used. I added one of the mixes and extra veggies from the weekend. Casserole done.

For weekend breakfasts we had sugar-free bacon, eggs, sauerkraut, and potatoes. I don’t have them pictured above, but the remaining PreMade Paleo meals are defrosting in the fridge for any time one of us is eating alone or needs a quick meal. I’m on a four meal a day plan some days (finally gave into four meals versus a ton of snacking) and I defrosted a bit of carne asada that can top a salad. I also defrosted what appears to be meatballs (in the jar on the right). I didn’t do a great job of labeling so I’m not positive what they are, but hopefully they are tasty.

Towards the end of the week I’ll defrost salmon and pork chops for dinners. And we don’t eat all meat around here, there is plenty of veg in the fridge from my CSA box. We have lots of winter squash, beets, potatoes, and salad and spinach for greens. The freezer is looking better, though I’ll probably need to do a second week to make enough space for the chest freezer contents. Oh the trials of an urbanite who likes to pretend she’s a homesteader…

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I’m going into the final few days of my Whole30. This has been by far the fastest one has ever gone by. Between the craziness of the month and dietary restrictions due to pregnancy anyway (i.e. no booze), it seems like I just started. I’ll be doing a big recap post next week once I’m done.

The only noteworthy moments from this week are that I finally ate out after 25 days of only cooking my own food. Not sure that I’ve ever gone 25 days without eating out. I can say that it felt great AND our credit card bill notices the difference! I had a little meat at a friend’s on Saturday and Greg and I had Chipotle for lunch on Sunday while car seat shopping. Things are just getting crazy around here.

Have a great week!