Tea Party

On Sunday we had our monthly Girls Night, except it was more of a Girls Morning! Elyse hosted a mad hatter tea party for us where we dressed up for a late morning tea & some tasty treats. Afterward we decorated our own tea cups. It was a really fun get together and something totally different than what we have done in the past. Actually all of our get togethers have been very unique and different from each other. Anyway here are a couple of snapshots from our latest get together. 

Freezer Meals

Last week I got busy with a few freezer meals. I saw on a friends Facebook that she had pre-made meals so that on hot summer days she didn't have to worry about cooking. Pull it out of the freezer, bake, and voila! So I did a bit of searching on Pinterest for recipes, as well as used my own and came up with this list of meals:

CrockPot

Lazy Day Stew

Healthy Mama BBQ chicken

Cheesy Chicken

Slow Cooker Spagetti

Bake and Serve

Hashbrown Pizza

Turkey Pot Pie

Beef and Vegetable Pie

Chedder and Cracker Chicken

Lasagna

Chicken Lasagna

Sheperds Pie

Hamburger Pie

Reheat and Serve

Chicken Salsa

Ham Chowder 

In total this list produced 26 frozen meals! On top of this I will be able to send Sandy out to the Barbecue and thus drastically reducing my number of evenings spent cooking! 

A few of the recipes I found on the internet so try clicking on some of the recipes and they will take you to the website I found them on. Some of the other recipes I found in a company's coming cookbook (all about cooking with ground beef) and the rest are family recipes. You don't have to make "freezer meals" in order to freeze them. I made a lot of one dish meals like lasagna, pies, and casseroles. I basically prepared and cooked what needed to be done ahead of time and then stopped at the baking step. Instead of baking the dish I sealed it up and put it in the freezer (but of course wrote the bake instructions on the front of the bag first). I think you can basically make anything into a freezer meal! I have a nephew on the way in a few weeks and am going to make my sister-in-law a bunch of meals for when baby gets here, but I think I will try more slow cooker meals for her. Much easier to thaw, dump, and slow cook! Another thing I did was prepare all the meals in disposable baking dishes (the tinfoil round and square dishes) so that we can simply eat and toss. No muss to fuss! 

Anyway that is it for my freezer cooking attempt number 1. I will DEFINITELY be doing this with baby number two, it just makes life so easy! 

Prepping for the cooking frenzy! Laying out all the
ingredients for each meal

A few of the crock pot meals complete

The grand finale! 26 meals later

Training Weekend

This past weekend we had a training weekend for our ultramarathon coming up in a few weeks. The race takes place in the Crowsnest Pass so we spent the weekend in Canmore hiking two mountains to prepare for the change in altitude and the hiking conditions that the race will present. It was a big weekend for training but also a big weekend because it was my first time away from Al for more than 24 hours. Daddy did a great job and everyone survived but it definitely marked a milestone. I have spent today trying to take care of the tornado that must have hit the house while I was gone but at least my little guy is in one piece (with only a few scratches).  Only five members of our team were able to make it this weekend but it still proved to be a good team bonding experience. There was definitely a wide variety in our group of age, athletic ability, relationships to one another, and maybe even sense of humour? But it proved that under stressful (mental and physical) conditions we are still a great team and group of friends / mother-daughters. We did two scramble hikes: Lady MacDonald and China Man's Peak. Here are some pictures from our hiking trip, Enjoy!

And just a side note, I haven't picked up my point and shoot camera in quite a while now, and boy can I tell the difference. My DSLR was just too much to carry up the mountain and sadly I think I missed out on some great shots! But these pictures are still great memories captured on the ol' pink Canon!