52 weeks of Pinterest - Pin 2

I can already see keeping track of what week I'm on is going to be a disaster!  So instead I'm just hoping for 52 pins done by July of 2013.

My second pin to try was a recipe.  With an almost 4 year old and a very active 18 month old, prepping dinner is like war time in my house.  Trying to keep the little man from getting into everything, jumping off the back of the couch, burning himself on the stove, etc while trying to keep from ignoring my older child, who wants nothing more than to help with EVERYTHING, can be overwhelming, hectic, dangerous, and exhausting.  I'm in some serious need of easy to do meals, enter the crockpot.  And then say hello to crockpot freezer meals!  You prep all the veggies, meat, and seasonings for a whole bunch of crockpot meals all at once (only one mess to clean up!) then freeze them.  Defrost the day before, dump in the crockpot in the morning and a nice healthy warm dinner is ready when Daddy walks in the door.

I tried the Sausage and Peppers recipe from Ring Around the Rosies.  I did not make a bunch of recipes and freeze them, yet.  I figured I'd try a bunch, see which ones were keepers and then do a big prep day one weekend.  The resulting meal looked beautiful and smelled great.  I served it on a tortilla instead of over pasta or on crusty bread.

The overwhelming consesus was "Eh."  The taste was great and it wasn't spicy (I hate spicy food although J would rather a whole lot of spice).  The only problem was it was very watery.  I guess you need all that water to cook the sausage, but the sausage was overly waterlogged.  J said he'd much rather just grill some sausage and have me pan grill some peppers and onions, which would be a great option on the weekend, but it doesn't help my weekday cooking dilemma.  J did concede that if I made this during the week instead of another night of sloppy joes, he wouldn't complain!  In fact it would probably be rather nice on top of plain pasta where all that watery, tomatoey goodness could work as a sauce.