Save on Groceries with Bulk Cooking

From walking in the door with groceries in hand to sitting down with a cold drink, while multiple meals prepare themselves, can take less than an hour...and will cut actual daily meal preparation to 30 minutes or less...and will cost much less than the frozen time-savers we buy.

2 KEY TIME/MONEY SAVING TIPS ARE:
1) Instead of purchasing for daily meals, buy what is needed for your "go-to" meal "basics" like roast beef, spaghetti sauce, bar-b-que, etc.
2) Use several cooking methods at once: stove top, oven, crock pot.

My shopping list for the day included a 5+ lb. Pork Roast (Boston Butt) which is in the crock pot, 14 lbs. of Chicken now stewing on the stove top, and 6 1/2 lbs of Beef Chuck roasting in the oven, 10 lbs of Ground Beef - half made into patties and frozen for hamburgers, the other half browned with salt, pepper, chopped onion and minced garlic (1/2 of which is cooling to be packaged for the freezer, enough for 24-36 servings of some future something), while the remainder is simmering spaghetti sauce, enough for 4 meals each serving 4-6.(If I had bought more ground beef, I could easily have put a Classic Southern Meat Loaf or two in the oven to cook along with the roast)

MY SHOPPING/COOKING DAY MINI-DETAILS 

1)   I cut the fat from the huge pork roast and salted it heavily to make salt-pork before putting the lean roast in the 6 qt. crock pot. 
2)  I cooled and de-boned the chicken (using only boneless breasts and regular thighs made that a quick process), cubed some of the chicken & shredded some, and packaged for future use in Casseroles, Chicken Enchiladas - Our Way, or Tacos and added some back to the broth for soup. 
3)  I shaped 20 - 1/4lb. hamburger patties using a plastic, $3 kitchen scale.
4)  My total time in the kitchen was less than an hour getting things started and another 2 1/2 hours finishing up specific items and packaging for the freezer.
5)  The total spent for the items on my list, including tax, was $91.46. Of that, $51.09 was spent for meat, $40.37 for the other list items. 
6)  My yield for time and money spent was:

Chopped pork and pulled pork bar-b-que - 40 servings. 

Sliced roast beef w/ gravy - 20 servings. 

Cubed roast beef for stew - 6 servings. 

Cubed and sliced chicken - 24 servings. 

Spaghetti sauce - 16 servings. 

Prepared ground beef for 'helper' type meals - 20 servings. 

Hamburger patties - 18 servings. 

Chicken n' dumplings - 12 servings. 

Chicken vegetable/noodle soup - 12 servings. 

OR

168 main dish servings for about $.30 per serving. Turning these frozen, prepared meats into full meals like casseroles, tacos, enchiladas, can be accomplished quickly and for very little additional cost.

Link to Chicken Stock vs. Chicken Broth here.