DeeDoo’s Digital Scrapbooking Blog

The frozen diet meals have been a tremendous success – so far. One of the frozen meals I’ve purchased is a Meatloaf Dinner, which consists of meatloaf, whipped potatoes, and broccoli. Don loves a new meatloaf recipe we tried recently, so I decided to try my hand at preparing that meatloaf, together with some whipped potatoes, then measure and divide them into my version of portion-controlled (and calorie controlled) meals.

I decided not to bore you with a series of photos showing the preparation of the food – I’m sure almost everyone knows how to prepare meatloaf and mashed potatoes!! I simply counted all of the calories for each ingredient in the meatloaf and arrived at a grand total. I did the same with the whipped potatoes. I did control what I put into each food; no butter in the potatoes, just 2% milk, and lean ground beef for the meatloaf, and removal of ALL cooked-off fat. Simply put, I exercised self control in the areas I knew were fat and/or calorie traps.

Then I did some quick calculations to determine how each of the foods should be portioned into my individual meal containers to attain the total number of calories I wanted for each meal. I ended up dividing the meatloaf and the potatoes into 13 portions. This worked out to approximately 290 calories for each meal. I then double-wrapped each meal with Best Value brand clear plastic wrap – it is microwave safe for about 2-3 minutes on high, so I thought it would work just fine. Once wrapped, I popped all 13 dinners into the freezer. Voila! Done! It didn’t take much time or effort at all. AND I won’t have to actually cook to enjoy these; we’ll just reheat in the microwave when needed. I LOVE being able to avoid the kitchen and it’s mess when I have so many other things on my to-do list!

Now we have some tasty ‘diet’ dinners to enjoy. But, just for fun, I decided to calculate the cost of the ingredients used in these two foods so I could determine my total cost per dinner. Imagine my shock to discover that, REALLY, each dinner cost me about fifty cents!! Shock and awe. I knew it was cheaper to cook and eat at home, but compare the cost of each of these at fifty cents to the packaged meatloaf dinner at $1.80 each, and you see what a savings can be had by doing it yourself!

I plan to expand my diet dinner experiment to include spaghetti and lasagna, and possibly pot roast, because they all are relatively easy to create and calculate. However, I will continue to purchase the prepared meals from the grocery store – things like rigatoni and other pasta dishes that I am not in the mood to try cooking on my own yet. But, who knows? Maybe next week I’ll be whipping up massive quantities of chicken and noodles for our homemade diet stash!