First Meals in New House! Freezer Meals

I've got some fun pics to share with you today! They're back from mid-June when we were moving into the house and some of our first meals. After many moves (almost yearly since college) I felt like everything came together that I'd learned from those past moves and this was a fairly seamless move. Many thanks to my mom for coming up the week after everything was out of the old house and helping us give it a thorough cleaning - due to all of our efforts we received our full security deposit back! I feel like this rarely happens ... there's always that random $50 stove-cleaning fee that they seem to always think is necessary to take out. The one thing I had blocked out from previous moves was how long it took to unpack! Felt like that took quite awhile.

One thing that is most important to me during a move is making sure we can stay somewhat normal in our eating habits. My body does not like eating out for a week straight - there are the days leading up to the move because everything is packed away and then the days afterwards when you're getting the kitchen set up. I did my best to avoid this scenario by prepping some freezer meals. All of my freezer meals can be found on this pdf document. What a life saver these were! I made Hungry Jack casserole, meatballs and sauce, Baked Cheesy Chicken Penne, and breakfast English muffins. More special thanks to my mom who helped assemble these things. And - exciting news here, folks - we have a garage freezer! I whipped up all these freezer meals at our old house before move and then drove them over to the new house.


So we moved and things looked like this:


Fortunately we were able to set up a table in our "formal" dining room and we made a big effort to always keep this table clean so that we could have somewhere to sit and eat because it took awhile to figure out where all that stuff should go.

One of our very first meals in the house was Baked Cheesy Chicken Penne! And it was delicious. It has sun-dried tomatoes in it. We learned that we needed to allow ample time for the freezer meal to either thaw or cook for extra time. Sometimes we would be super hungry and think we could just put one in the toaster oven and eat in a short amount of time ... boy was that a miscalculation on our part!



Our move day was the weekend after my parent's anniversary. They celebrated it in Asheville and stopped by to visit on their way home to check out the new place. They brought us some fancy beer from Biltmore - Cedric's Pale Ale - which we enjoyed with our freezer meal after a hard day of unpacking.


Then after we were a bit more "settled" and felt like we could use some pots and pans we were able to make this pasta with salad. This is actually a frozen pasta saute from Trader Joe's that I purchased prior to move-in and stashed in the freezer for a quick meal. Even though pots and pans were in their places at this point we were still worn out from our hard work and didn't quite have the energy to also prep a recipe. This was a great mid-way transition meal to taking over our kitchen.



I know I just said that we kept the dining room table clean so we could eat on it but we made this on a Monday night and Bachelor was on so eating on the coffee table was a splurge!


Do you have any tips and tricks for making moving easier?

2 comments:

  1. Let one of the first things you do be to put sheets on the bed so when you are tired and ready to head to bed you don't have to find sheets and make up a bed.

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  2. Moving can be a stressful time. But it looks like you have all been pulling your weight and doing your best!Don't worry about having a 'formal dining room'. Just take it easy and don't push yourselves too hard in the future. Enjoy the moving experience and get your house exactly how you want it. Although eat before doing any heavy lifting to give you lots of energy!

    Willard Evans @ Wow! Homes

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