My $200 Freezers and $400 in FREE Groceries!

You might remember the Hy-Vee freezer deal that I talked about on Thursday. You purchase a 5.0 cubic feet deep freeze and you get $200 in Hy-Vee coupons for free food. Well, we decided that it was just too good to pass up so we went to town on Thursday evening to pick up one of these little cuties. When we got home we quickly unplugged our old beast of a freezer...

and transferred all of our frozen beef to the new freezer. After looking through the coupons a time or two, we realized that this was a REALLY great deal and thought hmmmm....should we go and get another? Well, if you know us you know our motto, "Go big or go home!" Of course we were going to get a second freezer! The next night we packed up the kids once again, hit up the Hy-Vee bakery for our free kids cookies and headed to the check-out to purchase our second $200 deep freeze and collected our second envelope filled with $200 in coupons. See how cute they are?

Knowing that finding all of the items in the coupon book would take a really long time, we decided that we would leave the kids with grandma while we did our FREE-coupon grocery shopping Sunday after church. That was probably one of the better decisions that we've made. I'm pretty sure that it took nearly 2.5 hours to find our items and check out with all of our coupons. We then had to head to another Hy-Vee in town to pick up a few items that the first store was sold out of. After a surprise flat tire, a trip to Wal-Mart to get it repaired, a romantic dinner date at Subway (while we waited for the tire to be fixed), a stop to pick up the kids and lots and lots and lots of unloading, this is what we ended up with:

 

You might not be able to tell it from this little picture, but my kids were really excited about all of the free ice cream, ice cream treats, granola bars, pizzas and other fun foods that we brought home. There are lots of items here that I would not typically buy, but they are going to be a nice treat for our family on special occassions. (I won't lie: I'm really looking forward to some mozzerella sticks and chicken tenders!) Oh, and a side note: I got two free half gallons of soy milk and that stuff is really, really good! I let the kids try it and they were fighting over who got the last little drop! I've got a ton of stuff here and I fully intend to use up as much as I can in next month's OAMC plan. I'm going to have to get creative, but I'm already thinking about how I can incorporate some of the items into my recipes. For instance; I'm going to use the vanilla flavored soy milk in my pancake mix. I'll cook up the sausage and use it in some yummy breakfast burritos and as a topping for homemade pizza. I plan on using the frozen veggies in shepherd's pie and tuna noodle casseroles. We are going to need to eat up a lot of stuff in our freezers though if I plan on making any more OAMC freezer meals. I have one freezer FULL of the free Hy-Vee food:

 

I have another freezer FULL of beef (and a few random items):

 

And yet another freezer FULL of OAMC meals, frozen veggies and bread:

 

  

You probably won't be surprised to find out that I'm going to do an "Eat From the Freezer" challenge this month huh? I am pretty sure that this is a ridiculous amount of food and there should be little or no reason for me to have to purchase anything other than milk, eggs, and fresh produce over the next few weeks. I've declared a self-imposed decrease in my grocery/toiletries budget for the next few weeks. Instead of $100/week I'm going to stick to a $50/week budget. This week I've spent $10 so far (on pop of course!). We need milk, apples, oranges, bananas and salad dressing before the week is over and if that is all we purchase, we should be well under budget! Did anyone else pick up a freezer at Hy-Vee this week or have ridiculously full freezer pics to share (so that I don't feel like a crazy hoarder)?