"perfect portion" bags

 We apologize for being a little MIA lately…. Niki's husband had shoulder surgery and I have been a little softball crazy lately.  So the other day I had a moment of pure genius after my shopping trip.

 Let me explain…

I started like this:

This was just a short shopping trip…just buying the things that were on sale that we needed, and nothing more. So I just had a quick written list on notebook paper instead of the list that I normally use

 (this one)

Then I hopped into my vehicle with my lists and off I went.

Next comes the genius part….I came home with chicken breast and ground beef…lots of it.

While I was shopping, I was dead set on getting some of those ziplock perfect portion bags. We buy a lot of chicken at a time but rarely use the entire package at once, so it seemed like a brilliant idea.

Only problem is, there were no glad perfect portion bags to be found. Here comes the genius part: the fold top sandwich bags!! Perfect and I'm sure much cheaper!

So when I got home, I had my packages of chicken:

Got gallon size bags and labeled them:

Then comes the sandwich bags:

Just flip them inside out and grab each chicken breast and close it up. Easy Peasy. Just take out what you need for each meal. No need to thaw an entire package when you only need two.

Same thing works for ground beef. We buy the tubes when they are on sale…cheaper just not as convenient. 

I divide them into labeled one or two pound packages. I don't weigh each section, I just divide it into 5 or 10 even-ish sections and bag them up.

I'm sure so many other people are already doing this…but I was pretty happy with myself at the time. I think I will enjoy the convenience, over the time it took to package things up (which didn't actually take that long).

What other brilliant ideas do you have?? Feel free to share!