I don’t know about you but making a home cooked meal after I had my first baby was a rare occasion for the first few months. With Baby #2 due any day now, I made sure to stock up my freezer with lots of yummy meals so when the meals from family and friends stop coming my boys won’t have to go out and grab something or eat a sandwich every night.
Here are a few tips to help stock up your freezer with some yummy meals.
1. Eat half and freeze half. If you have a small family, make a full recipe, cook half of it as your dinner that night then freeze the other half. If you have a large family double the recipe, cook one recipe as your dinner then freeze the other half. This allows you to have one meal now and one meal later while only making one mess.
**With my first baby I doubled recipes and had 3-4 of one kind of a casserole in the freezer. We were sooooooo sick of it by the third time we pulled it out so this time I only did one of each dish in the freezer.
2. Label and date meals. I always put what meal is in the pan and the date I made it. I don’t really want to be eating year old chicken spaghetti. If I put that I cooked it on 1-19-14, then I know I want to eat it in the next few months after that.
3. Store in throwaway pans. I prefer to store my meals in throwaway pans because not only is it easy to pull the meal out of the fridge and cook, it eliminates having to do extra dishes too. My favorite pans to store meal in are these from Dollar Tree. They come in a pack of 3 for $1.00.
4. Store soups and meat in ziploc baggies. Soups make wonderful freezer meals. I like to put soups in gallon zip-loc bags then lay flat in the freezer to freeze. It takes up a lot less space than putting it in containers. I also like to stock up on boiled chicken, ground beef and ground turkey. It’s not technically a freezer meal, but it is the main part of a meal. I label the bag with what I plan on cooking. For example, a bag of ground beef might read “Ground Beef for Scramble Enchiladas” and a bag of boiled chicken might read “Chicken for Chicken Poppyseed Casserole”. This way I can run out to the freezer, grab some meat and have an idea of what to cook for dinner!
5. Freeze breakfast foods too! Dinner isn’t the only meal that you can freezer cook for……I love making mini loaves of banana bread, zucchini muffins, and sausage balls to throw in the freezer. It give us some variety in the mornings for breakfast and all I have to do is pull them out and warm them up! I also cooked up some breakfast sausage so I can easily throw it into a breakfast casserole one morning for breakfast.
6. Have a Table of Contents on your Freezer- I have an ongoing list of the meals and meats I have in my freezer. When I make the meal, I cross it off my list. This helps me from having to dig through my freezer to see what I have available. I can just look at my list and know exactly what our choices are.
7. Ideas of meals to freeze- Chicken Pot Pie, Red Beans & Sausage, Green Bean Casserole, Tator Tot Casserole, Tortilla Soup, Chicken Spaghetti, Chili, and Enchiladas. The list could go on an on. Soups and casseroles are definitely my favorite meals to freeze.
My absolute favorite freezer meal is Taco Soup. I always freeze one big helping for my family to eat another night but then I always make sure to freeze a few smaller zip-loc baggies ith “lunch portions” in it so I can have a nice warm lunch every now and then. Here is the recipe I use for taco soup…….
Taco Soup
1lb ground beef
1 can stewed tomatoes
1 can Ro-Tel tomatoes
2 cans whole kernel corn
1 can Ranch Style beans or chili beans
1 can black beans
1 can tomato sauce
1 pkg. taco seasoning
1 pkg. dry Ranch dressing mix
Brown meat and add taco seasoning. Add all cans of vegetables. Let it cook for about 30 minutes to 1 hr before adding the dry Ranch dressing mix. Cook a little long. We serve with sour cream, cheese & tortilla chips but it also tastes great with cornbread.
Do you have any freezer cooking tips?
What meals do you like to use when freezer cooking?
