Happy Friday everyone! Are you still with me on this Menu Planning thing? I hope so! Today is an easy one…Freezer Cooking.
The comment I most often hear when I discuss freezer cooking is “Oh I don’t have time for that. It takes so much time!”
Well, no disrespect meant to any of those people, but – wrong!
Do you have time to cook one meal? I hope you just said yes. If not, then go feed your family! They’re hungry!
😉
I’m sure most of you said yes. The good news is that if you have time to make one meal – you can totally be a freezer cook.
Here’s my secret. Ready? Double your recipe.
Yep. Really. It’s that simple. I’m not asking you to spend your weekend in the kitchen. I told you, I like to keep things simple. Think of it this way: The next time you’re planning a big Sunday meal for your family, double your protein. Are you making a roasted chicken? OK, great! Make two! One gets set out on the table for dinner, the other gets cooked, shredded, and carved and thrown into the freezer for later meals. Easy peasy!
And I speak from experience here: One roasted chicken can make up several meals for a small family. If you’re really adventurous, save the carcass too. You can boil it down later for broth.
Here’s another tip: Use your crock pot.
Every once in awhile, I throw the ingredients for my mother’s top secret spaghetti sauce into the crock pot and let it cook all day. Then, I let it cool down, throw it in a Food Saver bag, seal it, and let it freeze flat. It takes me 20 minutes of prep and I have a wonderful sauce that usually takes a couple of hours to cook. On a busy weeknight, I just plop the saucesicle in a pot and let it get saucy again (technical, huh?) while I heat up some noodles.
My last, and probably best tip: Save your holiday leftovers.
When I cook those big holiday meals for just the two of us, we usually have a TON of leftover meat. We just carve it up and throw it in Food Saver bags. I still literally have turkey from last Thanksgiving and ham from Christmas in my freezer. We use them to make soups. You can find two of our favorite recipes HERE and HERE
Our favorite things to freeze:
- Soups
- Pasta Sauces (sauce only, no noodles)
- Cooked meats like holiday leftovers
- Fresh veggies (You can find my tutorial on how to flash freeze HERE.)
It’s truly that easy. You can do this!
Questions? Comments? Totally bored of this series already? Let me know! Leave a comment below. 🙂
