I've had so many people asking me about freezer cooking lately, that I figured I'd just go ahead and do a blog post on it. I'm no expert, but I'm happy to share my experience in excessive detail in the hopes that it may inspire someone else to go and be even more awesome with freezer cooking than me. :)
I started dabbling in freezer cooking just a few months ago. Since I started working 40-48 hours a week plus an hour commute there and back, cooking has really gone to the backburner (no pun intended..). Aaron never cares what we eat, but even he was starting to get sick of the Stouffers lasagna and Digiorno pizzas that we'd started living off of. My Aunt Lisa is also a very busy working woman and I emailed her and asked for her advice. She sent me a few recipes for freezer meals, so I gave it a try. I spent about 3 hours after work one day cooking them, and had two 9x13 pans of goulash and four bags of chicken cacciatore crockpot meals at the end of it. It was so nice having go-to meals for the next week or two, that I decided to expand into it more intensely. A few years ago I had a visiting teacher, Shantelle McBride, recommend 30 Day Gourmet Big Book of Freezer cooking. I had never done freezer cooking, but I remembered that my former neighbor, Kirsten Slevin, had done it a lot and loved it. So I had added it to my Amazon wishlist for "someday". Well, "someday" finally came! I put it on my Christmas list and my mother-in-law purchased it for me. I started reading it a lot and planning my big cooking day (Aaron would make fun of me because I mostly read it at night in bed, haha, but in my defense that's the only time I had to to read!). Those are the events that led me into freezer cooking. Now to the good stuff...
PLANNING
First thing about freezer cooking is that it is not something you wake up one morning and just do. There's a lot of planning and preparation involved, but it's all so worth it. I should add here that I'm one of those crazy planning people, so I probably over-planned. You might actually have to do less than what I did, but I'll tell you what I did anyway because it worked for me. The 30 Day Gourmet Big Book of Freezer Cooking is not just a recipe book. It walks you through the whole process. There are planning worksheets and tips and all sorts of awesome things. Seriously, get this book. I have the ring bound one, which is great. You might not be able to get the book for a while though... It's currently out of stock on pretty much every website (told you it's good!), including Amazon (which is where mine was purchased from - thank you to my very sweet mother-in-law!). There's a Kindle version too for $10, if that's your thing. Apparently you can go on the book's website and download a sample of the book (15 pages) and also get on the waiting list for when the book is back in stock.
Anyway, as you'll learn in the book, you can choose to do group/partner cooking or cook on your own. If you cook with a group you need to find people with a similar size family as you and who like the same recipes. I opted for cooking alone because I have extremely limited free time and sometimes have to work overtime on Saturdays, so it's hard to coordinate schedules for grocery shopping and cooking. Plus I don't know any families of only two like us. Also I think I'd be too polite to tell someone I didn't want to make their recipe and then I'd end up with a freezer full of food I don't want. That said, I'm sure having someone else in the kitchen would have made some things go a lot smoother and it would have been fun. But I enjoyed rocking out to my music and having the time to myself :) You can do whatever suits you, like I said, I went for the loner option and loved it. The next step was choosing the recipes I wanted to do. I just went through the book one evening and put sticky notes on each recipe that looked like something we would like. Then I went back through more carefully and paid close attention to the instructions on serving day. (There are instructions for assembly, freezing and serving). Serving was where I had the least amount of time so I only wanted the recipes with instructions that were something like "thaw, bake and serve", nothing much more complicated was going to work for us. So that eliminated a few. Then I just went through and picked out about eight recipes for the big day. I also tried to find things with similar core ingredients so I could buy in bulk. So I picked out hamburger based recipes instead of chicken for this time around. But still made sure the recipes varied enough so we weren't eating all the same things.
SHOPPING
For my grocery shopping list I actually did a chart ahead of time and made sure I had the right amount of everything for what I was doubling and tripling, etc. I then took my list and went around my kitchen and marked off what I already had. I also organized my list based on what section of the store I knew it was in... I told you, I'm a planner! You probably don't have to be that extreme about your list, but it was so much food to purchase, it ended up being really helpful to have it organized like that.
I had this great plan to go to Costco to buy the meat in bulk and a few other things, and then hit WalMart for the rest, but I was so pressed for time that I had to make it a one stop shop at WalMart. I know I spent more on the hamburger as a result, but it was worth it to save time. I probably spent about $60 on meat alone. I also had to buy more than just food. Since this was my first time around, I had to buy freezer bags as well. I opted for bulk on those and spent about $40 just on freezer bags, but I'm good for probably six months and I got all different sizes (1qt, 1gallon and 2gallon).
Oh my goodness - I wish I had taken a picture of how full my cart was!! People looked at me like a crazy person, it's a good thing I didn't get a single extra thing, it wouldn't have fit! Anyway, the entire grocery trip, NOT including the freezer bags, was $300 - and that was two months worth of dinners for two. NOT BAD!
Quick financial note... we have already saved so much money by doing freezer cooking! I will say that it's hard to appreciate it after your very first shopping trip because you haven't saved yet and suddenly you spend a lot more at once than you normally do, so it may feel a little tight for the first week or two and you'll really be hoping it's worth it! But a less than month into it you'll see the savings as you're suddenly not going to the grocery store for much more than milk and bread for a couple months at a time and it will be SO WORTH IT.
Our fridge was pretty stocked between shopping day and cooking day!
First thing to do on your cooking day is to eat a big meal! You want to be well fed to get through your day. Also, don't plan anything else that day. It will probably take longer than you think and it will just stress you out if you have to stop right in the middle of one of your recipes. Anyway, day one I spent about eight hours cooking. The first couple of hours were spent chopping 12 onions and browning 9lbs of hamburger. Those are easily my two least favorite things to do in the kitchen!! So that was not fun... but I did it at the beginning on purpose so that it was out of the way and the rest of the day when I needed those ingredients, they were already available. My onion chopper broke half way through so I used my Ninja for the rest of them...it worked but it was as clean of a dicing job. I think I'm going to be investing in a decent onion chopper/dicer before my next cooking day.
This was my kitchen about halfway through the first cooking day --
I tried to clean up as I went along, but I was always doing at least two recipes at once so it was tricky. I was glad I had cleaned my counters really thoroughly before starting because things got so crazy that the food definitely was directly on the counters more than once. I really had to think ahead about pans and pots and I coordinated in advance to know what order to cook things in and what I was using for everything which really helped a lot!
The Ninja was PERFECT for blending the spinach and cottage cheese into the paste for my spaghetti pie recipe.
Anyway, by the end of day one I had made two 9x13 lasagnas, two 9x13 size spaghetti pie casseroles, 8 gallon size bags of cheese vegetable soup (I know, 8!!), and I'd started the crockpot to cook the roast beef overnight.
I should add that I made labels for everything which had the thawing/serving directions on it so that I don't have to pull the cookbook out to know what I'm doing every time I pull something out of the freezer. Plus it's amazing how easy it is to forget what's what. Also, when it's labeled it's really easy to assign my husband to be in charge of dinner because everything he needs to know is right in front of him! Or if you give one of your meals away (freezer cooking really helps make it easier for you to help others out when things come up because you have a meal ready to go!) then the directions are right there for them.
COOKING - DAY 2
I didn't take any pictures on this day, sorry. First of all, I did this on a 3 day weekend so that's why I had two days (thank you Presidents Day!). I'm glad I did that because I didn't think it would take so long! On day 2 the cooking went much quicker and smoother. I probably cooked for about six hours this time and by the end of the day I had finished up the roast beef sandwiches (enough for about 40 small sandwiches), 3 freezer bags of wet tacos, 3 freezer bags of stuffed bell peppers, four gallon size bags of broccoli cheddar soup, three gallon bags of homemade macaroni and two freezer cheesecakes!
Aaron was out picking up some computer parts that day so he was able to stop and pick me up some spring form pans that I needed for the cheesecakes. If you plan to make them, you just can't do it without a spring form pan. I lucked out and got mine on clearance at WalMart for $6 each! I ordered them online and Aaron just had to run in and pick them up already paid for. It worked out well :)
Day 2 of cooking went a lot smoother than day 1, but keep in mind that I had prepped the onion and hamburger ingredients on day 1, so that helped a lot! It might help your cooking day to have a couple hours of a prep evening to get all your meat browned and veggies chopped the night before. Depends on your recipes. One other tip for cooking days is that you want to make sure you have a dinner plan. I already mentioned eating a good breakfast. You'll probably skip lunch because you'll be full from your awesome breakfast and might snack as you cook, but you'll be starving by dinnertime and the last thing you'll want to do is either cook more, or eat one of your freezer meals before you freeze it! You totally can if you want, but I didn't want to. I just put all that effort into making it freeze-able and I'm not even going to freeze it?? Nope, not happening. So on Day 1 Aaron brought home some Taco Bell or something, and on Day 2 we actually ate the roast beef sandwiches. That was an exception to my issue of not wanting to eat the freezer meals because there was a huge crockpot full of the stuff and it hadn't been put into the freezer bags and labeled yet. Anyway, just be sure to think ahead about that. Having leftovers from a previous meal available in the fridge is probably the best way to go if possible. Oh also make sure you drink tons of water while you're cooking. Have a water bottle! I tried having a glass of water, but there's so much flying around that something will get in it (gross...) so a water bottle of ice water is a great way to go. It's easy to get dehydrated when you're in a hot kitchen for that long. I also found it very helpful to blast my 80s music all day long, that last tip is optional, but you'll miss out on all kinds of awesome if you skip it :)
RECIPES
Okay so having now tasted all of these new recipes, I thought I'd provide some feedback in case you do get this awesome book and want to try the same ones. The spaghetti pie was really easy (and actually fun!) to make and it's a new family favorite. It's yummy! The wet tacos are delicious! They're basically little burritos with sauce on top...kind of a taco meets enchilada kind of meal. The sauce is amazing - I definitely recommend it. The wet tacos list serving sizes based on one "taco" per person, but we eat two per person for a normal sized dinner - just a tip. And I thought they would need sour cream or something to top them off, but they don't. They're delicious all on their own! The freezer cheesecake is ... unbelievable. It's SO delicious! I top it with Duncan Hines Wilderness toppings. We did Berry Medley and Raspberry, both yummy. When freezing the cheesecake, I froze it in sections. I kept one half in the fridge to eat right away, froze one half all together, then froze two quarter sizes and also four individual slices. I also put the toppings in containers, labeled them and froze them. The stuffed bell peppers is the only recipe we didn't like at all. Aaron didn't mind it eating it, but didn't like it, and I just won't even eat it. Probably just personal taste - we're not huge fans of cooked bell pepper I guess. Anyway, the homemade macaroni and cheese was one of the easiest things I've EVER made. You make it in the crockpot and it's super easy. I have a huge crockpot though and could only fit a doubled recipe, so be aware of that when planning your portions. A doubled recipe still makes 3 gallon-size freezer bags worth though so it's plenty. It's really delicious too! I was very impressed. Aaron even likes it and he doesn't normally like macaroni. I really like the broccoli cheddar soup a lot! Aaron didn't really like it though, he didn't mind it, but it wasn't his favorite. It was more complicated to make so it probably won't be a common recipe for us, but I'll still probably do it again sometime because I really enjoyed it. The cheese vegetable soup is not a recipe from the freezer cooking book and it is not a new recipe for our family. I actually got it off of Traci Monson's blog over a year ago and it's one of our favorite family recipes now! (Thanks Traci!) Turns out it's even more delicious after it's been frozen! I guess soup gets thicker when you freeze it and reheat it. So good! Aaron is a HUGE fan of this soup so it's always a winner. I always triple the recipe so it takes FOREVER to thicken (about a half hour) which is frustrating while cooking it, but then it lasts forever because it fills eight gallon-size freezer bags! I'll also put some in quart size bags for lunches too. Which reminds me... another tip so you don't have to think about having rolls on hand is to buy the Pillsbury rolls from the store... I hope you know what I'm talking about. The ones you can pop the dough out of the cylinder thing and just bake them for a while (lol, I'm inventing terminology now...). They're easy to keep on hand and don't take long to bake - then you have fresh rolls to go with the soup! The roast beef sandwiches were not my favorite, but Aaron really liked them a lot, so I put enough for 2 sandwiches in a bunch of quart size bags and froze them, now he has a go-to meal for lunches at work! It works well. The lasagna was okay. We're not huge fans but we didn't hate it. It was easy so we might do it again, but it's not a favorite by any means. I think that's all of them! Let me know if there's any recipe you'd like me to send you a copy of and I'll be sure to get it to you.
I will add that one of my favorite things about freezer cooking is that even though it's really easy to make meals each day, you don't have to! At least, we don't have to. There's just two of us, so if we pull a 9x13 pan of something out of the freezer, thaw it overnight and stick it in the oven the next day, that makes three meals for us. So we can put it back in the fridge and a couple of days later we have leftovers, as well as a couple of days after that. Once we're in a rotation, on any given day we have 3-4 meals in the fridge available to pull out and eat. It's awesome.
Spaghetti pie - tastes better than it looks! :)
FREEZING TIPS
I mentioned how freezer cooking makes it easy to give meals to others, so in that spirit, I made a couple of my meals in foil 9x13 pans so they were easier to give away if necessary - plus the 2 gallon bags will only fit 9x13 pans that do not have handles so I needed some extra pans without handles to fit since 2 gallon bags are the best way to freeze 9x13 dishes. Anyway, those foil pans are a little flimsy, so I put them on cookie sheets and froze them in our freezer in the kitchen over night before moving them to the chest freezer to prevent them from freezing lopsided. Another amazing tip is one I got from my Aunt Lisa. When freezing soup or anything else soft, lay the bag on a cookie sheet and freeze it overnight so that then your bags are frozen in straight, stack-able shapes. It makes it so much easier to store in the freezer that way!! Speaking of freezers...you'll need one! haha, yah in case you weren't sure... that's a big factor :) We got a 7.2 cu ft chest freezer from Best Buy for under $200, but that was back when I had a discount, so it may be a little more. Not sure what the retail price was. You can get a good one for around the same size for under $250 though. I think a chest freezer works great because it's not a big deal to stack everything and you can fit a lot in them. Just as long as you have your planning worksheet so you know what's in there, because it's easy for things to get lost. Upright freezers are easier to organize, but don't hold as much per cubic foot and they're more expensive.
BREAKFAST
One quick tip for breakfasts is that I made a whole bunch of "fluff" and put it in smaller containers and had breakfast for a couple of weeks! Don't freeze fluff! This is a quick stray from freezer cooking, but it's related because I did it on my cooking day to prep for the weeks ahead and you may want to do something similar. Peach fluff is really easy, it's just cool whip, cottage cheese, peaches and peach jello mix. I used light cool whip and fat free cottage cheese so I kept track of everything I put in and when I double the recipe below and divide it into six containers, each container is about 500 calories (533 if you're being specific) :) But 200 of those calories are just from the peaches. I bring a container to work and it takes me 2-3 days to eat it all because I eat while I'm waiting for things to load on the computer and sometimes I get too busy to eat much. So if you're only eating half (which is a decent amount for breakfast, I think) it's a quick, yummy 250 calorie breakfast! Peach Fluff:
1 (16 oz.) carton Cool Whip
1 (16 oz.) carton cottage cheese
1 pkg. peach Jello
1 lg. can sliced peaches, drained
For those of you who just want the quick version... :)
Freezer cooking is AWESOME and saves you time and money. Buy the Big Book of Freezer Cooking (if you can...it's out of stock online, but apparently you can get on a waiting list). I spent two days cooking (total of about 14 hours) and made nine recipes (all of the recipes were at least doubled, if not tripled or more). The groceries for the nine recipes cost $300 and I made two 9x13 lasagnas, two 9x13 size spaghetti pie casseroles, 8 gallon size bags of cheese vegetable soup, roast beef sandwiches (enough for about 40 small sandwiches), 3 gallon size freezer bags of wet tacos, 3 gallon size freezer bags of stuffed bell peppers, four gallon size bags of broccoli cheddar soup, three gallon bags of homemade macaroni and two freezer cheesecakes! The meals lasted for two months of dinners for two. Now I should clarify that I say they lasted two months, but there are some things to factor in to this. Since we saved so much money doing freezer cooking, we actually go out to eat more. We get Qdoba or something about once a week (we have awesome Qdoba coupons!), so that's one meal a week out of the running. We also will still occasionally do a frozen pizza or fish fillets or something. Plus once in a blue moon (twice a month?) I actually want to cook a meal so we'll make up some squash, potatoes and rice or something simple and yummy. When you don't have to cook at all anymore, it's suddenly a pleasure to be able to do it every now and again. Then again, another thing to consider is that the roast beef sandwiches were only used for Aaron's lunches so I didn't count them in our two months of dinners. That accounts for very little cooking time, but for at least $30 of groceries. So anyway, it may not be a "true" two months of meals, but I started this on Feb 18 and it's April 4 and I'm still a good couple of weeks away from having to do another cooking day. Not only do I have money to spare in my grocery budget, but I've spent almost no time on meal preparation or asking myself "what should we do for dinner??" in the last couple of months!
Dinner prep in our house is simply a matter of picking something off the list on the fridge, sticking it in the fridge the night before, then popping it in the oven the day of. So easy, so awesome. Best thing I ever did. You should do it too :) The end.
