My Day of Freezer Meal Preparation

Lately I've seen a lot of people doing the freezer meals, where they make a bunch of meals in one day and then they don't have to cook for a while- they just pull out a meal every day and it's pre-made, ready to simply cook and eat!

So I wanted to try it! So I did!

I looked at a lot of blogs looking for the best tips & what was best to do. I'm no expert or anything, but this is what I did. Hopefully you can learn some good tips of what to do (and what NOT to do!). 

First, it takes a lot of preparation before hand. You need to figure out what recipes you want to make, and how much of each food item you will need to buy.

I found this girl's blog where she has downloadable planning sheets that I used and actually helped me a lot!

For my recipes, I used mainly (a) a family cookbook, (b) one of my favorite cookbooks - which my super cute aunt Tami is the author of, which you can see at the bottom of this post (c) my cute mom (d) And as always, I used Pinterest and tried some new recipes! 
After doing this step, I had 13 meals planned (a few of them were the same recipe that I doubled to make two meals), plus a bunch of twice-baked potatoes. So you can get an idea, some of the recipes I did were: Taco Soup, Chili, Beef Stew, Stroganoff, Chicken Tortilla Soup in Tami's cookbook, Apricot Chicken, Creamy Chicken, "Dinner in One Pot" in Tami's cookbook, Garlic Brown Sugar Chicken (found on Pinterest, here is the link so you can repin it - it was a good one!), etc. Most of my recipes were crockpot recipes. I LOVE crockpot recipes, they were beyond easy. All I had to do was take it out of the freezer, empty it into the crockpot, and eat it 8 hours later. 
I. Love. Crockpots. 

 When I was figuring out how much food I needed to buy, I basically just made a basic list of things I knew I needed to buy at the store (onions, potatoes, carrots, chicken breasts, chicken soup mix, etc) and then went through each recipe and put tallies next to each item on the list. Then I knew how many of each item I needed total, and I added to the list when there was something I hadn't put on the list already. Also remember that you probably already have a lot of the staple items already, like seasonings, flour, corn, ranch dressing, etc.

Then go grocery shopping! And since you will probably be buying a lot of things, try to find good deals!
If you haven't seen my blog post about price matching, click HERE to read it - you're gonna wanna do it if you're buying lots of stuff for this! I bought tons of ground beef for super cheap, tons of chicken for really cheap, tons of vegetables for way cheap, so if there's one time you're going to want to save money, it's for this! 
Here is everything I bought/used to prepare my meals. I don't know exactly, but I'm guessing I spent about $75 for everything. A lot of the stuff I didn't use all of - like ranch dressing, french dressing, salsa, chicken, etc. 

In preparation, also make sure you have enough time. It took me a lot longer than I expected - like 7 hours! Next time it would be a lot quicker, but for your first time plan a little more time than you think. 
Also make sure you make room in your freezer. I didn't think about that part, and my freezer was full to the brim for a while!
I would say the preparation is the hardest part - making sure you have enough of everything, making sure you remember to get everything you need for each recipe, going to the grocery store & getting it all! Then all you have left is preparing it all - which is the other half :)
I started by scrubbing my potatoes for my twice baked potatoes - so they could be cooking while I am preparing the other meals. 

Wrapped those, put them in the oven for about two hours. 

Then I started peeling and chopping all my vegetables - these will be out the longest and will be fine if they sit out for a few hours. Save the chicken and beef until last so they can stay cool in the fridge while you get everything else ready.

Okay tip time: Have a grocery bag out on the counter while you peel/chop/cut and throw all your garbage pieces in there. It makes it easy so you don't have to keep going to the garbage can!

The thing I dreaded the most: The Onions... 
Having a lot of recipes calling for onions, it was inevitable that chopping onions for 20 minutes was about to happen.
And I do not do well with onions.
You know what i'm talking about, I cry every time.
It KILLS my eyes! 
So in order to prepare myself, I looked up the best tips online I could find. 
One: chew gum. 
FALSE. 
Why that would work?? I'm not sure. But it sure as heck doesn't.
Tip Two: Have a flame nearby and it "burns" the burn away... 
FALSE. 
Been there done that... didn't work.
Tip Three: Cut them with water running nearby.
FALSE. Still got teary. 
Again, why that would work I'm not sure, but I tried it, and it didn't do a darn thing. 
Tip Four: Soak the onions in water beforehand.
FALSE. Nada. 

So I came up with my own trick. Sure to work, and the only one that did. 

GOGGLES. 

At least Trent thought it was funny.
When I was ready to disperse my vegetables, I labeled a Ziploc bag with each recipe name and where I found it so I could go back and look at the cooking directions when I was ready to make it. Then I measured out how much of each vegetable the recipe called for, and dumped it in the bag. If you planned right, it should end up about even (give or take a little bit).

I read from a fellow blogger that she adds grated carrots to a lot of her recipes because it is hardly noticeable and adds a little extra vegetable. I did that for a few of my recipes (especially Meatloaf) and it really wasn't noticeable at all!

After you're done with all your chopping and dispersing of vegetables, go through each recipe and add all the "extras," like the spices, cheese, sauce, etc. For some of my recipes, it was kind of pointless to add a cup of water to the bag when it would just add space, weight, and would be frozen anyways. So I would just write on the bag "Add 1 cup water" or "Add 1 can Tomato Soup." 
It depends on if you want to add it when you're ready to make it, or if you just want it to be 100% pre-made and not have to worry about it later. 
Then it's time to add your meat. Chop and add away. 

One of my recipes was Chicken Enchilada Casserole, which was supposed to be layered in the crockpot so it would be layers of tortilla, cheese, peppers, onions, chicken mixture, tortilla, cheese, etc. So I separated these ones into their own Ziplocs inside my big one. Was it hard to layer a bag of frozen peppers? Was it hard to spread out a bag of frozen chicken mixture? YES it was. Did I end up having to thaw everything out so I could layer it? YES i did. So would I recommend it? NO i wouldn't. I would DEFINITELY recommend this recipe, it really was sooo yummy! But it took me just as long to prepare it frozen as it would have been to prepare it fresh. 

So be aware of recipes like that. I would recommend only doing recipes that you can add everything all to one bag, like this.

Although some of the recipes called for a pound of ground beef, so I would keep that separate and then add it to the crockpot when I put the rest of it in there. 

By this time, your potatoes should be out of the oven and cooled down. 

I scooped out the "meat" of the potatoes, added the ingredients, mixed those up, and scooped them back into the hollowed out skins. 

I am trying to find which recipe I used for these -  I have no memory of where I found it, haha. Sometimes I read a bunch of recipes, and make up my own based off all those. If I remembered, I would tell you. They're really easy though. Basically it's butter, sour cream, cheese, bacon pieces if you want, and chives if you want. There, now you have it. 

These are nice because you can wrap them individually, freeze them, and then whenever you feel like you need an extra side or just need something quick, you can take one out, put it in the microwave for a few minutes or the oven for about 20 minutes, and they taste awesome. 

Then I made my meatloaf. Like I said, sometimes I will be looking for a good recipe, read tons of them, and just make up my own based off all of them, and tips from other people and what sounds good to me. That's what I did for my meatloaf recipe, and if you want to try it, I wrote it down so I could use it again. It ended up being yummy! Trent rated it a 9 out of 10 (And I'll take it! We save 10's for the REALLY awesome meals)

Meatloaf

1-2 cloves of garlic (optional)

Few tsp butter (for sauteeing - do you like my approximate measurements? Probably not haha)

1 1/2 lbs ground beef

1 egg (weird I know... but it was in all the recipes)

1/2 onion

1/2 green pepper

1 large carrot, finely shredded (see, the carrots come in handy! and add to your volume!)

1 pkg onion soup mix

1 cup milk

1 cup dried bread crumbs

Salt & Pepper

For sauce on top:

3 tsp brown sugar

2/3 cup ketchup

2 tbsp mustard

tiny bit of vinegar (tbsp-ish)

Sautee onion and some garlic if wanted in butter. Combine ingredients in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, combine all the sauce ingredients. Looks delightful, I know. 

Put ground beef mixture in a loaf pan (helpful tip: You can line the pan with tin foil, then when the meatloaf is frozen take it out of the pan, so you can use the pan. It will keep its shape - obviously since its frozen - and when you are ready to cook it, put it in that same pan to cook! The tin foil also makes for easy clean up) 
Bake at 350 for about an hour (test it to make sure it's done)

Add the sauce on top:

Wrap & Freeze!

By the end of it all, I had 13 meals, plus a ton of chicken I had left over, plus a bunch of baked potatoes. 13 meals may not seem like a lot, and I thought that maybe it wasn't worth all the work to just make 13 meals, but let me tell you.... 
It was worth it!!

(Don't mind my Grandma curtains in the back. We're workin on it okay?)

They lasted us SO long. 
Some of the recipes were just 2 servings for the 2 of us, but some were whole batches of chili and taco soup that we eat for dinner, then lunch a couple times. So they last us a while! And because our schedules are so crazy, I don't make dinner EVERY single night. 
But we do eat every night (haha let's hope so) so sometimes we would come home late after a long day and be starving so I would just make some rice & fish or something. Or pasta. Or whatever other quick, go-to meal you make. 
But you get the point?? We didn't eat one of these frozen meals every single night. So you can really ride them out for longer than you think. 
To be completely honest with you, I have been putting off this post for about 2 months (haha i tell ya, I always take 2 months!) and we are JUST now about to use our last frozen meal! I am gonna have to either do this again, or get used to making a full on recipe again!  Granted there are only 2 of us. But TWO months! 
At the end of it all, I only had this many dishes! I was shocked! I'm still not sure how that happened, but I'll take it!

The best part about this all is how EASY it is when you are done. In the morning:
Pick what you want to eat for dinner that night (So hard I know).
Take out of freezer. 

 Empty into crockpot. (Sometimes it was hard to push it out of the bag so I would just use scissors to cut down the edge of the bag and cut it out)

 Turn crockpot on. Leave. (Sometimes mine were too bulgy like this to fit in my crockpot, so I would just put the lid on and as it slowly melted down, the lid would go down. I was nervous about that but it worked fine every time)

Then at dinner time, your meal is ready whenever you are! 

mmmm

Well I hope that helped any of you that have been wanting to do this lately, like I had! It is about time for me to do it again. If any of you that live around me want to do it with me let me know! Trent gave me the great idea that you could do it with a friend, make double of each meal, have her make double of each meal, and then trade! That way you would get twice as many meals! So if anyone wants to do that with me, let me know :)

Also, I'm sure I didn't explain everything perfectly. If you have any questions that I didn't answer, feel free to leave a comment below & I will reply!

Here is my cute aunt Tami's cookbook on Amazon if you're interested! It is one of my favs - I use it all the time!