Thursday, September 3, 2015

A Month of Freezer Meals

In order to prepare for our baby girl's arrival, Dan and I decided to make a bunch of food and freeze it. We have no idea what our days will be like once Baby Cookie is here, and we want to be prepared so we don't grab fast food every night.

To do so, I compiled a list of recipes that we already enjoy (and a couple new ones for fun), typed them all out, made a giant shopping list, and we got started! *You can find a free PDF download at the end of this post, which includes the meal plan, all of the recipes, and a shopping list!


We ended up making 15 recipes, and we doubled each one so that we will get a full month out of them! It's just the two of us eating, though, so if you are feeding more people, you'll only get half a month out of these recipes unless you make more of each one!

In total, we went to three grocery stores (Sam's Club, Aldi's, and Kroger) and spent a total of $110. Not bad for a whole month's worth of dinner, right? Keep in mind that we already had most of the basics, like spices and most sauces.

Some of these recipes were SUPER easy to prep - literally just gathering the ingredients and dumping them in a gallon sized Ziploc bag. Those are the recipes that will simply be thawed and placed in a crock pot to cook. The ones we put in foil baking dishes we had to cook ahead of time, which definitely took more time (but will be well worth it later!). If you only have a little time, you could make the freezer bag meals one day and the foil pan meals another time.

Here's a list of what we made -


HELPFUL TIPS

For bagged / crock pot meals: I highly recommend writing the meal name and cooking instructions on the bag in Sharpie BEFORE putting the ingredients inside. Also, lay the bags flat in the freezer so they will take up less space when frozen and be easier to grab later.

For foil dish meals: Use a Sharpie to label each meal on top, AND write the cooking instructions so you remember what to set the oven to and how long to cook it for. On some of mine, I even wrote suggestions (like serve with garlic toast, etc.) We let ours partially cool before stacking them in our chest freezer.

• To make these meals vegetarian, simply replace the meat with other veggies or your favorite brand of mock meat products, and of course replace the broth with vegetable broth!

To download the free meal plan, recipes, and shopping list, CLICK HERE to get it from my Dropbox!

Do you make freezer meals?
What are your go-to easy recipes?
Did you stockpile dinners before your baby was born?



    

4 comments:

  1. Ooh, some of these sound really delicious!

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  2. I'm sure this is going to be a great help to you!

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  3. Thanks for this! I've been wanting to do this for a long time! Great resource!

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