Freezer Cooking: Success!

Well I guess I should wait until we actually eat some of the meals to call it a success, but after about 5 hours of preparing we have 13 meals in the freezer and 1 cooked in the crock pot for dinner that night! I had been wanting to stock the freezer with prepared meals for a while but hadn't quite figured out what meals and how exactly to do it. Thanks to a friend's blog and pinterest, I became motivated!
We made 5 crock pot meals... 1 that we cooked right away and 4 that we froze (each meal actually made 2 bags that will provide dinner for the two of us, then left overs for lunch the next day!)




We have a Food Saver that we sealed these in, gallon freezer bags would work too

 Those meals were teriyaki chicken, vegetable beef soup, healthy bbq chicken, goulash/beef stew and cooked for dinner that night was balsamic & onion pot roast - it was delicious! The entire lay out of freezer cooking with these crock pot meals came from this blog. The link to the pot roast is in there too, but the pot roast came from here. I was really impressed with how much I liked it. We made mashed potatoes to go with the pot roast.


Yummy!


I also created some meals that are not crock pot based. I found a few on this blog basically you make the meal and then freeze it in a pan, let it thaw in the fridge during the day and throw it in the oven when you want to eat it! From there we made chicken-bacon alfredo, chicken cacciatore (2 bags and serve over spagetti), sausage spinach stuffed shells (this made a lot too, probably 2 dinners worth - I did have to store it in 2 baking dishes).

Stuffed Shells



I labeled directions on the bags/foil of anything to add and what temperature to cook at


I will try to remember to take pictures when we actually eat the meals and post about how they were. Hopefully it will all be delicious! My shopping trip cost about $150, but that was with some left over chicken and veggies that I will be using to make a chicken pot pie, so that's 15 meals (+ left overs for lunch) so only about $10 each, although I did have some basics at home and will serve some of the meals over potatoes, rice or noodles that I already had.

Lots of veggies



Meat



Speaking of rice, Trey and I have a habit of starting to cook something, like stir fry, that needs rice to go with it and totally forgetting about the rice until we are halfway through cooking. So I read about cooking rice ahead of time and freezing it. I decided to give it a try. I cooked a few cups in my new rice cooker and froze it in bags portioned to about what we use for a dinner meal. I'll let you know how it goes but apparently you just thaw it under warm water, and throw it in the microwave for 2-3 minutes! Way better than the 20 it takes to cook in the first place!



Freezing rice

 Most of the time while we were cooking Vegas and Tyson laid in the sun in the kitchen, occasionally getting up to see if they could find any scraps.

Tyson is watching out the window for his girlfriend at the fence

She loves him :)