Introducing: What's in my Freezer?

Growing up my mom made all of our food from scratch.  I have many memories of her working in the kitchen prepping everything from stock to casserole meat long after everyone else had scurried out of the kitchen for the night.  Our food was both healthy and delicious but my mom was quick to remind us that "it takes time to save money".  Since leaving my teaching job to be a stay at home mom over 2 years ago, I have found myself standing in my moms shoes time and time again, doing everything in my power to make our food from scratch and confidently manage our health and grocery bill.  I can tell you first hand that cooking from scratch is very economical but just like my mom always said, it really does take a lot of time.

When Shawn and I decided to have another baby, I knew instantly that my time would be the resource I had the least of moving forward.  That's not a complaint, it's just the simple reality of having two small children at home.  I did my absolute best to set up systems that would maximize my time while I had it and freezer cooking happened to be one of those systems.  For months I have been planning ahead, and filling our freezer.   My goal was to have enough breakfast, lunch and dinner to get us through the first two months of our new life as a family of four with minimal trips to the grocery store.

I enjoy cooking so I wasn't trying to avoid being in the kitchen for an extended period of time - I was simply trying to cut down on the number of steps involved in keeping my family well fed.  In a normal week, I read all of the grocery sale ads that show up in my mailbox every Tuesday afternoon, make a menu plan largely based on those sales and then head to the store with Nicole sometime later in the week.  Our grocery store runs are generally pretty successful but coming home to unload and put away the groceries is not nearly as smooth.   Furthermore, I prep almost all of our food while Nicole is napping and I'm still not 100% sure I'll have the luxury of doing that now that we're adding a second child to the mix.  So, my motivation for filling our freezer was mostly to eliminate the steps of reading sale ads, planning a menu, unloading and putting away the groceries and prepping food in quiet moments of the day.  By having our meals mostly done ahead and tucked away, I also know that Shawn and I will be spending far less time cleaning the kitchen which just happens to be an added bonus. 

Finding appropriate ways to involve a toddler in our food prep has proven to be very messy.  Totally worth it though! 

I'll be sure to let you know how this plan ends up working out for us in the days and weeks ahead but for now, I thought some of you might benefit from my list of freezer meals.  After all, who doesn't love recipes that freeze well and reheat like a dream?  For the sake of keeping these posts at a readable length, I'll be tuning in a couple more times to share my favorite freezer meals with you one course at a time (breakfast, lunch and dinner). You can expect to see these posts about once a month which will give us plenty of time to eat the bounty that we have tucked away and report back.

The list of meals that I'll be sporadically sharing with you only includes the freezer friendly recipes that I've found online, but I wanted to mention that I also cooked from one cookbook in particular that ended up being an incredible resource to me.

The cookbook is called From Freezer to Table and has a slew of yummy recipes which contains excellent freezing and reheating directions.  What I appreciate the most about this cookbook is that the meals are not loaded with fat and cheese to make them taste good from frozen - they generally contain mostly healthy ingredients and the directions for making them either fresh or frozen are very straight forward.  I actually ended up learning a lot of things about making freezer meals that I then applied to other family favorite recipes that we wanted to have on hand.

As I begin to share the internet recipes that I made and froze, you will probably wonder how on earth I fit so much food into my freezer.  A very generous couple bought us an upright freezer last year.  They knew that we often host Shawn's out-of-town coworkers and they wanted to make the meals I feed our guests easier and more affordable.  Having an upright freezer has been an incredible blessing to me specifically because I've been able to buy sale items (mainly proteins) in bulk and make a practice of always having company worthy food ready to go.  As it turns out, this freezer is the gift that keeps on giving because it has equipped to feed my family day after day in a season of life when I would otherwise be struggling to pull off dinner each night. 

Here's to hoping that next week we'll finally be able to announce the birth of this baby boy.  Say a prayer for us is you think of it! 

Love,
Erica