As I have shared, I am striving to spend less on groceries. One way I am attempting to do this is to prepare the majority of our meals and snacks at home. Well, this takes time and effort each day and with an infant that likes to change his schedule around, I needed to find a better strategy for dinner planning.
I started researching this online and found two tools that really made me stop and think: Monthly Meal Planner and Freezer Cooking Blog.
The Meal Planner is a simple template that lists out meals for breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinners. I use this to record our dinners each day, then I make my monthly shopping list on the back and list options I purchased for breakfasts, snacks and lunches. This helps save time reinventing the wheel and planning dinner each night, but it also helps you optimize your meal schedule. The monthly shopping list is also more concrete and one off purchases are less likely.
This brings me to my second tool, freezer cooking. I had not heard of this concept before, but I absolutely love it! It is the answer to how in the world can I make dinner each night with x, y activity, working late or simply a fussy infant.
With freezer cooking, you spend a few hours making meals for the month and then freeze them until needed. At first it seemed a bit intimidating, but the blog post helped walk me through it step by step. First, I had the list of meals and ingredients I needed to buy separated out by section of the store. I was able to quickly go through the recipes and modify them for our tastes, e.g. whole wheat noodles, less cheese, etc. Then, I was able to shop in my pantry and cross many of the more basic items off the list. Next, off to the store I went. I thought I would have a heaping cart to prepare this many meals, but the ingredients were actually quite manageable. The only downside I found while shopping was that all these meals contained meat. Well, we only like to eat meat once or twice a week and meat is expensive. I kept with the plan though, as I was determined to learn how this could work for me.
That night, my husband and I decided freezer cooking could be our date night, so we poured a little wine and started cooking. We found that it went quickly, the ingredients and meals went further than anticipated and we had fun! It was easy to see the benefits of working through this in one night, especially the assembly line approach and building upon recipes and ingredients to maximize groceries.
In the end, we had 25 meals (4 lasagnas, 2 bags of marinara, 4 containers of chili, 4 broccoli chicken pasta bakes, 4 tex mex casseroles, 3 chicken casseroles, 2 bags of browned ground beef, and 2 bags of shredded chicken). According to my meal plan for the month, we will use 10 of these meals in January and we will still have plenty left for February. In addition, this taught me how to plan ahead when cooking. For example, I often make a meal and have an abundance of leftovers. I put them right in the fridge and remind my husband to bring them for lunch. Well, with the large amounts left, we sometimes need to throw away leftovers when they go bad. Now, as I finish preparing a meal, I can simply package up 1/2 or more for the freezer right away.
Today we are still experiencing frigid temperatures in Minnesota and I am very excited to know that I just need to run to my freezer quickly and grab the chili we made. I will whip up a quick batch of corn muffins and we will be set for dinner.
Next month, I am hoping to do this process with our non-meat meals. My favorite vegetarian go to meals are Pinto Bean Tacos, Broccoli & Peanut Stir-fry, Meatless Chili, Vegetable Curry, Summer Vegetable Pasta, Eggplant Parmesan Lasagna, and Broccoli Cheese Casserole. I am interested start the process of freezer cooking from scratch with my own recipes and also to see which of these meals can be frozen and served later, as many of them contain fresh ingredients. Please comment and share your favorite freezer meals, especially if you have experience with freezing fresh vegetables!
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