Freezer Cooking & March 22-28th Menu

Cooking, Menu Plan, Recipes — By admin on March 21, 2010 at 3:47 pm

I love to cook. It is one of my favorite hobbies. But I don’t like to cook every day. Therefore, the fact that I can tend to be extremely busy, unorganized lazy means that our family has been eating out way too much. With a family our size eating out is just not that practical. Eating out is time consuming, most often taking up our precious school time or even worse our relaxed evening family time. Not to mention the cost is enormous. An average restaurant meal for us is about $50 but it wouldn’t be uncommon in a nicer (often healthier) restaurant to spend upward of $100. It adds up very quickly and we can far exceed our monthly grocery budget in just a couple of weeks.

In an effort to save time and money (and effort) I have tried different menu planning techniques . I have tried the once a month freezer cooking, both alone and with partners. It was helpful but didn’t give us the best solution. I have tried pre-prepared food delivery. Easy but very expensive and we didn’t like the food very much and ended up tossing a lot of it. The pre-prepared foods are also very unhealthy. Making my own meals to freeze is definitely the healthiest most cost effective way to go. So this week I am going to try something new. For every dinner I make this week, I am going to double, triple or quadruple the recipe to split and freeze for future meals. I will also do the same thing for breakfast: pancakes/waffles/muffins /breads ad gravy. That way at the end of the week I should have at least 1 week’s worth of dinners and breakfasts cooked or at least prepared and ready to cook and frozen for later use. My goal is to have yummy, healthy meals that save me from cooking when I don’t feel like it and save us a ton of money without having to spend all day or more in the kitchen. I am looking forward to the final days of this pregnancy and the postpartum period when I am not feeling like cooking to be able to pull something from the freezer.

Here is what I have in store for this week:

(with links to some recipes at the bottom)