Freezer Cooking & March 22-28th Menu

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 22:47:22 +0000

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)

Breakfast:

Sausage Gravy

Bonnie’s Best Biscuits

Cinnamon Rolls

Cinnamon Cream Syrup

Citrus Poppy Seed Rolls

Baked French Toast

Farmers Casserole

Dinner:

Cheesy Chicken Enchiladas

Mexican Rice

Meatloaf

Chicken Soup

Stuffed Peppers

Beef Stroganoff

Green Chili Chicken

Chicken Pot Pie

Week of November 7 Menu

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 13:58:45 +0000

This week I decided I needed to add an event column at the bottom of my menu. That way I know at a glance what we have going on that day. It should help me to remember why I am using the crockpot that day ( super busy day planned) and help remind me to prepare some things for future meals ahead of time. I usually put little notes, like *make bread, to help remind me to do that for an upcoming meal. That way, I don’t start pulling together a sandwich just to realize I have forgotten to make bread! grrr…

Also, I have a confession…we ate out WAY too much this week. I was a little stressed over going to the doctor, and waiting on test results…When I am stressed I tend to really lose focus. Excuses, Excuses.. But those times we ate out added up to close to a months worth of a grocery budget! So this week my goal is to not eat out except for the couple of times that we have planned.

Next week I hope to get in a couple of days of freezer cooking to prepare for the upcoming holidays. Have any of you girls tried cooking one day to freeze meals for an entire month? Well, I won’t exactly be doing that. But I will be getting a few things ready for the holidays. Think along the lines of quick breads, rolls, pie crusts, cranberry sauce.. I plan on making a few meals that will be healthy and quick when I need an easy meal.

Get your vacuum sealers ready ladies!

Suburban Granola » freezer meals

Freezer Cooking & March 22-28th Menu

Week of November 7 Menu