Freezer Meals

Who doesn't love to have meals ready to go? *Especially* when they're already packaged in disposable cookware so clean up is a breeze!

In preparation for adding baby #2 into the family, I went a little crazy, particularly in preparing with food! My husband Jack and I currently have a 16-month old, and hunting season is in full swing (if you're a hunting widow, you know what I mean), so I wanted to do some hard work in preparing ahead of time a LOT of meals that we can enjoy after this baby is born. Plus -- Jack can "prepare" our dinner for us, which will be a plus for me so that I can spend the time in bed that I need to while I recover from having this baby!

So as we wait for baby #2 , I'll share with you my basic process for how we prepared roughly FIFTY freezer meals for us to enjoy after baby #2 arrives! That's right, fifty meals! And you can see from the photo, that's like, full family-sized meals, not like individual portions. I'm telling ya, I wasn't messing around!

So I'll go over the basic steps I did to prep these freezer meals!

No. 1

I had to sit down and plan out what meals I wanted to create. This took me a long time. One, because I wanted to not just fill my freezer with meals, but fill the freezer with meals we'd enjoy eating. So I had to do some major "Pinterest-ing" to find meals that seem like they would taste delicious after being frozen. So it took me a little while to decide. Plus, I didn't want to make the meals too early in the game, so I waited until I was about 35 weeks to make these freezer meals. In the free download below, you can see what were some of my deciding factors to help me gage which freezer meals our family would enjoy eating. So go ahead and download that free PDF worksheet that I created for you with instructions on how I prepared for and executed creating all of these freezer meals!

No. 2

Next, determine for each meal how you're going to store it in the freezer: in a Ziplock bag or in a disposable baking tin? Make sure to label either before putting your food in it or else the Sharpie won't write well and it will be difficult to identify each meal! Make sure you have enough of those supplies before you get started.

No. 3

Now it's time to make a plan. You need to first make your grocery list. Consider how many portions (if you want to double or triple some of the recipes), of each meal you want, and make your grocery list according to that amount of food you'll need. So plan the grocery list. Next, you'll need to plan your time. Even if you're doing only like ten meals, it might be best to set aside the entire day just to make sure you can get it all done and not be working late into the evening. So, roughly estimate how much time it will take to prepare each meal, whether that meal only requires you to toss all the raw ingredients into a bag and freeze, or perhaps the meal requires you to fully cook it, let it cool, then you can freeze it in a baking tray or whatever you want to use. If you have meals that are prepped both ways, then I suggest that you space them out. Consider what meals need cooked on the stove vs. the oven. You can do both at one time. And while those are cooking, you can prep a meal that requires you to toss raw ingredients into a bag. You see what I mean? Plan out in what order you will prepare each meal. I started with doing roast beef in the oven because that takes hours, and then I started the chili on the stovetop in a huge pot, and then while those were cooking, I prepped a few "toss-in-a-bag" meals. This helps you to make the most of your precious time by planning out the order of each meal prep, depending on how each meal needs to be prepped for the freezer. So go ahead and write down a roster of meals and place them in an order that makes sense. You don't want to make all your "toss-in-a-bag" meals first and then save all the "needs-cooked-in-the-oven" meals for later in the day because you're going to just be sitting around and waiting for each oven meal to be done cooking before you can change the temperature and cook the next meal. So be smart with your time here to get the most of your meal prep day!

No. 4

Make sure you plan out a treat or some kind of reward or something to look forward to for during or after your meal prepping day! You'll be exhausted so it would be good to have something to look forward to (other than having a freezer full of ready-to-go meals, which is still a pretty sweet reward)!

Here's the free guide for my meal-freezing process!

Thanks for reading, and happy freezing!

Dorothy