Freezer Meals: My Introduction

I made a Facebook post last week about making four meatloaves and a cheesy hashbrown casserole to put in the freezer for later use.  I had a couple people ask me about what meals I made for the freezer, so I thought I would just put them on my blog so that I could share the recipes with them and anyone else who wondered but didn't ask and for myself to have a list of all the meals I've made all together in one place.  Freezer meals are something I really love but have gotten out of the habit of making lately.  I want to get back into the habit, especially before November when we will have our new addition here and spending a lot of time in the kitchen will be the last thing I want to (am able to?) do!

My first freezer meal trick is one we have been sticking with and it's just like second nature to us now.  We brown ground beef and sausage 5-10 lbs at a time in a large electric skillet, fill quart sized freezer bags, and put the meat into the freezer.  We don't do any seasoning to the meat, just cook it as is.  Ground beef is used for tacos, taco soup, chili, goulash, sloppy joes (We make ours with just meat and Cookie's BBQ sauce.  No Manwich in this house!), and any random recipe I find on the internet.  Browned sausage is used for spaghetti, biscuits and gravy, breakfast burritos, ravioli lasagna (more on it later!) and again random recipes found on the internet.  Along the same lines, we will cook a crockpot full of boneless skinless chicken breast in water and shred to put in the freezer for meals needing precooked chicken like chicken casserole, enchiladas, and chicken alfredo.  (You could also cook a whole chicken, but boneless skinless chicken breasts are so much easier!)  I'm not going to post my recipes for any of those meals (except ravioli lasagna) so if you want one of them, let me know.

My second freezer trick is buying glass baking dishes.  I found a website (Shop World Kitchen) when they were clearancing their purple pyrex 8x8 and 3-quart 9x13 dishes.  They have a buy 3, get 1 free deal, but I have no clue how that compares to a local brick & mortar store.  You can search garage sales or just slowly stock up on them.  I've never had one explode like you might have heard stories of, even with taking a pan straight from the freezer to the oven.  You could buy disposable aluminum pans, but over time, the glass ones will pay for themselves and it's more "green." Along the same lines, you probably need a deep freeze if you don't have one.  Ours was one of our first purchases after we bought our house.  I couldn't live without it and can't believe we did for the first year of our marriage in our small upstairs apartment.  You need freezer "ziploc" bags not just regular storage ones.  There is a difference and you will be able to tell after your regular storage bags rip out in the freezer.  We have always used ziploc brand because we were buying them in bulk at Sam's Club cheaper than off brand at other stores, so I can't tell you if I'd recommend other brands.  I haven't gone "green" in this area yet.

My third freezer trick is cooking extra when you are making your meals.  Some people do a month's worth of freezer cooking by taking an entire day and dedicating it to freezer meal preparation.  Not me.  Like I mentioned before.  I wanted to make meatloaf for supper.  We had just bought a bunch of ground beef.  I mixed up 8 lbs of ground beef with lots of eggs, breadcrumbs (made from bread that was going stale so we set it out on a plate and ran it through the food processor), and whatever spices I threw in... I wasn't using a recipe!  I divided it up between my pans.  I'm a bit OCD, so I had to measure it all out to put the same amount in each of the 8x8 pans (I think it was 4 cups) and then the rest went into a 9x13.  One bigger mess on one night gave us the four freezer meatloaves and supper for that night.  I did the same thing with the two hashbrown casseroles I made that night.  It's not much harder to make extra and the cleanup only has to happen once!  One word of advice, though.  If you are making a recipe for the first time, only make enough for one meal.  I once had to throw away a chicken pot pie after it sat in our freezer for a long time because the first one we made was completely disgusting and we couldn't bring ourselves around to eat it a second time.  Don't be afraid to look at the meals you are already making and love and ask yourself if any or part of it could be made ahead of time and frozen for later use and try freezing a meal's worth to see.  And then share your recipe with me!  Also, don't forget to freeze your cookie dough!  We almost always make a double batch of chocolate chip cookies and freeze all of it in balls but the 10 or so cookies that we make at that time.  We mostly only freeze chocolate chip cookie dough and monster cookie dough so try out your favorite recipes!

I've heard that you shouldn't freeze dairy products like sour cream and cream of "whatever" soups, but I have never had a problem in the recipes that I've made.  I did have a salisbury steak recipe that I froze cream of mushroom soup and water in a ziploc baggie to add to the steaks after they cooked for awhile.  The soup came out of its freeze pretty lumpy but the taste and texture was completely fine when it was cooked for the 10 minutes the recipe required.

So, with all of this said, I'll start making posts with recipes that we freeze, as I find the time because this post got really long!