Well, I have been doing meal plans every week for a few months now… well I missed a few weeks here and there but other then those it is doing really well..
However, when I go grocery shopping and I see something on special (meat most of the time) it has become easy to pick it up and stick it in the freezer… However, sometimes it gets lost of forgotten in the next week’s meal plan and then just stays in the freezer…
Well, I decided that it is time to something… cook it all up before I lose it to freezer burn, make meals out of it all, portion it and freeze the portions… So I am on the journey of feeding my freezer… One of the great advantages to this is for when the new babe arrives… Since I am the only “cook” in the house.. (Simon can manage a few small things) This will be a very useful thing…
Last night I made beef and bean burritos with a homemade enchilada sauce…. Instead of only making enough for the night’s meal and a bit of leftovers I cooked up all the meat I had, used all of the beans and made 10 burritos… cooked up 4, used half of the enchilada sauce and froze the rest using a Ziploc for the rest of the sauce…
Today I am cooking a big pot of spaghetti sauce and I will freeze it into meal size portions in Ziploc bags also.. and I am slow cooking some meat I had in the freezer with spices and will make more burritos out of that too since not only do we like burritos but they are easy for Simon to bring to wok for lunch…
I am thinking about every few days making a big meal and feeding the freezer each time…
I did the same thing when we were waiting on our third baby. I think I ended up with about 10 meals in the freezer and then I also bought some of those not-so-healthy family sized frozen dinners. They really helped out.
We don’t have a big freezer right now, but when we did I kept a sheet of paper taped to it and I listed cuts of meat that I’d put in there as well as veggies, sides, or entrees. That way when I planned my menu for each week I could look at the sheet and see what I had to possibly prepare a meal from.
~Kristen
(skrimpy on MDC)