Cooking & Entertaining
Make Dinner Easy with Freezer and Bulk Cooking
Feb
Ever stuck on a weeknight not knowing what to have for dinner or lacking the time to make dinner and take out sounds more and more appealing?
I love freezer, crockpot, and bulk cooking for this reason!
It’s easy to do and takes a much or as little time as you want. I can simply double a recipe and freeze the leftovers or pour ingredients in a crockpot when I’m short on time. If I wanted to make more or freeze an entire meal for later and I have some extra time, I can pour raw ingredients into freezer bags and cook later or I can assemble a casserole up to the baking point and freeze it. I could also just cook a lot of meals and freeze them when they’re cool, but that doesn’t work best for all types of meals.
So want to give it a shot? Where do you start in the overwhelming amount of websites dedicated to this topic without spending hours searching? I’ve created a list of websites that I really enjoy and are easy to follow. Simple recipes that are a mix of healthy and comfort food.
Website for How to Approach Freezer Cooking
New Leaf Wellness
If you’re new to freezing meals and don’t know where to start this is a great site: New Leaf Wellness. She guides you through what’s the best and worst foods to freeze, how to plan, cook, and store your meals. I wish I had seen this website when I first started cooking to freeze meals. She also includes freezer recipes here. I used her process to create my own freezer meal plan from my own favorite recipes and also included some of hers and it was great to have meals prepped when we had our first baby. The best part is that you can freeze meals for whenever you’ll be busy. I always find I’m running out of lunches when dinners don’t have leftovers so I keep going back to this website to inspire me.
Kitchen Stewardship
I also like Kitchen Stewardship because she provides an extensive list of how to stock your freezer for easy cooking. I never thought of some of things she froze that help when you need a quick meal: bread dough, veggies already cut up, cooked chicken in smaller portions. On a night when I’m pressed for time for dinner, having these in the freezer really saves time.
Websites with Great Recipes for Bulk and Freezing Cooking
I spent a lot of time being motivated and inspired on Pinterest for cooking in bulk and freezing. There are a lot of sites out there. I wanted recipes that were easy, didn’t use a lot of processed foods, and had both traditional and creative recipes to try.
Joel and Kitty
Mmm. Stromboli, stuffed shells, chili, chicken parmesan, and more. All the recipes I consider special occasion that I never make or feel comfortable with are here and look easy. What’s great is you have a list of 10 recipes with ingredients, how to prep it for the freezer, and most importantly how to cook/serve it on the day you eat it. Then of course I love the freezer bag recipes on their site they compile from other websites like chicken broccoli alfredo or maple Dijon glazed chicken. Yum!
Six Sister Stuff
The Six Sisters Stuff has a lot of wonderful recipes. I like their idea of tossing different ingredients from your favorite recipes, labeling them, and freezing them. Then the day night before you want to eat it, dethaw, then pour it into the crockpot and cook on low while you’re at work. I’ve also just cooked in the fry pan before and that worked fine too. I’ve tried the cilantro lime chicken and the black bean taco soup, which were both good. Next time I’ll try the honey sesame chicken and the Swedish meatballs.
Pioneer Woman
Pioneer Woman is well known for her recipes. Here she explains to use frozen chicken, beef, and dough. This is really helpful because sometimes I run out of inspiration on how use ground hamburg or new chicken recipes.
Pillsbury
Comfort food at its finest. If you like cheese, soups, and chili this list is right up your alley. Eighteen freezer meals that sound tasty: cheese turkey chili bake, slow cooker cheeseburger soup, lasagna pasta pies, cheesy potato slow cooker soup, and creamy potato bacon slow cooker chicken.
Mommy Fabulous Finds
Looking for new ways to cook meat? This is a list of tasty and healthy crockpot meals. I like crock pot teriyaki pork chops, bbq cranberry chicken, and apple bbq pork tenderloin.
Kids Activities Blog
Appetizing pictures to tantalize your tongue. Kids Activities Blog created a list of great crockpot meals for you to try. It’s a mix of traditional and unique recipes: mango chicken, pumpkin chili, cilantro lime chicken, taco soup, and chicken curry are just a few that look great to me.
Eating Well
I love casseroles; they’re easy to put together and provide lots of leftovers. Eating Well has nineteen casserole recipes to inspire you. I thought these sounded particularly yummy: ground beef, potato, and broccoli casserole; vegetarian, squash, and quinoa casserole; and rigatoni and spicy sausage.
Do you have a favorite recipe to make a double batch or freeze? How about your favorite crockpot recipe or casserole?
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