Freezer Meals

A while back I started thinking that I would love to find ways to make the best use of my time in the kitchen and to help minimize my time cooking in the kitchen.  After doing some research online and searching through Pinterest, I kept seeing Freezer Meals over and over again.  I quickly discovered the notion of Freezer Meals with friends.  The concept is you get together with a group of friends, you all cook meals in bulk, and exchange them.   So, I contacted my 5 closest friends here, set up some guidelines, and we just had our first Freezer Meal Exchange and it has been awesome!  Here's what we did for us that works best in our situations.

We met once and discussed our plans.  We determined if anyone has food allergies or if there were any foods people couldn't stand or just wouldn't eat and we'd know not to cook those foods.  Since we've all been together the last few years, we tend to cook one another's recipes as is, so to minimize the chances of us having multiples of the same recipe, we made our meal plans for the next 5 months up front, and arranged them where we'd get a variety of foods each month!  It worked out great and caused us all to research and plan our recipes at one time, ensuring less work later.  This aspect is a huge benefit for us since some ingredients are hard to come by or aren't always available in grocery stores... you're sure to have plenty of time to stock up when needed.  

Here are our guidelines: 

- Create 6 freezable meals (including one for your own family) once a month

- Deliver your meals on the 3rd of every month (or as close to as possible based on individual schedules)

- Enclose food inside large ziploc freezer bags (flat) or in a cookable, disposable casserole dish (wrapped)

- Label meal on outside of bag along with any cooking or preparation instructions.  Email recipe or provide hard copy of recipe for future reference.

- Prepare enough food for a family of  4 people

One of our good friends who doesn't live on our compound is having a baby in April so we're going to fix an additional freezer meal that month and give to her and her husband to have once their baby girl arrives!  This could be a great outreach for you and some friends to do for a family in need, too!

Last month I made Chicken Cacciatore.  I cooked all my chicken in the crock pot for a few hours in the morning, cut up all the veggies, sauteed them, simmered the sauce, combined it all together, then bagged the food.  I was done within 3 hours!