I’ve been spending some time on Sundays batch cooking and making lunches and dinners for the early part of the week, but by Wednesday we run out of meals, and we still have several busy nights in front of us every.single.week, so I decided a massive freezer cooking session was in order.
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How I Made 40+ Meals with MyFreezEasy
I didn’t have a lot of time this freezer cooking session to look for meal ideas and make a grocery list, so I turned to MyFreezEasy. I picked 14 different recipes, and My FreezEasy sent me the cooking directions, steps to take, and the grocery list straight to my email.
Grocery Shopping Day
The day before I planned to do my freezer cooking, I went to the store and bought all of the ingredients. I ended up spending $378.51 on groceries. (We buy organic produce as much as possible as well as grass-fed beef. I also bought canned bean because I didn’t want to mess with precooking them. If you don’t buy these types of items, your total will likely be cheaper.)
I bought so many groceries that they didn’t all fit in one frame on my camera! So, here is one half of the groceries:
and the other half:
We’re gluten free and dairy free, and with simple substitutions, all of these meals could easily be gluten free and dairy free.
If I had been feeling motivated, which I wasn’t, I could have prepped all of my vegetables, but I decided to save all of that for the actual freezer cooking day.
The Freezer Cooking Day
I worked mostly by myself, though I did have some help from my 10 year old daughter. Making 40+ meals took me 6 hours, including cleaning up the kitchen as I went. (I really hate freezer cooking when I don’t clean up the kitchen as I go!)
Browning the ground beef was the biggest job because, wait for it, our stove top only has one functional burner!! (We need to replace the stove but haven’t done it yet, so I felt like a college student browning meat on a single burner!)
Chopping the vegetables was also time consuming, but I turned on some good music and just set to work.
As I shared on Instagram, after 1.5 hours, I had made the Sausage & Baby Potato Bake (x3), put the Slow Cooker Veggie & 3 Bean Soup in the slow cooker, browned 5 pounds of meat, and started the Fully Loaded Taco Bake.
A few hours later, I had freezer meals stacked up in the refrigerator waiting their turn to go into the freezer.
PB & J Girl needed her lunch, so I gave her one of the servings of Korean Beef, which she really enjoyed!
When the day was over, I was tired, but I had all of these meals in the freezer!
(Meals are servings for the whole family; lunches are single servings.)
- 5 Ingredient Chili (3 meals & 4 lunches),
- Beef, Bean & Rice Skillet (4 meals),
- Black Bean & Sweet Potato Chili (8 lunches),
- Chalupa Salad Topping (4 meals),
- Cornbread Taco Bake (3 meals),
- Fully Loaded Taco Meat (4 meals),
- Korean Beef with Rice (2 meals, 4 lunches),
- Slow Cooker Chili Mac (4 meals),
- Slow Cooker Poor Man’s Paleo Stew (2 meals),
- Maple Dijon Salmon (2 meals)
- Sausage & Baby Potato Bake (3 meals)
- Slow Cooker Chicken Cacciatore (2 meals),
- Slow Cooker New Brunswick Stew (2 meals),
- Slow Cooker Veggie & 3 Bean Chili (8 lunches)
I ended up with 35 meals and 24 lunches. (If I hadn’t made lunch size portions for some, I would have had 41 meals!)
Final Thoughts
This day was so worth it! In October, the girls and I will be heading to Michigan to take care of my mom when she has her hip replaced. We’ll be able to take some of these meals with us, and my husband and son, who will stay home, will have plenty of meals in the freezer while we’re gone!
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