I Don't Have Much Time!! Seeking Good Healthy Recipes to Make in Bulk and Freeze

If you can afford to get a freezer saver machine, it really helps. It freezer saves everything without air. It never freezer burns and it last a lot longer while frozen. We freezer save leftovers too. When we make a crockpot meal and we know there will be leftovers, I put it in a freezer saver bag and pop it in the freezer. Then (for example...I did this with some bbq pulled pork I made) we took the leftover bag out and dropped it frozen into boiling water. Ten minutes later we cut off the top and our pulled pork is steamy hot! Great! I find a lot of great recipes (rated and tweaked by people that have tried the recipes) on allrecipes.com

One last thing. Try seeing if you have the time to spend some time to prepare what you need on an afternoon. Brown up some ground beef and store in the fridge. Clean and chop your produce and seperate for the recipe. That way when it comes time to cook, you can just pull it out and you'll be ready.

Congrats on your new arrival!!! Good luck!

Make friends with a pressure cooker! I have a pretty large one and cook 6lbs of chicken or whatever at once. On a busy week, I'll take a family pack of chicken that I'll find on sale somewhere and season it with garlic and Tonys, put in the water, and pressure cook it. All the meat will be done in about 30-40 minutes, and it's soft and super easy to shred, if not already shredded. I'll divide the meat up into cheap Walmart brand quart sized ziplocs (about 1 pound in each bag)and then put the smaller bags (about 3) in 1 good brand-name gallon sized freezer bag and label what it is, and the date, with a sharpie. Those baggies of chicken are super simple to make into quesadillas, enchiladas, casseroles, lasagna, chicken fettucini alfredo which I love to add some sliced mushrooms, chopped tomatoes, and spinach to, soups, etc. Homemade chicken noodle soup (without the noodles, cuz I don't like them frozen), chicken-sausage gumbo, and the alfredo freeze well. Then just cook the noodles (or rice for gumbo) the day you're ready to eat that meal, and it's super easy. A ridiculously easy "recipe" for the alfredo is to just add a can of Classico alfredo sauce to the cooked chicken, slice up the tomatoes and mushrooms, throw in a handful of frozen spinach, and heat it up on the stove. When I'm really busy, that and a bag of Caesar salad fill us up and the whole family is happy. With ground beef, you can cook it into patties (wrapped individually) or taco meat for soft tacos, burritos, or enchiladas later, make a chili, etc. Allrecipes.com is great and you can type in "pressure cooker" and find recipes that way if you wanted to use it but didn't know what to do.....I found a neat recipe for porkchops, potatoes, and saurkraut (all in one dish, in about 40 minutes or less) from that site. Congrats on the baby!!!

I have a home made marinara sauce I make and keep in the fridge. It also freezes well.

I also freeze.....Home made Chicken soup, Home made Tomato Basil Soup (almost as good as La Madeline), sometimes my lasagne (f we have any leftover..it goes fast around here).

When I purchase my meats (ALL of my meat products are purchased at Hirsch's in Plano)....I buy bulk ground round and ground chuck...I make large burgers with them, freeze separately. You can pull out a couple of burgers for hamburger helper (daughter loves that when hubby is out of town), I freeze my chicken breasts, steaks, Italian sausages all separately so I can pull what I need.

I wrap everything well with plastic wrap and then place in freezer bags. Sometimes I will use freezer paper and label it. MAKE SURE you label everything because it is easy to forget after it is in the freezer a while. I use a sharpie marker and everything in my freezer is labeled.

Example: last night I pulled 3 chicken breasts out at 4:15, quick thawed in microwave, battered with flour and seasonings, cooked in cast iron skillet til almost done, pulled from stove, added cream soup, sour cream and more seasonings to soup mixture, after it was mixed well, put chicken back in soup mixture about 5 minutes while noodles finished. We had dinner by 5:30.

We eat a lot of noodles too....quick and easy.

Congratulations on your new addition!

Here are a couple of really easy recipes:
Taco Soup http://www.familyeguide.com/index5.php?id=13&sid=27#T...
Chicken Pot Pie http://www.familyeguide.com/index5.php?id=13&sid=27#C...

SUPER easy; can be made ahead and frozen, or prepared in about 5 minutes, then heat and serve.

Good luck!

www.familyeguide.com Your guide to affordable family activities in Denton County.

One thing I think helps a lot is to pre-cooked meat. I buy about 6 pounds of lean ground beef at a time and cook it all and then divide it up into 4 zip lock freezer bags and freeze it. When I want to make spaghetti sauce, for instance, I can just put my sauce in the crockpot, or skillet, throw in the frozen meat and my seasonings, etc., and it practically cooks itself with very little supervision. I can thaw it or break up the frozen meat for casseroles or warm it up a little in a skillet before I add it to hamburger helper.

We grill a lot too. I have an assortment of meat like sausage, chicken, steak, pork chops, etc, and my husband grills it all at the same time. I separate the things we're not going to eat that night into zip lock bags and either put them in the refrigerator, if we're going to eat them within the next few days, or they go in the freezer for later. Then, all that needs to be done is a quick thaw and warm up in the microwave, or throw it in to whatever recipe I'm making, (i.e., sauce, casserole or soup) and the meal is practically done.

We keep a lot of frozen veggies on hand as they are super easy to make in the microwave as well. I find that pastas don't freeze well so that's something I end up cooking fresh, but that doesn't take much effort of course.

I personally don't freeze a lot of casseroles and that type of stuff 'cause we have limited freezer space, so I try to prepare in advance and freeze the components of whatever I want to make so when it comes time to cook, it's just a matter of putting it all together and heating it up.

Hope this gives you some helpful ideas. :-) Congratulations on your new little bundle of joy to be!

Blessings,
N.

You have a great idea. Follow this link for freezer menus complete with shopping lists and instructions. This site really helped me!

75% of Americans don't know what's for dinner tonight...Don't be one of them! Go to http://www.savingdinner.com/1152.html

S.