Currently, my family is both short on time and money because we are paying down our debt with gazelle intensity. All of our extra cash is being thrown on debt. While I may like to eat fancier meals, at this point in our lives we are looking for healthy, nutritious, low cost meals. One way we save both time and money is through freezer cooking.
How to Stock Your Freezer with Meals
If you are new to freezer cooking, there are two main ways to stock your freezer with nutritious foods.
If you are ambitious, you can devote several hours one weekend day to cooking four to six meals you know your family loves and doubling or tripling the recipe.
If you are less ambitious, you can pick one week to cook every meal at home from scratch and double or triple it and put the extras in the freezer. If you are away from home every day working, simply pick slow cooker meals to double or triple.
Benefits of Freezer Cooking
The time benefits of freezer cooking are obvious. Once you invest time in stocking your freezer, your time investment is over. Instead of spending thirty minutes to an hour each night getting a meal on the table, spend a few hours early in the month stocking the freezer and then simply pull meals from the freezer the rest of the month.
What you may not consider as much are the financial benefits. I went shopping for my family of five at the beginning of the month and spent $250 on groceries. Included in this amount was enough produce and eggs to last us two weeks in addition to all of the ingredients I need for our freezer cooking session. At the end of my freezer cooking day, I had enough food for 18 main meals for my family and 10 smaller meals for my daughter and I to split at lunch time. (These make for a quick lunch that is much cheaper and healthier than the individual size frozen meals you can buy at the grocery store.)
To make our grocery budget stretch, I make sure all the meals I freeze are packed with healthy ingredients such as beans and spinach, so we get at least a full serving of vegetables, if not more, from our dinners. One of our favorites is Jamie Oliver’s Pasta Sauce, which has two to three vegetable servings in every serving.
Later in the month, I only have to buy produce to last for the last two weeks of the month, which is maybe $100 more. I supplement the freezer meals by cooking a few meals with the slow cooker and having leftover nights.
Our diet is largely comprised of fresh fruits and vegetables, and we make a priority to use organic produce. Still, we are able to keep our grocery budget under control by implementing freezer cooking and limiting our grocery trips to twice per month.
If you are interested in freezer cooking a good, free resource is food.com. Simply type in OAMC (once a month cooking), and you will find hundreds of recipes to try.
This post was written by staff writer Melissa.
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- A Review of Food.com – Your Online Cooking Resource
- Tips to Save Money on Healthy Groceries
- Learn to Cook, Learn to Save
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- Splurge or Save? When to Buy Generic and When to Buy the Best
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