Why I love making freezer meals
If you have ever searched websites like Pinterest for easy, cheap meals for your families, I am sure that you have come across several articles about things called freezer meals.
For those who have never heard of them, freezer meals are premade dinners that can either be thrown into the oven, or placed in a crock pot in the morning.
The first time that I saw posts about freezer meals, I thought it was overly complicated and something I wouldn’t ever consider doing. Boy, was I wrong. As you can imagine, my job can have weird hours at times. I’m normally off by 6 p.m. Monday through Friday but that is not always the case. If a story breaks, I may have to work late or on a weekend.
My husband is not a cook by any stretch of the imagination and I wanted to find a way that I wouldn’t have to come home late and make dinner.
So I bit the bullet and tried freezer meals. I am never going back and here is why.
First and foremost it really is a time saver. I work on freezer meals every two weeks on payday weekend. I take about one hour to make roughly 14 meals and that is with me taking short breaks while making them. Comparing that to the amount of time I would use to prepare food nightly, it’s nothing.
I either run the crock pot meal under some hot water just long enough to have it release from the bag and start it in the morning (it takes less than five minutes) or I have dinners that I can pull out and stick straight into a hot oven or on the stove.
Because of this it is also extremely convenient.
By the time I get home at night, my brain is shot and I normally don’t even want to think about preparing food and then cooking it.
I don’t even take time to think about what we are having. I have several recipes that both of my boys love so I normally pick up the first thing my hands land on.
If for some reason I don’t have time to set it out in the morning and I work late, my husband, Luke, has plenty of oven meals with instructions attached so that he can get dinner made for him and Gideon.
It also makes it easier
to have the energy to do the dishes at the end of the night, which is a chore that I loathe with every fiber of my being. Because of these reasons, what we are now eating is so much healthier for us than what we were eating.
I would be beyond tired when I got home from work and because of that, we would go get fast food way more than we should.
My husband and I are both fat people, there is no beating around the bush.
And while we don’t mind the way we look, we didn’t want to encourage ourselves to eat food that is bad for us.
Our health could not afford for us to gain even more weight.
Even more importantly, we didn’t want to enable our precious child to have unhealthy habits.
While Gideon is big for his age, it is not unhealthy. His weight is proportionate to his height. He is where he should be and we want to keep it that way.
On nights I would cook at home, I normally didn’t plan so we would have carb-filled dinners.
Pastas and breads would litter our plates and while it is OK to do that every once in a while, it was most meals for us.
I would justify it with the thought that at least I had dinner on the table. But honestly, that wasn’t good enough.
I also love how cheap it is to make these meals.
A lot of the meals I double or triple so I buy in bulk, cheaper than buying for individual meals and divide it into separate meals.
One of our favorite crock pot meals is chicken fajitas.Not only do I buy the chicken in bulk, but I also buy a frozen bell pepper and onion mix.
Since I will be freezing the meal anyway, I buy the vegetables frozen so I don’t have to worry about how well they will freeze and it saves so much money!
I don’t know about you, but I also tend to season a lot of my hamburger meals the same way.
So I buy a huge pack of meat, saving us money,
then I season the whole thing with breadcrumbs, egg, onion and other spices then divide it into portions.
I use it to make meat loafs and hamburger patties.
I can either make hamburgers or hamburger steaks with it and meatballs.
If you are wanting to find a way to save yourself time, energy and money, consider making freezer meals.
They have helped me with my home life and I hope it makes things easier on you, too.