Freezer Cooking

Do you do "freezer cooking"? For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, it's when you take one day out of your month and prep/cook like crazy filling your freezer with homemade casseroles or other things to make dinner prep through the rest of the month easier. I tried it once, with a complete month's menu and instructions from Saving Dinner and vowed I'd never do it again!!! It was insane, took me more than 3 days for all the prep and didn't significantly cut down on my dinner prep (not enough to make it worth the effort at least). The only thing it really helped with were the "what do you want for dinner?" conversations.

I've been following a few blogs for a while now that advocate freezer cooking and I ignored those posts and just read everything else. As I was about to skip another post today by Life As Mom something made me read it. In retrospect, I can see why my foray into freezer cooking failed miserably, and made me hate it and vow never to do it again.

1. There were 22 different meals. Sounds great, right? Wrong! So many more things to prep and cook!!! Rather than making 5-7 meals and dividing it into 3-4 bags or trays to spread over a month, I was making 20 different meals. Talk about insanity!
2. The huge variety made it a very expensive endeavor. I did not save ANY money that month and actually spent way more than I normally would, even if I factored eating out or ordering in once a week.
3. It took 1 full day and 2 evenings to do all the prep work. It was just hubby and I at the time, so no toddler to distract me at all. I can't even imagine how bad it would be now that my daughter is constantly distracting me.
4. It didn't save me much time. The concept was assemble the raw ingredients to be cooked on the day you ate them. There was probably 2 maybe 3 meals where the prep work was significant enough to result in decent time savings on the day they were made.
5. It wasted a LOT of gallon freezer bags.

In the end, it just wasn't worth it and I haven't done it again since. Not saying it won't work for anyone, it just didn't work for me and my family.

Attitude adjustment time... after clicking around some of Life As Mom's freezer cooking posts I think I'm going to give freezer cooking a try again, with some significant adjustments to what I tried last time.

1. I'll make granola, two loaves of oatmeal bread, a batch of bagels, egg muffins and a batch of toaster waffles to supplement eggs, yogurt, cottage cheese, fruit and apple sauce for breakfasts.
2. I'm going to go through my personal recipes and pick out 5-7 that I think would freeze well that will use a lot of my normal pantry ingredients.
3. I'll adjust each of them so they'll make 3 meals for my hubby, daughter and I.
4. I'll make a grocery list, and basic assembly list from those recipes.
5. I'll shop Friday night and rather than use 1 day to do all my cooking and assembling, I'll make 1 meal each night.  A little extra time each night to create meals for the rest of the month.
6. I'll let you know how it goes and what recipes I chose and how well they freeze.

My goal will be to choose a vegetarian entree, a fish entree, a leftover generating entree, and a crock pot entree; then I'll round out the rest with favorites. By leftover generating entree, I mean things like roasts or tenderloins where the leftovers can be incorporated into other meals, IE shredded for soup, sandwiches, tacos, etc for weekend lunches.

A couple of resources to help with Freezer Cooking:
Life As Mom
Money Saving Mom
Organized Home
Fearless Freezer Cooking