Feeding the Freezer

In our house it is hard to cook dinner everyday. So I like to do what I call "feed the freezer." Some people call it batch cooking. It's where you do a bunch of cooking and freeze meals to use for another day. This method works well with making "all of one sort of meat", such as cooking up a bunch of chicken and making meals out of it. Or making a bunch of ground beef meals. I would love to "once a month" cook but find this method works better for me. As my little ones just can't seem to function without me for a whole day while I am cooking.

This week a friend told me about a great sale price on bone-in-chicken. So I stocked up and have made my first batch of meals out of it. I boiled the chicken and made broth, seasoned the broth with sauteed onions, celery, and added some chicken bouillion. Then I deboned and chopped up the chicken. I froze the broth with some chicken in big ziploc bags and made 5 meals of chicken noodle soup. I will just boil some egg noodles on the day we eat the chicken noodle soup and add them to it. Quick and easy meals, ready to go for another day. And I had 3 small ziploc bags of chopped up chicken leftover to freeze ready to pull out for another meal. I will probably use this chicken for quick tacos and just have to make some mexican rice or refried beans to go with it.

I froze the ziploc bags full of soup on a flat cookie sheet so it would be easy to stack later.

So that's 8 meals of cooking mostly done. I plan on making fresh rolls or biscuits on chicken noodle soup day, as that will make a nice fun extra. And maybe experiment with a few new recipes for cornbread for variety.

I am in the midst of trying to downsize our food budget. So in our household for the month of January and maybe beyond, we are declaring 1 day a week as chicken noodle soup day, and 1 day a week as beans and cornbread day. That is 8 dinner meals out of 30 for the month that are extremely cheap. I would say I have cut my dinner food budget almost by a 3rd, just by doing these two things. But I will forge on and try and share other things we do.

***So a great tip to share would be buy meats on sale and plan, make meals out of them.