Make dinner a breeze by preparing your crockpot meals ahead of time and storing them in the freezer until you’re ready for them! All of the recipes featured are full of good-for-you ingredients.
I got super motivated a few weeks ago, and I made eight freezer meals that can be thrown in the crockpot for super easy dinners!
While the BF and I very rarely eat out on weeknights, we often go out to eat a few times on weekends. I love going out for dinner, but it can get expensive.
Our struggle with cooking at home on weekends is that we are usually running low on fresh produce by the weekend, and we forget to thaw meat from our freezer for the meals we planned. So I thought having meals pre-made that can just cook all day would be the perfect solution for our weekends.
Here’s what I made…
- Mushroom Barley Stew (2)
- Black Bean Chili (2)
- Hearty Lentil Stew (2)
- Lime Chicken with Corn and Black Beans (1)
- Butter Chicken (1)
I used recipes from this website.
I chose recipes that included many ingredients that I already had in my pantry like quinoa and lentils, and chose animal protein that we already had in our freezer. We only buy meat when it’s on sale, and then we freeze it.
I bought a lot of canned items – black beans, coconut milk, crushed tomatoes, diced tomatoes, corn – and fresh produce – carrots, green red and orange peppers, mushrooms and onions – and one pantry item – barley. I was also running low on cumin and black pepper, so I picked those up.
My total was $46.25 for eight meals! That’s about what the BF and I spend when we go out to eat one time.
I labeled each freezer bag with name of the meal and the cooking instructions.
I took me a little over two hours to prep everything. The bulk of the time was spent washing and chopping vegetables. If you wanted to save time, you could buy pre-chopped vegetables. It would just increase the cost of your meals a bit.
The only one that we’ve cooked so far is the Black Bean Chili. I would recommend using a lot less vegetable stock because it came out very soupy. I prefer my chili to be hearty and thick. I ended up eating it with brown rice to bulk it up. I also think it would have been more flavorful with less stock. I may use less stock for all the recipes in the beginning, and add more stock later if needed.
I was most excited about this experiment because we got a new crockpot for Christmas! Our old one was falling apart, so I’m really happy about this new fancy one. This is the one we have, and we love it!
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Do you ever make freezer meals? What’s your favorite?