Okay, I know, it sounds crazy — who really needs THAT many freezer meals, right? Well, I’m kind of just a little bit of a planner, so I went all out and planned to make a ridiculous amount of freezer meals to make my postpartum time go as smoothly as possible for not only me, but also my husband, who will be taking over (for the most part) on kid-duty with our older two while I have time to recover and rest with our newborn.
Sure, he could cook if he had to, but having all the meals prepared will eliminate long trips to the grocery store, where he’d either have to take the two older kids along or leave them with a momma who won’t be in the best shape to keep up with them. This way, he’ll be able to just quickly run to the store for fresh produce as we need it, while the kids stay home with me and can be busy doing something that won’t require much from me, like simple arts & crafts, movie time, cuddling with momma and new brother or sister, etc. In order to help out someone who may be in need of some advice, I’ve come up with a list of my 10 best tips for planning freezer meals!
Personally, I like to make things as easy as I can when it comes to planning and making freezer meals, and I want to help make it easier for you too, so keep reading for my 10 best tips for planning freezer meals!
First 5 Tips:
#1: Make what you know your family will like.
#2: This falls in line with my first tip, but make sure you test the recipes you’re choosing before making them into freezer meals.
#3: Use a lot of the same ingredients to keep the chaos to a minimum, because it’s really easy to mix things up along the way if you have too many random ingredients.
#4: Buy a lot of off-brand products (which really are as good as name-brand…most of the time) to keep the cost low.
#5: Make multiples of each meal.
Since my husband will be thrown into full-time dad mode for 6 weeks while he’s on paternity leave and I’m pretty much out of commission, I thought it would be best to have meal options for any time of day to help make things easier on him. Plus I really don’t want to have to wait for food to be decided on and then cooked when I’m tired, constantly nursing, occasionally ravenous, and having to rely on someone else 😄
Depending on how things are going, some days, we may eat freezer meals for each meal with fresh fruits, yogurt, etc. for snacks, or just a freezer meal dinner each day. Who knows, maybe he’ll have little to no issues being able to juggle kids, housework, cooking, and all the things, and we’ll end up having freezer meals for months.
Anyway, enough jibber jabber – on to the FOOD!
Breakfasts: pancakes, waffles, and breakfast burritos
Lunches: homemade sandwich bread for grilled cheese, peanut butter and jelly, lunch meat – whatever kind of sandwich floats our boat that day – and whatever leftovers we have from dinner the night before
Dinners: cowboy casserole, chili and cornbread, Mexican tater tot casserole, chicken veggie alfredo, teriyaki chicken/rice/veggie bake, ziti, cheesy chicken veggie and rice casserole, chicken tater tot casserole, and taco bake
I’m also making some amazing cinnamon rolls from scratch because who doesn’t need (okay, fine, want) something deliciously sweet every now and then?
It took weeks for me to get it all planned out because 1. kids and life in general with all the distractions, and 2. the ridiculously detailed way I broke it all down so we wouldn’t have to run to the store in the middle of a recipe because I either didn’t have or ran out of an ingredient.
5 More Tips:
#6: Create a list of all the meals you’ll be making, along with how many of each you want to make and the ingredients needed next to each meal. Example:
- Pancakes (flour, eggs, milk, oil, sugar, salt, baking powder, vanilla, cinnamon)
#7: Make another list of all the ingredients with the meals listed beneath to easily see what ingredients will be needed for everything, rather than having it scattered in a long list of meals, and missing something along the way while creating your shopping list later. Here’s an example:
- Eggs
- breakfast burritos
- pancakes
- waffles
- cornbread
#8: Next, go through all your recipes and do the math to figure out exactly how much of each ingredient you’ll need in order to make as many of each meal you’re planning. Then go back and add to the list shown above.
- 10 dozen Eggs (note: we buy the 5 dozen packs at Costco and none will go to waste even if I don’t use them all up for our freezer meals)
- breakfast burritos (4 dozen eggs)
- pancakes (12 eggs)
- waffles (16 eggs)
- cornbread (2 eggs)
#9: Piggybacking off of the example given in tip #8, buy your ingredients in bulk; not only will you save money, but if you’re making multiples of each recipe, it just makes more sense to do so. Even if you don’t use everything up in your freezer meals, anything leftover shouldn’t be wasted since it’s all stuff you like anyway.
#10: Create your shopping list, check it against all your lists…then check it again just to be sure, and head to the store!
Time To Cook!
It was A LOT of work with a lot of going back to check and fix things as I went, like how many of each meal I wanted to make versus how much of each ingredient would make the most sense to purchase and use in each meal. It required a lot of little tweaks along the way, but I won’t have to run to the store in the middle of cooking to grab more of something, so that alone makes it worth the time spent planning.
Now that I have all the ingredients, I’ll be cooking soon, and I’m really excited, even though my feet and back will be killing me by the end of it! 😅
Thoroughly planning a large amount of freezer meals certainly takes time (and lots of coffee!), but it doesn’t have to be difficult. Hopefully my tips for planning freezer meals gave you some new ideas on easy ways to plan stocking your freezer! Feel free to leave any of your tips in the comments below!
If you want to see what all I made for my postpartum freezer meals, you can click these links: breakfasts, chicken dinners, beef dinners.