Freezer Meals and PlantoEat! (Siobhan)

 

~Freezer Meals~

One question my mom always gets asked is how she plans meals for 11 people and does all of our food prep. Quite honestly I have no idea how she does it sometimes, but I have learned a LOT from her about meal planning and food prep. Bulk cooking is the way to go when you are feeding a big family, and I love stocking our freezer full of yummy meals whenever I find some extra time. This weekend was a perfect weekend for cooking and baking, because the rest of the family was gone on vacation in Florida. I found myself with an empty house, an empty kitchen, and a fridge full of odds and ends that I wanted to use up! It was way too quiet without my siblings, and I can't wait to join them in Florida tomorrow, but I had a lot of fun and thought I would share the recipes with you! I'll link all of them below.

I divided my cooking up over a couple days! I made a mixture of meals and breakfasts so I didn't run out of oven or stove spaces.

~The Savory~

I mainly made pasta dishes and casseroles to freeze. These are so easy, and I like making them in disposable foil pans so I don't have to worry about running out of dishes. 

1770 House Meatloaf: I prep the meatloaf until it is ready to bake, and I'll make the garlic sauce fresh when we cook it!

Macaroni and Cheese with Kielbasa: Pasta freezes beautifully! I decided to double this recipe, so it made one giant lasagna pan and one small 8x8 pan that we can eat for lunch.

I also made Tamale Pie, Easy Cheesy Baked Tortellini, and Chicken Alfredo Stuffed Shells. For each of these dishes, I covered them with foil and wrote the cooking time and the oven temperature on top. I also made a freezer inventory so I don't lose track of which meals we have.

~The Sweet~

Muffins! They are such a good grab and go breakfast. I made Pumpkin Chocolate Chip and Bakery Style Chocolate Chip Muffins.

Granola Cookies: A sweet, but relatively healthy snack! I freeze the dough so we can just thaw it and bake it.

Scones are my absolute favorite fall breakfast! I made Maple Oat Nut and Gingerbread Scones. I make the dough, cut out the scones, brush them with egg whites, sprinkle them with sugar and then freeze them!

Blueberry Crumble Pie: the perfect way to use up frozen blueberries!

Bread freezes so well. I made Carrot Cake Loaf today.

~Plan To Eat~

We love using Plan to Eat to organize our recipes and plan our meals. Plan to Eat costs $20 a year (on sale over Black Friday weekend)! and is more than worth it for our family. I can import all the recipes we try and love from our favorite websites and categorize them based on course and cuisine. We only save our favorites, so definitely send us a friend request if you want to see them all!

This is what the main page looks like. Recently added recipes are on top, and you can search for them in the sidebar.

This is what the menu plan looks like. Mom comes up with our menu each week, adds the recipes to it, and prints out the plan so we all know what we are having. There is even a section for snacks or recipe notes on the bottom.

This section of the website shows our freezer inventory!

And that's a wrap for this freezer meal post! Click here to read our last post for more recipe ideas. We'd love to hear any suggestions for your favorite freezer recipes!