One of my goals for the new year is to meal plan and cut down on our food bill. One of my favorite ways to save some money and make things a lot easier is freezer meals. It takes a little prep sometimes, but being able to just throw something into a pan or toaster oven and have a meal ready to go is really nice. I am setting up a meal plan now for next month but I decided before that to go through everything I have and see what I can make to start stocking up our freezer now. The first thing I grabbed was a bag of potatoes. Potatoes work great for a side or a quick meal. You can add a million different toppings to them to change it up and they are filling. Chili, veggies, cheese, just butter, bacon.... almost anything goes. Makes it a little easier to change things up without having to cook up a bunch of different things. I just wrapped each one up in foil with a little bit of oil and salt and put them in the slow cooker. You could just as easy bake them but we don't have a oven, plus this way you can do it in summer and not heat up your whole house. Once they are done I just left them as is, let them cool, put in freezer bags and tossed them in the freezer. When we decide to eat them I can just put them right into the toaster oven to heat them up, or take them out of the foil into a baking dish and add some toppings and bake that way. You can take them out of the freezer the day before if you want them to heat up quicker too. The next thing I grabbed was some baking mixes I have a small stock pile of. I bought a bunch on sale before our oven broke and just never got around to using them. I decided since one of the easy meals I could have ready for breakfast was pancakes that I could find a way to make that work using the mixes. Since Mallie is allergic to eggs, milk and wheat I subbed pretty much everything for applesauce, bananas and cashew milk. There is a bunch of ideas on how to substitute all of it online and this is just what we had on hand. Plus adding bananas to a banana bread mix seemed like a good idea. I was going to use a griddle to cook everything up but I thought about making the pancakes a little easier for travel since we have to bring food for Mallie just about everywhere we go and pancakes are not that easy. At first I thought how much fun using a cake ball maker would be, but I don't have one. Closet thing I have is a old sandwich maker. It worked perfect. Makes little triangles perfect for little hands and cooks it quick! Once it cooled off I put them in freezer bags and they are ready to go. Each box should be about 5 or 6 breakfasts as is. If I was going to cook up sausage or pair it with fruit I could make it last a bit more. The mixes are pretty cheap too so I think this works out great. I already have the idea to use plain pancake mix and mix it with sausage so its really all in one breakfast. Chocolate chips with the banana bread, brownies because of brownies... Without buying anything for next months meal plan I already have 2 things ready and stocked in the freezer. I bought this dry erase calendar to help keep us on track. It has magnets and sticks right to the fridge so everyone can see it. I have 2 weeks already planed but I'm going to wait to post about all of that until after we go shopping so I can get a better idea on cost. It should be close to $200 for all of this, plus a little to stock up.
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AuthorTrina: Mom, Wife, Person. Archives
August 2017
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