It's Freezer Day

I love Freezer Day!! The last time I did a freezer day was the weekend before July 4 and those delicious meals lasted until tonight. I pulled the last of the freezer meals (brown sugar glazed ribs) out for tonight's dinner. I made a believer of Ben too. He was VERY sceptical when he saw the grocery bill for that first shopping trip, but for the 6-8 weeks since, our grocery trips are about $100 or less every 2 weeks. It also eliminates every excuse for going out to pick something up for dinner because I forgot to pull something out or I am too tired from that day to cook. Overall, we save so much money and time by going about our dinner's this way. I have found, personally, that I love freezer meals because instead of cooking for an hour in the afternoon/evening, I am serving my family a delicious and nutricious meal that I popped into the oven and can use the time instead hanging out with Ben or playing with Connor and Alaina.

Last night, right before I started dinner, I cooked up a quadruple batch of spaghetti sauce and let it simmer while I made dinner. By the time dinner was over and we were cleaned up, the sauce had cooked and was cooled. It went into 4 individual containers and now we have 4 meals of spaghetti ready to go. Yesterday, I was also able to freeze 6 pounds of strawberries and 6 quarts of blueberries. This morning in less than 2 hours, I knocked out parmesan encrusted chicken nuggets, bacon chicken, teriyaki chicken, smoky maple chicken and cheese manicotti. (I know it is a ton of chicken meals, but I had a ton of chicken thawed and ready to go.) Tomorrow I will wrap up the rest of the meals to include- a huge batch of meatballs, angel hair pasta with creamy turkey sausage, linguine carbonara, baked ziti, flank steak, chicken cheddar quesadillas, beefy spanish rice, salisbury steak, honey lime chicken and almost ravioli.

I have to admit whipping up these meals is a snap now that Connor is school and I can get a ton done with Alaina is down for a nap. The biggest challenge is finding space for all this food in our freezer and deep freeze outside!