Fantastically Frugal: The Freedom of Freezer Cooking

It occurred to me when I began writing this column that grocery store secrets and freezer cooking are so intertwined it makes more sense to blend them together. so that is what we will do. We will present freezer cooking as we have discovered it works best for us. We utilize the loss leaders and sales at our grocery stores and design our freezer cooking sessions around that.

When Jillian and I first heard of freezer cooking, my youngest daughter, now eleven, was in kindergarten. One of the moms in my daughter’s class did 30 day freezer cooking. I have to admit, it sounded magical, weird, heroic and even impossible. How amazing to have 30 days of dinners done and in your freezer. And honestly I thought what drudgery it would be to be in the kitchen all day long cooking. It was not until many years later when I had absolutely had it with the “what’s for dinner,” question that I gave freezer cooking a second look.

I was at CSUS taking 18 units and drowning in homework, and Jillian was in school full time to become a certified massage therapist. We both simply didn’t have time to cook, nor the money to constantly eat out. We needed to simplify, and we wanted to have more control of what foods our families were eating.

We started out buying several cookbooks on Amazon.com. We just typed in Freezer Cooking and bought whatever cookbooks came up. We were desperate and not sure where to start. Before long it became clear that we would have to tweak what ever system we used. Saving a lot of money didn’t seem to be as high a priority to the author’s of our cookbooks as it was to us. It was all about saving time. We not only wanted to save time, but money as well. And like most of the time…I thought I could do better.

This has been a learning process for us. We have discovered that our families will revolt at eating taco meat 3 times a week. We have blundered and reevaluated many times to get to our current system. It sounds incredible to say that cooking for days will be the most liberating thing you will ever do…but it’s true. It is simply the best way we have found to answer that incessant dinner question healthfully, inexpensively, and easily.

The best thing to do is to check out some books on freezer cooking from your library or buy them. You can start slow. Our collection has grown as of late but for a long time we operated with just a couple of books. Some good ones are; Once a Month Cooking by Mimi Wilson and Mary Beth Lagerborg, Frozen Assets by Deborah Taylor-Hough, The Freezer Cooking Manual by Nanci Slagle, and Don’t Panic Dinner’s in the Freezer by Susie Martinez, Vanda Howell and Bonnie Garcia. The best books also give tips on what foods freeze well and what foods will be a waste of time and money to freeze. The truth is we just use these books for the recipes. We have our own system.

We check the loss leaders for the week and decide what kind of a cooking session it will be. For example this week Safeway has ground beef for $1.49 a lb. So ground beef it is. Last time ground beef was on sale, we did 80 lbs at once. We’ll brown the ground beef all at once (4 pots at a time). We drain the fat, chop and add onion and garlic and cook it all together. This meat mix will be the basis for several recipes. We make pasta sauce with meat, hamburger stroganoff, chili, taco meat, and enchiladas.

We also make meatballs to freeze, mix up several varieties of meat loaf, and shape some for hamburgers. Next week if chicken is on sale, we’ll do a chicken session. A few of these sessions and we are stocked up. Our top is 149 meals in two days. Most of those meals, other than a few extreme favorites, were not repeats.

The set up and clean up time is saved for every dinner. You have the knowledge that you have a restaurant in your freezer. You have purchased the main ingredients for the lowest price possible and saved money. We will visit this topic many times in the next few weeks.

It is so satisfying to come home from a long day of work/Christmas shopping/running children places to a piping hot meal that went from your freezer to your crock pot. Or you come home to a thawed meal you pop in the oven, and a few minutes later dinner is served.

Mmmmmm Happy Cooking,
Brandy and Jillian