Frozen Dinners, Anyone?

Last summer was crazy busy with baseball and general life with 6 kids, and I never felt like I had the time, energy, or inspiration to come up with a variety of good, healthy(ish) dinners that could be made (and eaten) quickly. Kids had to be at baseball fields by 5 or 530, usually across town from each other, and we'd be there until 8. How were we going to make dinner and when were we going to eat it? It was endlessly frustrating, but somehow we made it through with minimal fast food runs, and lots of roasts in the crockpot. By the end, I was determined to come up with a better plan - especially if we were going to have similar soccer schedules for the fall. Fortunately, we escaped the soccer insanity over the fall and spring seasons, but here we are two weeks into a new baseball season. We lucked out with team arrangements and scheduling, but we still have baseball between 3 and 5 nights a week and the kids have to be there around 530, which still presents our dinner problem.

In my scouring of crockpot cookbooks on amazon, I came across the idea of freezer meals. Meals made in advance and frozen until it's time to cook them. It was one of those "Why didn't I think of that" moments. I read up on the idea a little more, and it became super appealing. I ended up buying two cookbooks - Don't Panic Dinner's in the Freezer and More Don't Panic Dinner's in the Freezer. They arrived soon after, and as I flipped through them I was even more happy with my purchase. There were tons of recipes in them that I knew my kids would actually eat, that looked fairly healthy, and reasonably easy to prep/freeze and thaw/cook. Then the cookbooks sat on my coffee table for a couple weeks. Then I moved them to my unused computer desk in the bedroom. Eventually they ended up on the bottom of a pile of things that I had tucked away under my craft table.

Months went by before I started to consider the idea again. I kept thinking I wish I knew how to get started on those freezer meal things... of course when I flipped through them originally I skipped right past the tips and advice section. But eventually I decided that I just needed to get them out, pick a couple recipes to try on the weekends and do it already. How much mental preparation did I really need, anyway?

I finally pulled out the cookbooks this weekend, and handed them to three of the kids. I told them to each pick a recipe or two and I would see what I could do about getting them on the dinner menu. They ended up picking 3 and I ended up adding 4 more. We made our shopping list and did our bi-weekly grocery shopping and only ended up adding about $100 more to the bill than normal, but ended up with enough ingredients to make 27 dinners instead of our normal 14. Sounds like a win to me.

Chicken was on sale at the grocery store for .99 cents a pound, except instead of our normal boneless, skinless chicken breasts it was bone in with skin thighs and breasts. Jerry and I decided it was still a better deal to get it, and we decided to skin and de-bone it before freezing. This helped because we were able to dice what needed to be diced, and slit what needed to be slit. But, it ended up taking forever (or about 3 total hours, which felt like forever)! Jerry boiled the bones and made chicken stock which wasn't in the orignal plan, but it worked out :)

Although most families would get a lot more dinners than me, here's what I made in advance, figuring on 6-10 mouths to feed:

3 beef fajita dinners (3lbs each)
3 chicken nacho or taco filling dinners (3lbs each)
2 meatloafs (2lbs each)
1 beef and squash crockpot stew (3lbs)
1 Ground beef taco dinner (2lbs)

I also prepped the meat for:
3 Chicken Cordon Bleu dinners (or 28 breasts)
2 Elegant Chicken dinners (or 18 breasts)


I realize the math on that only adds up to 15 dinners, but I also planned out a semi regular two week menu with 12 additional dinners. Not counting the raw chicken prep, I was able to make the 10 dinners in about 2 hours. Granted, only the ground beef tacos were cooked and everything else was frozen raw, but the cooking part is going to be super easy.

*Update 6/8/2012: We used the ground beef taco meat and one of the meatloaves this week, and I'm in love. The taco meat was thawed and served with re-fried beans, tortillas, cheese, sour cream and salsa. It took about 10 minutes from freezer to table. We pulled out the meatloaf the night before and let it thaw over night and all day. I stuck it in a 9x13, formed it into a loaf shape and stuck it in the oven to cook for an hour. We cooked up some potatoes and corn to go with it but really put in no effort. It was fabulous and neither tasted like they had been frozen and thawed.