It’s nice to have a few meal options in the freezer for busy days or … new baby coming! When Hannah was born, several friends brought us meals, and I really appreciated not having to think about what was for dinner each night. This time, I tried to plan ahead and have a stash of meals in the freezer. Brett has a lot of good skills, but in the kitchen … :/

I doubled several dinners and froze the extra, but I also wanted to try an exclusive freezer cooking day (before Violet’s arrival). I found four recipes with several overlapping ingredients for efficiency.

– Sweet and sour chicken
– BBQ veggies and chicken
– Scalloped potatoes and ham
– Chicken verde soup

The first three recipes are prepared with raw ingredients then frozen. To prepare, you put the bag in the fridge the night before to thaw a bit then dump it in the slow cooker for 6-8 hours (with my favorite slow cooker liners of course). The soup is fully cooked and just needs to be thawed/reheated.

Here are the ingredients, ready for prep:

I did the potatoes and ham first because it was the easiest and didn’t have any “fresh” ingredients. Then I chopped all the veggies and made the sauces.

After assembling the veggies and sauces in the proper bags, I cut up 4 lbs of chicken breast and divided it between the recipes. Then everything was off to the freezer. From start the freezer, the prep and assemblage took me around three hours. Not too bad! Here are the finished, frozen meals.

That’s eight meals – four servings each so counting leftovers that’s really sixteen meals for us. I’m excited to taste the new recipes I tried. As much as I love cooking, I’m enjoying the extra rest time from not planning or preparing meals for a couple weeks.