Each month, I spend a few hours (or a few days) cooking up big batches of our family’s favorite recipes in order to save me a little bit of time in the kitchen during the week.
This “power cooking” or “make-ahead meal” planning is not just a hobby…It’s a routine habit that has become a way of life for our family and keeps our grocery budget fairly reasonable. My goal or should I say challenge for the next six months is to keep our grocery budget in check and our family everyday expenses to a minimum. Especially, if we plan to go on our big family New Year’s vacation.
Since we don’t typically use everything I make for the freezer up all in one month’s time, there is eventually a variety of meals to choose from. And with summer vacation here, I don’t want to heat up the kitchen if I don’t have to either.
Making meals for the freezer will allow us to have a constant rotation in our freezer throughout the month of great tasting recipes. And I get a break from cooking a few nights during the week.
Some ideas for dinners this week are:
- Crunchy Chicken Fingers
- Meatloaf Sandwiches
- Chicken Phillies
- Lasagna
- Hearty Beef Stew
- Taco Soup (back up)
So, this week’s freezer cooking session was designed to get our dinner meals up to speed and include a couple of breakfast and snack options. Here’s the plan for today:
That’s the plan for today. What about you? Making any tasty meals or snacks for the freezer today?

