Today I finally did it! I planned a day with a couple friends and we made 63 freezer crock pot meals!! It was a fun day of NOT cooking in order to pre-make tons of yummy meals. The idea is that you simply compile the meal ingredients (raw) in freezer bags that can be transferred to a crock pot and cooked later.
Here’s what we did:
First we picked out some easy, simple, and quick meals that all our families would enjoy eating! It helps if you aren’t dealing with different eating restrictions or picky eaters, but even then it could still be done.
We picked most of our recipes from an amazing book called Don’t Panic – Dinner’s in the Freezer. I highly recommend this book! It not only instructs you on how to do make-ahead recipes with all the freezer how-to’s you need, but it also lists each recipe with ingredient lists for a single recipe as well as bulk batches x3, x6, or x9…all the math is done for you!!
We also chose a few recipes that we found online from other blogs as well as a couple that were family favorites. In the end, we ended up with 7 different dishes. We agreed to all make 3 of each recipe which would give us 21 meals for a family of 4.
Tips & Tricks
If you plan on doing a big freezer day, make a spread sheet with all your ingredients and how much you need total for EACH person. This will help everyone shop and make sure everyone comes with what they need.
Label all your freezer bags ahead of time. You might also want to write any last minute instructions on the bags too…like “add 1/2 c. sour cream” if there are any ingredients you need to add at the last minute. You might also want to write the cooking instructions…like “low 6-8 hours.”
Although I can’t share the recipes from the book mentioned above (copyright) I can share the blogs that we used for the other recipes. However, I really do recommend the book above! It’s great. Another great resource is the website that I got the other recipes from (www.whoneedsacape.com). See below:
It was a really fun day that ended with a nice cool dip in the pool! 🙂