Cooking dinner every evening can be enjoyable and fun but it can also become tedious. Sometimes when you have plans, spending hours making dinner is the last thing you feel like doing or have enough time to do well.
The easy solution is to cook once a week or once a month, divide the food into portions and freeze it. Another name for this once a month (or week) cooking is freezer cooking. Imagine spending one day making a month’s worth of dinners and then having twenty nine days where you do not have to cook. Looking at it like that, it is easy to see the appeal of once a month cooking.
The Best Meals to Cook in Bulk
There are all kind of meals, which freeze well, and they will taste just as nice when they are thawed as when you first made them. Cooking big batches of food is a real timesaver and if you have a busy weeknight coming up, you can simply thaw your family’s evening meal in the refrigerator overnight and it will be ready to warm through in the evening.
When you are buying in bulk, you can often get good discounts. Buying a big pack of boneless chicken pieces rather than a couple of boneless chicken breasts works out cheaper per pound. You might see pork on special offer one week or minced lamb the next.
You can choose from many types of meat, fish, and poultry recipes if you want to do freezer cooking. Chicken or meat in a sauce will keep in the freezer for up to six months. Maybe you want to try making some classic dishes like sausage casserole, beef bourguignon, cannelloni, or lasagna. A chicken curry recipe is another good choice.
Tips for Once a Month Cooking
Pick a day when you are going to be relatively commitment and interruption free. Also, make sure there is enough room in your freezer to put your meals. You can also stock up on other discount frozen foods like cooked meatballs or cooked shrimp and add these to your thawed meals.
You can either cook one kind of meal at a time or have several on the stove or in the oven, depending on your cooking experience and what you feel comfortable with doing. When you cooked meals are cool, divide them between freezer bags or plastic food containers, seal them, and wipe the edges clean. You will be able to fit a lot of meals in the freezer if you store them flat in zippered food bags.
You will need a lot of plastic wrap and aluminum foil, freezer bags or plastic containers. You will also need a marker pen to write the name of the meal, the cooking date, and any special cooking instructions.
You might like to leave out certain ingredients, adding them when you thaw the food. For example, cream does not freeze well so add that when you thaw the meal. Defrosted potatoes are not great in texture, so either use undercooked pasta or barley as a replacement ingredient or add the potatoes when you thaw the meal.
Our Italian wedding soup is just one of many breast chicken recipes that will make a quick and nutritious dinner easy.