Freezer Meals

One of my overall goals this year is to be healthier, both physically and financially. Both of these goals can be met by eating out less. Of course, we're still going to dine out for special occasions, but for day-to-day meals, the FoodWhore household will be dining in.  In order to do that, we had to take a good look at our budget and our past failures to see why we eat out so much. For us, there were a couple big reasons:

1. We're feeling lazy. We don't want to cook dinner, so we end up ordering take-out.
2. There's "nothing" to eat in the house. Sure we have a pantry and frige full of foods, but nothing that screams "this will be a great meal!"
3. We made a big meal, but we're sick of eating leftovers for the 5th straight day.

So what's the solution? Freezer Meals. For us, freezer meals are larger scale meals (usually casserole-type dishes) that we can eat fresh for a day or two, then freeze individual servings. That way, we don't feel pressured to eat leftovers of the same thing for a week (or let it spoil in the back of the frige). And it's easy to pull something out of the freezer for Mr. FoodWhore to take to lunch or for dinner if we're feeling lazy.

We've been doing this for about two weeks now, and we have eight individual servings (five different meals) in our freezer. This hasn't cost us any more in grocery budget because it's usually cheaper to buy/cook in bulk.  And it's certainly easier. It takes just as long to cook two portions of a meal, as it does to cook six or eight.

Be sure to check out the new "Freezer Meal" label to see all the meals you can cook and freeze to save time and money!

*Note: I've found it's easiest to stick to this routine if you portion out the meals into freezer-safe containers the night you cook it. If you shove the whole casserole dish in the frige, you're not as likely to deal with it later.

Bon Appetit!
The Food Whore