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In my ongoing quest to cook and freeze more meals so that we are tempted to eat out less I came up with another recipe that is easy to prepare and used ingredients I had on hand in my stockpile.

This one should definitely go in the “freezes beautifully” section of the cookbook.

Printable Recipe

Ingredients:

• 4 chicken breasts, cooked and shredded
• 2 (8 oz.) packages cream cheese, softened
• 16 oz. cheddar or jack cheese, shredded
• 2 (4 oz.) cans Ortega diced chilis
• 9 (10 oz.) cans green enchilada sauce
• 32 fajita sized flour tortillas

Directions:

With a mixer, beat the cream cheese with the green chilis and 1 can of enchilada sauce.

Pour cream sauce over shredded chicken in a bowl.

And stir to combine.

In the bottom of 4 foil baking pans (I purchase these at Dollar Tree 2 for $1.00) pour 1 can of green enchilada sauce and spread evenly to cover bottom of pan.

Now take your tortillas and fill generously with the creamy chicken mixture and roll up.

Place rolled enchiladas in pan seam side down and cover each pan of enchiladas with sauce – 1 can for each pan.

Sprinkle top of enchiladas with cheese.

Cover each pan with a double layer of aluminum foil. I baked one pan for dinner and froze the rest, uncooked.

To bake – Preheat oven to 355° and bake unfrozen for 45 minutes or 70-90 minutes if frozen.

Frozen enchiladas will hold in freezer for 4-6 month.

Serve with rice & beans for a yummy Mexican inspired meal!

Notes: Much like my frozen breakfast burritos recipe this is a pretty forgiving recipe that you could easily adapt to suit your needs.If you are gluten free feel free to use corn tortillas or GF tortillas. Dairy free…perhaps there is a dairy free substitute or you could omit the cheeses and just make chicken enchiladas. If you like things spicy add some diced jalapeno instead of the canned green chilis…really easy and hard to mess up. If you like red sauce – go for it. I just happen to like greens sauce. – Enjoy!

Tags: Chicken, Chicken Enchiladas, Enchiladas, Freezer Cooking, Freezer Meal, OAMC, Once A Month Cooking, Shredded Chicken
Posted in Entrees, Freezer Cooking, Recipes | 2 Comments »

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Recipe number two in my quest to stop eating out so much  is this one for a baked rigatoni pasta dish. This is a recipe I normally make for dinner every couple of weeks. And so instead of just making one batch I made a super-sized batch so I could freeze it and have it ready to go on nights when we are tempted to run out to grab something to eat at a fast food joint. This is also a nice and easy babysitter meal for nights when my husband and I have our date night, instead of ordering a pizza for the babysitter I can pop this into the oven before we leave and just have the sitter pull it out and serve it to the kids when the timer goes off. Easy, and gives me a little more money for date night!

Baked Rigatoni Pasta Freezer Meal

Ingredients

• 3 (16 oz.) boxes of Rigatoni pasta (you can use just about any other kind of pasta you have on hand)
• 3 jars of spaghetti sauce (I used 2 jars of Classico and 1 batch of homemade Crock-Pot Veggie Loaded Spaghetti Sauce that I had in the freezer)
• 2 lbs. sweet Italian sausage, casings removed
• 2 lbs. shredded mozzarella cheese
• 24 slices provolone cheese

Directions

In a very large stock-pot bring to boil enough water to cook pasta according to directions on the package.

Cook pasta till just al dente or even ever so slightly undercooked as the pasta will absorb some of the extra sauce. You don’t want mushy pasta.

In a large skillet (or I use my electric frying pan) brown and crumble the Italian sausage, drain and rinse to remove extra fat.

Add sausage back into skillet and add spaghetti sauce to the pan. (If using jarred sauce I like to add about 1/4 cup of water to the empty jar and swirl it around to get the last bit of sauce and add the saucy water to the pan). At this time you may opt to add in some extra herbs and spices to jazz up your sauce – this is optional but I like to sometimes add a little dried oregano and basil to mine.

Cook sauce and sausage for about 10 minutes until sauce is hot.

Drain pasta and add it back into your large stock-pot, pour spaghetti sauce and sausage over cooked pasta and stir to combine.

Divide pasta into four 11 3/4 inch by 9 3/8 inch aluminum foil pans (I purchase my pans at the Dollar Tree 2 for $1.00)

Sprinkle each pan of pasta with 1/2 lb. of shredded mozzarella cheese and then top with 6 slices of provolone cheese.

Cover pans with a double layer of aluminum foil.

Label each pan with instructions on how to cook. I simply wrote on a 3×5 index card “Baked Rigatoni Pasta – Date: 1/14/2012 – Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour”

We cooked one pan for ourselves for dinner that night and froze the other three pans for dinner at a later date.

Easy! It took about 5 minutes more to make 4 batches of a yummy pasta dish than it did to make just one batch. We usually serve this with a side salad and some garlic bread.

Notes - this is a very adaptable recipe, if you are gluten free use some gluten free pasta and a GF pasta sauce, if no dairy, omit the cheese or use a lactose free cheese. If you are a vegetarian omit the sausage or use a meat free alternative. I do recomend you try that homemade sauce in the crock-pot…that is super tasty, loaded with healthy veggies and is gluten free, dairy free, vegan, low fat, low sodium. It is my preferred sauce any day over jarred sauce.

Tags: Freezer Meals, OAMC, Once A Month Cooking, Pasta
Posted in Entrees, Freezer Cooking, Recipes | 1 Comment »

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One of my goals for the new year is to do more freezer meals for my family. In looking over my spending habits for 2011 I can clearly see that our family spent entirely too much money eating out and I need to bring that down in 2012. So the plan is, to make more meals at home and have items in my freezer ready to be warmed up or cooked for easy meals that don’t cost me a fortune.

Even though I have a stockpile of food there are many days where I look and say “we don’t have anything to eat”. What that really means is that I didn’t thaw out any meat or plan something for dinner or I just don’t want to cook. I am a lucky girl in that my husband cooks 50% of the meals for our crew. We switch days on who cooks and who cleans the kitchen. That works for us. We both work a full-time job. It was not always this way however because I have been a stay-at-home/work-at-home mom for 20+ years and I used to do all of the cooking and cleaning. It took my husband some time to get around to the notion that I now work a full time job, often longer hours than he does at his job outside of the home.

So, back to the goal….do more batch cooking and have options in my freezer ready to go for those days we don’t feel like cooking and are tempted to going out for dinner or grabbing a donut or muffin at the store.

I hate cooking breakfast. I am not a morning person. I dislike the smell of food cooking first thing in the morning. And I don’t want to eat breakfast until after 10 AM. The problem is, I am the only person in my household who is like this. Everyone else wants to eat as soon as they wake up and on the weekends they all want home cooked hot breakfast and not cold cereal. So in our first freezer meal project my husband and I whipped up some yummy breakfast burritos.

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs. bacon, diced
• 2 lbs. breakfast sausage
• 1 large onion, diced small
• 1 cup diced bell pepper (I used frozen diced bell pepper)
• 20 eggs
• 36 fajita sized flour tortillas
• 1 (8 oz.) bag shredded cheddar cheese

Directions:

In a large skillet (I used my electric skillet) cook the bacon until browned. Drain grease from bacon and set aside on a plate with a few paper towels to absorb the grease.

Click here to read the rest of the recipe

Tags: Breakfast, Breakfast Burritos, Burittos, Freezer Meals, OAMC, Once A Month Cooking
Posted in Breakfast, Freezer Cooking, Recipes | 39 Comments »

There are three popular methods of freezer cooking that can save a family money. There are many benefits to freezer cooking. Some benefits include preserving perishables and reducing waste, having ready-made meals in your freezer when you are tempted to order out, and maximizing time with the family by cooking less often. Fully cooked meals can maintain their texture and taste in the freezer for up to three months. Uncooked, ready to go meals, like marinated meat can be frozen without degradation for up to six months. Different methods can optimize for busy schedules or tight budgets and any family can find benefits in one of the methods mentioned below.

Once a Month Cooking, also known as, OAMC is a way of making meals ahead of time and freezing them for later use. There are several ways to adopt this system into your family. The phrase once a month cooking was made famous by a book entitled Once-A-Month-Cooking by Lagerborg and Wilson. Their book is worth a buy at Amazon for beginners, the information inside is valuable to anyone looking into getting involved in this type of cooking schedule. OAMC, in its purest form, involves a family preparing 30 meals within one weekend each month, or mini-sessions where 14 meals are made in one day. The benefits are having only one weekend of dirty pots to clean and a highly detailed dinner schedule. For the family that eats take-out regularly or is rushed to find time for dinner, this is an excellent program.

Another method of freezer cooking is for seasoned deal seekers. “Assembly Line” cooking, as seen on websites like www.cooktosave.com, takes perishable loss leaders from your local grocery store and assembles them into several meals in one day to be enjoyed or prepared for another day. Assembly Line cooking turns your kitchen into a family assembly line. Examples are finding over-ripe bananas at the store for less than $0.25 a pound and turning them into 30 chocolate covered frozen banana popsicles, buying 20 pounds of pork loin at $1.67/lb and making breakfast sausage, burritos, kebobs, steaks, and Weiner schnitzel. For the family that likes buying large quantities of loss leaders and getting the best price for their meals, this is their perfect match.

The third and easiest method of freezer cooking is called “Feed the Freezer”. These ideas incorporate making double or triple the amount you usually make for dinner and putting the additional meals away in the freezer for a later date. When planning to make lasagnas, stuffed shells, chili’s, or other easy to freeze casseroles, make two or three dinners instead of one and freeze the additional dinners. Try searching any recipe site on the internet, like www.allrecipes.com for the keyword “OAMC”, to find recipes that are freezer friendly. For the family that wants to make their food dollar stretch a little more than usual and have one of two meals in their freezer this is an easy adoptive plan.

However a family chooses to adopt a make ahead style of cooking, there are savings to be had. An extra stand-alone freezer in your home can save $1,000 or more per year on a family food budget.

Contributed by: HotCouponWorld member FrankRyan owner of the website CookToSave.com

Tags: Bulk Cooking, Bulk Shopping, Feed The Freezer, Freezer, Freezing, Frozen Food Month, March, Meal Planning, OAMC, Once A Month Cooking, Stockpile
Posted in Articles, Cooking & Kitchen Tips, Frugal Living, Stockpiling | No Comments »