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Easy Freezer Meal Cooking Tips (Recipes & Helpful Tips)

Posted June 22, 2022
in Cook, Freezer Cooking, Main Dish

Carolyn Thomas

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Make mealtime easier by having freezer meals ready to go for those busy days when getting a home-cooked meal on the table just isn't possible. Here are our best tips for making freezer meal cooking and freezer prep easier.

For many years, all freezer space in our home had been allocated for meat and priority items such as frozen berries.

Because of this, we've done a lot of convenience meal canning projects where I make and can large batches of homemade beef stew, white bean chicken chili, or homemade tomato soup (sign up for our series on canning convenience meals here). Then these meals are ready and waiting on the pantry shelf whenever we need them.

However, since getting our freeze dryer, we're utilizing that preservation method to freeze-dry most of our berries and have found ourselves with a lot more freezer space available which is why I'm so glad to be chatting with Becky from Acre Homestead and Scratch Pantry on today's episode of the Pantry Chat.

Who is Becky?

Becky and her husband currently live on a one-acre homestead in Southwest Washington on the Portland-Washington border. They have recently purchased a much larger homestead that they're in the process of remodeling.

You can follow along with their journey over on her YouTube channel, AcreHomestead.

Becky really got into freezer cooking when she started her YouTube channel back in 2020. At the time, she and her husband were eating out far too often and knew they needed to reduce their food bill as well as eat from home because it's just much healthier.

Since she was busy filming YouTube videos and editing them in the evenings, she realized freezer meals were the answer to not having time to cook, but also wanting to save money by not eating out.

Why Freezer Meals are Helpful

Whether you're wanting to cook once and eat twice, prepare a week's or a month's worth of meals because you don't have the time to cook a meal from scratch each night of the week, or you just like the idea of having ready-to-eat meals on hand for emergencies (or gifting to friends in a time of need), there are so many reasons why freezer cooking might be for you.

Freezer Meal Prep

Many of Becky's freezer meal videos show her spending an entire day in the kitchen, prepping a month's (or a year's) worth of a specific item. You can watch Becky make a year's worth of pasta here (and grab our homemade egg noodle recipe here).

How Often Do You Prep Freezer Meals?

This can vary from family to family, but Becky says when she's solely living off of freezer meals that she needs to spend a day cooking about every six weeks in order to keep her supply topped off.

We both agree that this isn't always feasible for the common household. But some ways that make freezer cooking more attainable are to break it up into smaller portions, like this easy freezer meal meatloaf, single-serving frozen chicken pot pie, or freezer prep chicken masala.

Prep Ingredients

Freezer meals don't only have to consist of complete meals, you can easily prepare ingredients ahead of time to make dinnertime run more smoothly.

If you're chopping a bunch of onions for dinner, it doesn't take that much extra time to chop a few more onions and toss them into a half-gallon mason jar (be sure to label them so you don't forget what's in the jar!).
Cook up a couple of extra pounds of ground beef, season it up with taco seasonings and freeze it for a quick taco dinner later on.
Defrost a large portion of meat and separate it out into individual meal servings in a marinade. Then all you have to do the day of is cook your marinated meat and add a side.

Anything you can do when you're already making a mess in the kitchen can save you time later on. Then you're only dirtying up the kitchen and having to clean it up once instead of twice.

Having the option to grab an entire ready-to-eat meal or ingredients to speed up dinnertime can be great.

Peas being added to a skillet filled with chicken pot pie filling.

Cook Once Eat Twice

One way to easily stock the freezer with meals is to cook once and eat twice by doubling the batch of food you're already preparing for dinner.

By doubling that batch of homemade chicken pot pie, slow cooker BBQ pulled pork, or black bean enchiladas and freezing the leftovers, you now have the makings for a second meal when you need it most.

You can multiply this out even further if you cook enough food to have leftovers for lunch the next day. Then you're eating two dinners and two leftover lunches with each meal.

Crockpot Freezer Meals

Becky isn't a fan of crockpot freezer meals because you can get better flavors from food cooked in the oven or on the grill. Therefore, many of her freezer meals are prepared to be cooked that way.

Four breakfast burritos on a cutting board.

Freezer Meals for Breakfast

It's also nice not to limit our freezer meals to just dinner. Breakfast items make a fantastic freezer meal for quick and easy breakfasts on the go.

This speaks to me because I am not a morning cook! I don't enjoy eating breakfast myself and cooking a large meal at 6:30 AM does not appeal to me.

In our house, we often make up large breakfast casseroles and keep them in the refrigerator to pop in the oven first thing in the morning. But we're excited to start utilizing the freezer for breakfast items.

Becky recently did a video where she made up and froze a large batch of egg-muffin sandwiches, waffles, breakfast casserole and breakfast burritos. She said they were so good they're already gone and she wished she would have doubled or tripled the batch!

A cooked casserole in a pyrex glass pan.

Storing Freezer Meals

There are a variety of ways Becky recommends storing freezer meals.

Freezer Bags - Those ziptop bags come in handy for items like marinated meat or something that you won't want to reuse the bag for. They simply get tossed after each use. If you're trying to reduce your household waste, we recommend using glass bowls or pans with silicone lids.
Pyrex Dishes - Both Becky and I have a love of collecting Pyrex and casserole dishes from thrift stores. These are great to have on hand and she actually freezes her meals directly in those dishes. This means the meal can go directly from the freezer to the countertop to the oven in the same dish. This eliminates the need to buy disposable foil pans (that have gotten so expensive!). And when you have enough glass pans, you can actually gift the pan if you end up bringing a meal to someone.

Best Freezer Meals

I asked Becky what her favorite freezer meals were and she had a hard time nailing it down.

One of her favorites during the summer months is to make homemade stuffed peppers for the freezer. She buys a bunch of peppers from a local farmer when they're in season and chops them up to have them all year-round. This year she'll be making as many stuffed peppers as she can.

Curries also make a great freezer meal and they're a great way to use up any leftover vegetables about to go bad.

Lasagna and chicken pot pie are always favorites of her husband.

Cooked ground beef with tomato sauce in a pan.

Best Tips for Large Freezer Meal Cooking Days

Becky now has years of freezer cooking under her belt so I knew she'd be a wealth of information when it came to the best tips and tricks for the large cooking days. Here are her best tips:

Look for similar ingredients - When making multiple recipes look for recipes that use many of the same ingredients. You can mix up flavors with simple seasonings, but if you're chopping or cooking up the same vegetables or meat it can save a lot of time for those larger freezer meal cooking days.
Cook things you like to eat - Freezer meals are only helpful if they're actually recipes your family enjoys. Don't spend an entire day cooking a bunch of meals you've never tried before. Otherwise, those freezer meals will sit in your freezer, no one will want to eat them and they won't actually be helpful.
Don't repeat too often - One of Becky's tips when planning out the meals to prep for your freezer cooking days is to think about the previous meals you've prepped and try not to repeat them too often.
Use Grocery Pickup - When you're having a large freezer meal cooking day, it can save a lot of time if you plan out the ingredients you need ahead of time and use grocery pickup. Let the store do your shopping to save you valuable time!
Leave the groceries out - Pick up your groceries the day before your freezer meal day, then leave everything that doesn't need to be refrigerated out on the counter overnight so when you wake up in the morning it's ready to go. You can even designate a shelf in the refrigerator just for your freezer meal ingredients. These tips may seem silly, but every minute saved adds up in the end!
Print recipes - Once you have your recipes picked out, Becky recommends printing them on a large piece of paper so they're easy to read. Then you're not having to scroll through a recipe on your phone or trying to look at a small recipe card when you have a lot going on in the kitchen. An added bonus is that if the recipe page gets messy, you can just print another one the next time you need it!
Make notes - On those printed-out recipe pages, make notes as you're cooking and then store them in a three-ring binder for easy access next time you need them.
Prep beforehand - Marking off some of the more time-consuming tasks the day before really helps make the day run a lot smoother. Consider cooking up your meat or shredding all your cheese the day before. And definitely start with a clean kitchen, countertops cleared, an empty sink, and an empty dishwasher.
Save one meal for dinner - Anytime you're doing a large freezer meal prep day, plan to save one of the meals for dinner the day of. You'll be so glad at the end of the day to have dinner ready to eat.
Listen to something you love - When you're working in the kitchen, it's always best to have your favorite music or an audiobook ready to listen to. This can make the day so much more enjoyable!

Meals That Don't Freeze Well

Before embarking on a freezer meal day, it's important to know whether or not the item you're making freezes well. There are some foods you should not freeze.

I had a friend who decided she wanted to turn raw potatoes au-gratin into a freezer meal and she didn't realize that raw potatoes don't freeze and defrost well at all.

Can You Cook Freezer Meals From Frozen

We don't always have the forethought to grab out a freezer meal the night before and defrost it on the kitchen counter. So I asked Becky if freezer meals can be cooked straight out of the freezer.

She said yes! But the thing to remember is that a frozen meal is going to take a lot longer to cook than one that's been thawed. So plan on two to two and a half hours for that meal to cook all the way through.

If it's five o'clock and you're just now thinking about dinner, then it's likely not a good idea to grab one of those freezer meals. This is when utilizing some of those ingredients that have been prepped ahead of time can save you time when cooking your meal.

A food processor filled with chopped carrots, celery and onions.

Tools to Help With Freezer Meals

Becky and I can't say enough about the tools that help save you time in the kitchen. They may seem like an expensive purchase upfront, but the amount of time they save you later on more than pays for itself.

Some of our favorites are as follows:

Breville Dicing Kit - this dicing kit saves hours of time chopping vegetables for recipes. On those busy harvest days, this machine more than pays for itself!
Breville Food Processor - You can't use the dicing kit unless you have the food processor to go with it. This machine makes super fast pastry dough, it chops, blends, shreds, slices, and dices. You name it, it probably does it!