Another Round of Freezer Meals! Gluten Free!

Last Sunday I posted a photo of my fabulously FULL Freezer on facebook.

Since several of you asked for what recipes we did here is the list! I’ll try to start posting them each time we do them. Which is around every 4-5 weeks.

1. Crockpot Italian Chicken
2. Low Carb Taco Soup
3. Cheesy Chicken Ranch Lasagna
4. Fiesta Chicken Casserole
5. Low Carb Meatballs alla parmiaganna
6. Slow Cooker Sausage Breakfast Casserole
7. Chicken Broccoli Noodle Casserole
8. Chicken & Rice Soup
9. BBQ Chicken
10. Slow cooker San Francisco Pork Chops
11. Slow Cooker Cheesy Bacon BBQ Chicken Sandwiches
12. Macaroni & Beef with Cheese
13. Bacon Wrapped Chicken with Rosemary
14. Taco Casserole
15. King Ranch Chicken

Some Tips/Basic things we do

• I eat Gluten Free (I have Celiac disease). My friends I cook with are so sweet to pick GF recipes! Or recipes that I can alter. which means we have to leave out recipes like stuffed crescent rolls. sniff sniff. I miss crescent rolls. When recipes have cream soups (chicken, mushroom, etc.) we buy the cream soups for them & I use a batch of “cream of whatever soup”. I keep a batch of this around. Even my husband is fine with it. & doesn’t notice a huge difference!
• We don’t just pick recipes specifically made for the freezer. we pick whatever we want & alter it.
• We used to prepare the meals completely, using Glad’s black oven pans. But now we pretty much just prepare the ingredients & use freezer bags. This way things taste so much fresher. & the majority of the work is in precooking meat, measuring ingredients, etc.
• This round of meals cost us about $115 per person. which is less than $8 a meal! We try to make each meal serve 6-8 people.
• I type up a mega shopping list & 2 of us go shopping the day before.
• We start Sunday after church & spend 4-7 hours Total. the time varies on how many recipes we’re doing, when we all get started, difficulty level of recipes, etc.
• 15 recipes definitely took us longer. but honestly I’d rather spend 1 more hour to get 3 more meals than do it again sooner. (Although the day cooking with friends is quite fun! & we turn on a movie usually too)

I know it’s probably not the fastest method. I’ve seen several post on Pinterest about making 40 meals in one afternoon, but when I’ve looked through those they’re usually things my family wouldn’t really choose. lots of chicken with different veggies frozen to be thrown in a crockpot. good! just not my family’s style. so each of us girls chooses 4-5 recipes, we all look over them & approve or ask someone to swap out some recipe. This way we get a bigger variety.

Freezer meals has made the “witching hour” (or is it bewitching hour?) at my house dramatically less. yes, somehow kids seem to always get a little crazy around that time, but thankfully I usually already have dinner planned, or even in the crockpot or in the oven!