Five Days For The Freezer

Last Wednesday was our monthly trip to the grocery store. As a result, I have spent the past 5 days tackling cooking for my freezer.

The cooking began on Thursday. I made 2 dozen chocolate chip muffins. We ate 9 for breakfast and the rest went in the freezer. Then I had 10 pounds of ground beef to get to.
I made 2 meals worth of meatballs, Salisbury steak with onion and mushroom gravy, 3 packages of browned meat with onions, 2 batches of sloppy joe meat, and 1 meatloaf. The meatloaf we had for dinner.I also made a triple batch of mashed potatoes. We ate one with the meatloaf for dinner, the second batch was frozen on its own in a plastic bag, and the third batch topped one of the batches sloppy joe meat for a "Sloppy Joe Shepherd's Pie" for the freezer.

As a tip, I've found my mashed potatoes freeze and reheat best when I bulk them up with a little sour cream and cream cheese. They also taste delicious this way!
On Friday, I wanted to get some of our produce taken care of before it had a chance to even think about going bad. The first thing I did was cut up all of the veggies I'd be using: 3 zucchinis, 1 green pepper, 1 onion, 1 pound mushrooms, and 1 whole head of garlic.

I made garlic chicken & spinach spaghetti, which we ate that night.
Then I made garlic zucchini & mushroom saute. I packaged that into 3 side-dish sized freezer bags and put them in the freezer.
Then I made a veggie-heavy tomato sauce. I put one bag of just sauce in the freezer.
On Saturday, I used the remaining sauce, and the rest of the spinach, to make Florentine stuffed shells, meat lasagna, and vegetarian lasagna. We ate the vegetarian lasagna on Saturday night and the other two dishes went into the freezer.

Sunday morning began with blueberry pancakes. I made a triple batch and froze all of the leftovers.Then I decided to make lots of pizza pockets for quick lunches from the freezer. This is one of favorite things to have in the freezer. Even though it takes a few hours to make 4 batches, it is well worth it through out the rest of the month.
I ended up with 24 pepperoni and mozzarella pizza pockets. I decided to try something new this month and also made 8 ham & cheese pockets. While those were baking, I made 45 Parmesan chicken fingers. We ate half for dinner on Sunday and the other half went in the freezer.

On Monday I made 2 dozen tortillas. My hope was to have some extra tortillas to freeze for quick quesadilla lunches throughout the month. But, after 4 kids snacking on them, and 2 dinners, they are all gone. Oh well, maybe next time.
To go along with the tortillas I made a chicken & black bean taco filling, which we ate Monday night. I also made some creamy chicken and cheese enchiladas for the freezer. When I pull them out to eat, I will add some enchilada verde sauce over the top before I bake them.Here is the current state of my freezer. I think I'll have to halt the freezer cooking for now until we clear out a bit more room, or until I rearrange everything to see if I can create some more room.


Update: I have linked and written out recipes in this post.

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