Crockpot Freezer Meals

So while there may still be three weeks of Summer, Mother Nature disagrees. Bellingham has been cooler and grayer lately. While I love Fall I'm not quite ready to give up on Summer yet! I've been spending quite a bit of time on Pinterest lately, after taking quite a few months off, and my Crockpot recipe board as grown substantially! I'm all about prepping a crockpot meal at night before bed, putting the whole pot in the fridge and pulling it out in the morning on my way out the door. I know myself and there is no way I'm going to wake up early to prep for dinner, I won't even open a can! So this method of doing it the night before has worked wonders! But I've wanted to start getting into meal prepping and figured what better way than to start with crockpot meals that we can just pull from the freezer!

I tried to do a bit of research and figure out what meals I would want to make, and what items I would need to buy. I ended up spending around $80 and got 12 meals. That's $6.67/meal for two people. I was pretty happy with that.

That's another struggle I have with all these AMAZING recipes online. They're usually for families. Which is great, but it means I'm cutting all these amounts in half, which will change the cooking time, so I really don't know how they'll turn out in the end. I plan to do some more posts when I actually cook these meals - I would like to make sure they turn out before I set them on the world!

Here's a picture of almost everything I got - no pictured is a family size package of chicken breasts, chicken thighs, and 3 pounds ground beef (my counter just isn't big enough to picture it all)

Items include: 

• Canned beans: black, pinto, kidney, great northern, small red, garbanzo
• Bag o' celery
• Bag o' carrots
• Garlic
• 3 onions" 2 sweet 1 red (just for the sake of variety)
• Canned tomato products: paste, diced, sauce
• Salsa: both red and green
• Peppers: one green, one yellow (peppers are spendy right now!)
• Canned green chilies
• Frozen corn, frozen peas & carrots

Now I'm lucky and my boyfriend has spent the last 16 years working in a kitchen and wanted to help. So I set him to chopping all my onions, it took him all of two minutes. About 27 times faster than it would have taken me. And because he's amazing he also peeled all my garlic. Got myself a winner!

So next step was prepping the bags. Most sites I read talked about using freezer ziplock bags, which is a great choice. We happen to own a vacuum sealer which is what I used. Honestly, I recommend getting one, put it on your Christmas list because its amazing. We got it because the previously mention boyfriend ages his own meats, making is own bacon, all that jazz so it's super helpful for him. I primarily use it to reseal my chip bags - no more stale chips! Its also handy for resealing all bags, not just chips. Rice, pasta, frozen peas & corn, brown sugar, seriously I could go on forever!

I have no idea how much this sealer actually cost. Ours is a FoodSaver - very similar to this one. It has settings for dry and moist which is REALLY helpful when sealing bags with liquid.

 I also stumbled upon these awesome gadgets that hold your bag upright and open while you fill them. Seriously they're amazing and were only a few bucks. They made the process so much faster! My only regret is that I only bought three of them! I had all my recipes written down and with all my ingredients prepped out all I had to do was fill each bag, seal it, label it, throw it in the freezer. Super easy!

Here's what they looked like after they were sealed up. I tried to make them as flat as possible to they're freezer and thaw quickly.

In the end I ended up with twelve meals! Since I plan to only do these on week nights that's a little over two weeks worth of meals. But knowing us we won't want a crockpot meal every night of the week. And since these were just the trial runs, I figure at least one won't turn out right. Below is a list of some of the meals I did. Some bags also ended up just being throw bags - I just took whatever ingredients were left and dumped them in a bag. So who know how they'll turn out!

• Salsa Verde Chicken
• Chicken Beans and Rice
• Mexican Chicken Crockpot Dump
• Sweet BBQ Chicken
• Chicken Soup
• "Lasagna" Soup
• Pasta "Casserole"
• A handful of other meals I can't remember off the top of my head!