Hey! What's cooking?

Hey Loves!
Rissa here with another great tip!

Today's tip is about freezer cooking and meal planning. What exactly is freezer cooking and meal planning you ask? Well they kind of go hand in hand with each other and as I mentioned in a previous post on organizing recipes, these things were a must in our household while I was in Cosmetology school.

Freezer cooking is when you prepare 4-10 meals at one time and freeze them for use throughout the week/month. This method helps with planning your meals as well as saves you money. I have found that I spend less money in the grocery store because I shop from the grocery store sales ad along with clipping coupons for those on-sale items (if you live in the southeast region of the U.S. check out www.southernsavers.com). Freezer cooking also saves time because you don't have to cook on a day to day basis. I try to do my cooking twice a month so, I choose a day every 2 weeks and block out 2-4 hours to cook and freeze my meals. This makes dinner time a breeze! Just pull the meal out of the freezer, reheat, cook a side dish or two and Voila!

Meal planning is when you make a menu for a week/month based on your freezer cooking or based on your grocery list. Even if you don't freezer cook, meal planning is also a great way to save some cash at the grocery store and it also helps you more efficiently use the food you buy. There is nothing worse than spending time doing all of that shopping and spending all of that money on food just for it to go to waste.

So here are the steps to freezer cooking:

1. Make a list of items you have at home
2. Make a grocery list of items needed (I base my list on the sales)
3. Go grocery shopping
4. Plan meals you want to cook
5. Make a "master plan" to breakdown what needs to be done
• Items to prep (i.e. how many onions to chop)  
• What order to cook each meal (i.e. ground beef, bake chicken, etc.) 
6. Prep and cook meals
7. Separate foods accordingly and pop em in the freezer

Here are some printouts as well as tips on freezer cooking/meal planning from www.moneysavingmom.com

Some of my favorite things to freezer cook are:

• Soups
• Casseroles
• Crockpot meals
• Ground beef (I brown the beef with onions so it's ready for any recipe that calls for ground beef)
• Hamburger patties (I just season and roll the patties and freeze them uncooked)
• Any type of baked chicken recipe
• Breakfast burritos
• French toast
• Biscuits (I make the dough, cut the biscuits out and freeze uncooked)

Do you freezer cook or plan your meals? What is your method?    

Happy cooking! 

Organize those recipes.

Hey Loves!
Rissa here with another tip! This one is all about food! Yaaay!
I don't know about you guys but for me cooking for my family can sometimes be the most dreadful part of my day, simply due to the fact I don't know what in the world to cook! So I end up stuck in the kitchen fumbling around until I come up with something that either the Hubs and the babies don't like or I just end up microwaving something. It is very important to me that I make healthy and tasty meals for my family so in order to do so without all the stress I decided that maybe a recipe binder would be a helpful tool!
This binder not only houses all of our favorite recipes but it also keeps recipes we would like to try, grocery list printouts, food inventory, meal planning printouts (post on this later), freezer cooking printouts (post on this later), and much more. This binder has been such a big help here in the Cunningham house and dinner time is a breeze now! So if you are interested in putting together your own binder keep on reading and lets get right into it.

Items Needed:

• 3 ring binder
• Card-stock
• Glue
• Tab dividers (12)
• 3-hole punch
• Your recipes
• Page protectors

Now as far as how you put your binder together this is totally up to you. I have seen so many different versions of how people organize their recipes and I took things that I liked and applied them to my own.

Step 1.) Determine how you want to categorize your recipes. I categorized mine in this order:

•  Meal Planning  (this is where I put all of those printouts and food inventory)
• Beef
• Breakfast
• Chicken
• Crockpot
• Drinks
• Pork
• Seafood
• Sides, Breads, Butters
• Snacks
• Soups
• Sweets

Step 2.) Type those hand-written recipes and print them out. Glue them to card-stock to make them sturdy. Put them into the page protectors.

Step 3.) Label your tab-dividers.

Step 4.) Arrange your recipes in the binder accordingly.

Step 5.) Cook one of those favorite recipes and pat yourself on the back because you are awesome! ;-)

My supplies and yes that would be a glass of Shiraz, I try not to do many projects in the Cunningham home with out it! ;-)

Recipe from a magazine

Tab divider labeled

Typed recipe

Binder is complete!

Now that your recipes are all together in one fabulous place, you are ready to start meal planning! This too has been extremely helpful for meal time here. My next post will be about how I plan my meals by freezer cooking and using a weekly menu so stay tuned!
Do you have a recipe binder?