How to Save Money and Time with One Small Change

When I was single I didn't cook a lot at home because I was only taught to cook with recipes for a family, so everything I had would easily feed four people.  I felt this was wasteful because I would get tired of eating it after having it for dinner and then again for left overs.  Fast forward to my "couple" life.  I now cook more often and I don't have the same issue with most meals, but there is one particular recipe that we absolutely love, but whenever I make it me and Luis almost kill ourselves trying to eat it all before it goes bad.  

My First Freezer Meal

The lasagna recipe I would make yielded about 10 - 12 servings.  By the time we made it to the end of the pan we wouldn't want to see lasagna again for months.  Well, something I started doing was making the lasagna in mini servings.  

To do this, I would make the recipe as it was written, but when it was time to build it, I used aluminum pans (usually you can get 5 or 6 for a dollar or so) to layer the lasagna.  I'd layer it just like you would in one big pan, just on a smaller scale.  This would yield five little pans of lasagna!!!  

Each little pan held two and a half to four servings, assuming we weren't being greedy.  The beauty was that I was able to build each pan and then freeze them until we were ready to eat lasagna again.  When that time came, we would take one of the pans out and bake it as usual.  

How You Can Start Freezer Cooking

The beauty is that you can do this with many recipes that freeze well. All you need to do is break them into smaller containers before you freeze them.  This is known as freezer cooking or creating freezer meals.  

Since this first adventure into freezer cooking, I branched out into freezer crockpot meals, even having to graduate up to a 6 qt crockpot!  

I encourage you to go ahead and explore your inner chef and stop making excuses as to why you can't cook (single people)...come on you can do it!  I don't want to discriminate, so those parents that just don't seem to have enough time to cook at home because there are so many family activities, make a couple of freezer meals and assign someone at home to pop it in the oven so when you get home it can already be in the oven cooking.  

For all you newlyweds/couples out there who don't want to cook...come onnnnnnnnnnnn you can do it...try cooking together...or challenging each other to see who can make the best freezer meal.  You can eat the first servings and then freeze the rest...well unless someone doesn't do so well and then welllllll, I don't know, that isn't my problem LOLLLLL j/k. I'm sure it will be fine.  Explore something new...and have fun!  

You can search for "freezer meals" and "Crockpot meals" on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook or Pinterest to get some inspiration.  I of course encourage you to connect with me on social as I try to share what I'm eating and freezing periodically as well.