Do you ever wish you could take advantage of grocery sales more? How about the last time chicken breast went on sale for example. Unfortunately there’s only so much chicken your family can eat in a week (without complaining). Freezer cooking allows you to take advantage of these sales and enjoy the rewards for weeks to come. Here’s how…

Take a look at grocery sales flyers each week. I like to keep a price book to make sure a sale really is a good deal.
“Price Book – A small notebook you carry in your purse that contains prices of the items you buy most often. It allows you to tell at a glance if something really is a good deal or not”.

If it is, think about how many different meals you could make with that meat that your family enjoys. I usually stick to 4 recipes or less. Let’s look at some examples.

Ground Beef – Spaghetti Sauce, Tacos, Meat Loaf, Beef and Vegetable Soup

Beef Roast – Pot Roast, Sauerbraten, Crockpot Pulled Beef, Beef BBQ Sandwiches

Stew Meat - Beef Stew, Chili, Goulash, Beef and Potato Soup

Whole Chickens - Roasted Chicken, Chicken Salad, Curried Chicken, Chicken Enchiladas

By the way, if more than one meat is on sale, I choose the one that’s the best deal for this.

Next, decide how many of these dishes you can store in your freezer at any given time. It may depend on the size of your freezer, how much is already in there and depending on what you’re cooking how many dishes you have (for casseroles for example). You also want to make sure you only make and freeze dishes you think you and your family will eat within the next 3 months.

Then it’s time to shop. Be sure to get enough of the sale item and all ingredients to cook multiple versions of each of the dishes you’ve decided on. Get them all home and then work on a game plan. Are there any steps that you can combine for all or most of the dishes? In our ground beef example, 3 out of the 4 dishes require me to brown the ground beef first. In this case I’d go ahead and make my meatloaves first and store them in the freezer, then I’d brown the rest of the ground beef in two or three large pans and keep working on the dishes from there.

The more organized you are with this, the smoother the cooking process will be. The first time you do this you may want to focus on making just one or two versions of the dish. As you become more comfortable with it, add more dishes for a maximum of four.
Susanne Myers – The Hillbilly Housewife

P.S. As a special thank you for reading this blog and Tawra and Jill’s newsletter, we put together a deal on my popular Freezer Cooking ebook and the recipe collections I’ve developed for it. Until midnight on October 19th 2009 you can get my entire freezer cooking system for 75% OFF (yes, you read that right)
Here’s where you can grab your entire freezer cooking system for a fraction of what you’d usually pay for it.