Savings on Dinners

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Permalink Reply by Sylvia on February 11, 2008 at 4:04pm

I try to cook ahead of time whenever possible. I don't have much time to get dinner ready after I get home from work. I've found that freezing leftover spaghetti or any other kind of prepared pasta dish just does NOT work. The sauce is not very appetizing when you heat it back up. You can premake pasta dishes, you just have to freeze the sauce separately from all the other ingredients. I now understand why frozen dinners always keep the sauce separate and you have to mix everything together.

I'm sure you can get a lot of great ideas about what kind of dinners you can freeze by glancing at some different frozen dinners they have in your grocery store. I also found this website that lists all sorts of "freezer recipes." I use it sometimes to get ideas for things that might freeze well. http://www.recipelink.com/rcpmenus.html .

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Permalink Reply by B-Lou on February 12, 2008 at 6:20am

Thank you! I was going to make a pasta dish this weekend. Now I know to keep the sauce seperate! Thanks for saving me several meals :-) !!

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Permalink Reply by Karen Bennett on February 12, 2008 at 9:10am

As a busy working mom, I often try to cook ahead of time and to just simplify the whole cooking process in general. I tried the cooking/freezing process years ago after Deborah Taylor-Hughes wrote the book "Frozen Assets". It saved a lot of time and since then, I have frozen things here and there, especially when I find they will unfreeze/cook well when the time comes. A lot of it is trial and error -- finding out what freezes well and works for you.

The biggest challenge I found was trying to keep something from getting freezer burned. It's very important to try and keep as much air out of the container or bag as possible. If it's a container, try and fill it almost to the top with the sauce or food you are freezing. If you are freezing in bags, I wouldn't necessarily invest right away in one of those food-bag sealer machines. I had purchased one but then realized that just sucking the air out of the bag with a straw worked better!

Here is a site with some good tips:

http://www.frugalmom.net/once_a_month_cooking.htm

Hope that helps!

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