Freezer Cooking

I have been intimidated by the idea of "freezer cooking," "batch cooking," whatever you want to call it, for years. It wasn't until I participated in an online roundtable on meal planning last month that I realized something super important: there are different ways of freezer cooking. Maybe this is ridiculously self-evident to most people, but my mental picture of freezer cooking was that you had to dedicate a full weekend (or similar block of time) to cooking all the food in the world, and fill up your freezer with it, and then... I was a little bit foggy on how it was actually helpful, because I think I was picturing freezer meals as being a way to save dinnertime if you weren't able to make whatever you had already planned.

Last assumption first, while there are certainly some things that you can pull out of the freezer and use immediately, that's probably not going to be the main way that freezer cooking is helpful: quickbreads, breakfast cookies, chocolate banana oatmeal fudge bars, yes, but main dishes not so much... For full meals, it's more about having the prep work done ahead of time than about having healthy versions of instant pizzas in the freezer. Having a menu plan is still important—ideally, the freezer meals get built into the menu plan, so that they're written down and I can see on my planner a day ahead that I need to pull whatever it is out of the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge overnight.

Matt and I were talking about this a couple of weeks back, about slow cooker freezer meals specifically; he was confused about how it could possibly be all that helpful to have, say, a pork shoulder frozen with a marinade. "But you still have to cook it all day!" I certainly saw his point, but (as we were actually discussing an upcoming cookbook that I'm excited about on slow cooker/pressure cooker freezer meals) it got me to think through exactly how it would be helpful. Yes, in that case you still have the cooking time of a regular meal, but all of the prep work is done and if you're planning your cooking ahead, there's no last-minute "oh no, the orange juice has been sitting in the fridge too long and has a funny smell so I guess we're making carnitas with grapefruit juice today!" (It's not awful, for the record, but orange is definitely better.) And as we're getting ready to have a newborn in the house, even the 20-minute prep work of making a spice rub, coating the pork, dicing the onion, and making the marinade sounds a whole lot more challenging when I picture trying to do with with a tiny person who wants me to sit on the couch and feed him constantly. So in that case, yes, being able to dump the thawed bag into the slow cooker and turn it on instead of doing that small amount of prep work would be legitimately helpful.

Okay, now back to my first assumption. There certainly are people who do huge batch-cooking marathons and get an entire month's meals into the freezer in one go, and that works for them, and that's great! But there are other people who just make double batches of suppers when they know something freezes well, and stick one batch into the oven/slow cooker and the other into the freezer. Some people mainly freeze breads/sides/snacks, things they can easily use from frozen (or after a quick thaw). And some people just make staples ahead of time, things that can easily be transformed into a variety of meals, like beans, rice, tomato sauce, pesto, cooked meat... 

And any of those methods, or any combination of them, helps to save time and get dinner on the table more smoothly. I've actually been doing a little bit of several of those methods for years without realizing that I was "freezer cooking": sticking leftovers in the freezer when there's enough to serve as another full meal, keeping things like pesto and pureed beets portioned out in the freezer, storing batches of muffins or individually wrapped bars in there to be easily grabbed for quick breakfasts or snacks.

I've been trying to be a little more intentional about it as we prepare for a new baby, though. I don't even remember how I started reading the Thriving Home blog, but our family has enjoyed their recipes (and their "real food meets reality" philosophy) for a while now, and when Polly and Rachel released a cookbook full of freezer meals last fall, I was so excited to pick up a copy. Many recipes from From Freezer to Table have since become favorites in our house—their Killer Carnitas, Peach Baked Oatmeal, and Pesto Feta Tuna Melts all made it onto this week's menu plan! 

And in this last however-many-weeks pre-baby, I cannot tell you how helpful it is to have meal components already in the freezer and easy to assemble! I'm exhausted today, and had been dreading the end-of-the-day "they want to eat again?" time... until I realized that all I have to do is slice bread, pull pesto out of the freezer, and combine tuna with a couple of items from the fridge. I can practically make supper sitting down! Little Bear can peel some carrots for me, and if I have enough energy we can make ranch dip, but if not there's some hummus in the fridge. Easily-assembled suppers are very, very valuable!

Do you use any (or all!) of these methods of freezer cooking, or are there other ways of doing it that I missed here? How do you incorporate cooking ahead into your meal planning?