This morning was all about preparing some cheap freezer meals to store away for future use. I like to take advantage of lower unit pricing by purchasing larger quantities of certain things. Most times, food items are offered at better prices when purchased in bulk.

Of course, it is never a good idea to purchase in bulk if there is any chance that part of the item will go to waste.  I once bought a half gallon of soy sauce, because I used a fourth cup of it every time I made teriyaki chicken.  My family loved it and we made it about once per month.  It took forever to finish off that jug of soy sauce.

Also, don’t blow your money on bulk purchases of perishable food items, unless you plan to prep and freeze it, or otherwise store it, immediately.  Throwing away spoiled food doesn’t save you any money.

Utilizing Bulk Purchasing

After purchasing a lug of hamburger, yesterday, that I knew I needed to portion out and and get it into the freezer, I decided it would be good to use some of the hamburger in a freezer meal as well.

Since I needed onions in my chili, I went to the store and bought a small bag of them.  It doesn’t take me much more time to dice up a bag of onions than it takes for just one.  Plus, we now have a good sized freezer bag of diced onion for whenever we are making something that requires them.  Big time saver.  I already had some diced peppers in the freezer from some time before.

We had been given some butternut squash by a friend, so we searched for recipes of crock pot freezer meals that use butternut squash.  We settled on a butternut squash chili recipe that looked good.  It was supposed to be a vegetarian meal, but since we had all that hamburger, I decided to add it in.  We’ll see how it turns out.  The crock pot is one our favorite and most heavily used small appliances in our kitchen.

After cooking up the hamburger and draining it well, I portioned it out into three separate parts:

1. meat for the chili,
2. hamburger to use in spaghetti sauce,
3. taco meat.

Preparing Food For Storage

My Food Saver is another one of my favorite kitchen tools.  It’s one that I don’t use every day, or even every week, but it gets used enough, and I’ve never been sorry I’ve purchased it.  Food will store so much better and keep longer when the air is removed from the package and it’s well sealed.

That’s how I like to roll.  I’m in favor of doing things that save money and save time over the long haul. It just takes a little advance planning.

After the busy holiday season comes to an end, I’m planning to get on Pinterest and find one of those posts where someone provides an outline/instructions for a dozen or twenty different crock pot freezer meals you can make all at once, along with the shopping list for all the ingredients.  Meals for a couple months on one day of work.  That’s how I roll.