Freezer cooking, once-a-month-cooking (OAMC), make-ahead meals – whatever you call it, making pre-prepared dishes that you can pull out of the freezer at a moment’s notice can save you time and money. I’ve done this on and off for years; long before I started clipping coupons, I would make freezer meals in order to avoid the “Takeout trap”. When life gets extraordinarily busy, there isn’t always a lot of time to cook, and it’s too easy to cruise through the drive-through. By making time to prepare food in advance, I can just pull something out of the freezer and heat it up. By making it myself, I’m able to control what goes into the food, instead of buying a TV dinner. And of course, avoiding fast food and expensive pre-packaged foods saves you money, not to mention the fact that freezer cooking is a great way to use up food and take advantage of sales on perishable items.

I have declared this a freezer cooking weekend, and plan to assemble a batch of meals over the next two days. My work schedule for the next few weeks is shaping up to be very packed, so this is a great way to take some of the burden off – without resorting to takeaway. I’m going to share photos and recipes for what I make, so stay tuned! In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about freezer cooking, I recommend these sites:

Money Saving Mom: How I Plan My Freezer Cooking Day + Free Planning Worksheets – She frequently has “Freezer Cooking Day” link-ups also!

Freeze Happy!

Ellen’s Kitchen : OAMC Introduction

Life as Mom: Freezer Cooking Basics

Have you ever tried freezer cooking before? Got any recipes or sites to share? Leave a comment and let me know!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 20th, 2010 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Coupon Menu Corner. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.