Though I love to cook, I have been slow about sharing my tips about organizing meals only because I would rather organize my kitchen than cook in it.
But this month, my habit of freezing meals regularly paid off because my mom has been in and out of the hospital twice this month.
Besides the trips back and forth to the hospital, and feeding my family, my mom and dad also needed meals.
Simple Meal Planning – Forget Once A Month Cooking
Look at a few easy tips for meal planning that don’t take as much time as once a month cooking and is a great back up system when life is unplanned.
{I have spaghetti, stew, soup and breakfast frozen back.}
- Focus on freezing regularly while you cook. Though I have done once a month meal cooking a lot more when the kids were young, the truth of it is it takes times. Though the rewards are huge and I did save on my budget, sometimes I just didn’t have the time to devote to the planning, prepping and preparing.
Through the years, I have found that freezing a meal or two back when cooking regularly proves to be a huge help when you’re sick, when your parents are sick or just when you have the blahs and don’t want to cook or go through the drive-thru either.
- Prepare simple meals, include breakfasts. One of my main go to breakfasts since breakfast is a real important meal to me is what I call a McDonald-like McMuffin, but only healthier because it’s home-made.
I scramble the eggs with whatever I want in them, usually onions and set it aside. Then I toast the muffins. After everything is cooled off, I build my muffin with scrambled eggs, add some cheese and cooked Canadian bacon and freeze it. I use the bag the muffin came in to freeze them.
I make them over the weekend and usually have them in the freezer. It takes about 2-3 minutes to warm it up (yep completely frozen) in the microwave and so there is no fuss in the morning for breakfast.
You can even bake your eggs ahead of time if you don’t want scrambled eggs. Look at this recipe;
Homemade Egg McMuffins at the Baker Chick.
You can see one of my freezer packages in the picture above that I took to my parents.
- Focus on crowd pleasers. Because my teen boys are big eaters, I find that focusing on casseroles, lasagnas and spaghetti combinations can accommodate even picky eaters. But too, having one or two meals like that in your freezer can feed another large family and is a crowd pleaser when you need it for an emergency meal.
Though I decided to cook chicken pot pie for my parents too, which is one of their favorite recipes of mine and I cooked more meals for a week, knowing that I had meals in my freezer to jump start my cooking process allowed me to serve my parents when they needed it.
Homeschool Organization & Hospitable
I have been loving reading about Freeze it Forward on Once a Month meals because everybody needs help at some time or the other and it just feels good when you can help out.
An organized homeschooler always has time to be hospitable and you don’t have to do over the top meal planning that might be more stressful than helpful.
Check out some more tips!
Homeschool Organization : Are you Collecting Cookbooks OR Recipes?
Hugs and love ya,
