Are you looking for ways to save money? For most families, the third largest monthly expense in the budget is food. Freezer cooking is a great way to cut costs, shop sales, and still feed your family filling and nutritious meals!
Here are some ways that freezer cooking can help you save money.
Freezer = Money Saver
I would challenge you to utilize the freezer as a money saving tactic. As you watch the sales and prices at the grocery store, please start stocking up on the meats and veggies when you see them on sale. When you see boneless skinless chicken breast on sale for $1.99/lb., I beg of you to please buy enough packages to last until the next sale (usually 6-8 weeks later!) While every grocery store’s sales cycle differ slightly, if you watch your stores closely, you’ll start to notice a pattern of when they offer best prices on meats.
When you find chicken on sale, you’ll want to have these recipes on hand!
As you slowly begin to fill your freezer with meats and veggies, you’ll discover a shift in the way that you grocery shop and plan your meals. Instead of planning then shopping, you’ll find yourself shopping, filling your pantry and freezer, and THEN planning your meals based on what you purchased at rock bottom prices and what you have in your house!
While both options, meal planning then shopping & shopping then meal planning, are great money saving strategies, I have found that shopping the sales and stocking up, then planning around what you have on hand is the best way to save more money in the long run.
Here’s a peek of what that looks like…
Week 1 – chuck roasts and split chicken breasts are on sale. Organic baby carrots are on sale, as are yellow onions and sweet potatoes.
Shopping Plan: Purchase 3-4 roasts, 3-4 packages of split chicken breasts, 3-4 bags of baby carrots, an extra bag of yellow onions, and triple the amount of sweet potatoes you would normally purchase.
Freeze Plan: Marinate the beef roasts & chicken pieces, or just freeze them and marinate later. Freeze the baby carrots to use in soups or stews. Chop up or slice and freeze the extra bag of onions to use in soups, stews, sauces and fajitas. Make a triple batch of mashed sweet potatoes and freeze what you don’t eat for dinner that night.
Week 2 – Pork chops are on sale, as are celery and the last of the strawberries for the season.
Shopping Plan: Purchase 3-4 packs of pork chops, and extra stalk of celery, and as many strawberries as you can fit into your budget.
Freeze Plan: Marinate the pork chops, or just freeze them and marinate later. Chop up the celery and freeze in 2 cup portions to use for soups, stews and casseroles. Remove the stems from the strawberries and flash freeze (details in Freezing Tutorials section) to use in smoothies later.
Week 3 – it goes on and on.
After a few weeks, you’ll have all kinds of food in your freezer and pantry to start making up meals. Eventually your shopping list will be just fresh produce, dairy and bread. Then, you’ll need to purchase more meat when it goes on sale again and keep the rotation going. Just remember to keep enough on hand for what your family needs.
Over time, you’ll fall into a nice rhythm and will enjoy all kinds of savings, too!
Shop the Sales
Shopping sale items at your grocery store is a great way to save money, but when buying produce, you can only use so much before it goes bad. If you plan to make a few freezer meals out of your fresh (and on sale!) ingredients, you can make more meals at a lower cost.
Meat is another great ingredient to buy when it is on sale and put into a freezer meal. Meat is often the most expensive part of any meal, so buying it on sale helps you save! Most meals last about 3 months in the freezer – so you have plenty of time to eat them!
Other great items to buy while they are on sale (or with a coupon): pasta sauce, rice, beans, canned and frozen vegetables, and soup.
If plan to make a bunch of meals, you can also buy in bulk- without being scared it will go to waste. Buying in bulk is always less expensive than smaller portions.
Buy meat on sale & prep meals —> huge grocery savings in the long run
MyFreezEasy offers monthly themed meal plans for “All Chicken Recipes” and “All Ground Beef Recipes” and “All Pork Recipes” so that you can make meals for your freezer with the meat that’s on sale at your grocery store. We update these every month with new recipes. Keep scrolling to get a copy of this month’s all meat plans!
(Want to really dig deeper on your grocery spending habits? Tap below to check out my free workshop!)
A Story of a Sweet Potato Deal
The potatoes were sweet, but so was the deal.
Just before Thanksgiving, I ran into the grocery store to grab a few things for my 3rd son’s birthday gathering. We had a few of his buddies over to our house to play games and celebrate him turning 9. I had my 2 younger boys with me, which is really rare! (I go to great lengths to shop alone, sometimes even at 10 pm when they’re all asleep!)
Sweet potatoes were NOT on my list…but they were quickly added to my list when I saw that they were $.12/lb. (Yes, you’re reading that right!) That’s 22 lbs for $2.66!!! Also, they had some from a local farm that were ginormous! I quickly decided to grab as many as would fit into the top of the little cart and ended up with 12 giant sweet potatoes.
Now, what do you do when you find sweet potatoes on sale?!
You buy as many as you think you can handle, then cook and freeze them. This is how “$5 Dinners” works…I now have 6 hefty side dish servings that cost me a total of $.30 each. Doing this helps me keep the overall meal costs LOW, and I don’t have to fuss about cooking these later (other than reheating!). Win-Win! I only cooked 8 of the 12 for the freezer…the rest we used for our holiday meal!.
P.S. Cooking these sweet potatoes was NOT on my list of things to do that day, and it was already a busy day…but I managed to squeeze in getting them going in the Instant Pot and oven, and then once they were cooked and cooled off, I mashed them and put them in the freezer. Probably a total of 10 minutes for part 1 and 10 minutes for part 2.
Read my step by step sweet potato journey here.
Skip the Drive Thru Line
Do you ever come home from an evening of running the kids around, errands, or meetings and have no idea what to eat for dinner? Oftentimes, that leads to taking the family out to dinner – and that can really add up! Save money by having great meals at home.
Drive thru —> food budget disaster.
AMIRIGHT?!
Eating at home is the best way to save on food. Having an easy dinner ready to go in your freezer saves you from eating out.
Waste Less
Let’s face it – sometimes we forget what ingredients we have in our fridge. And then they go to waste – that is like throwing money in the trash! If you have a plan for all of your ingredients before you buy them, you are much more likely to use up everything- and save money.
After you get in the habit of freezer meals, it will become second nature to freeze food before it spoils. Vegetables can be frozen and later used in soups, condiments can be used for sauces, and cheese can top lasagna.
Food waste —> major guilt for the loss of food and the wasted money
Buy in Bulk
This is how my love of freezer cooking started! This is where the magic happened. I wanted to save money, so I created my own freezer meal plans using only bulk ingredients. These plans went crazy on the internet and you can still find them in our online store today!
Freezer cooking allows you to utilize bulk prices, because with your freezer meal plan you are confident all of it will be used in meals. Goodbye food waste, overspending, and stress! Hello confidence!
RELATED RESOURCES
BEST Freezer Meal Resources from the Erin Chase Store
MyFreezEasy: The Best Way to Save Money AND Time
If you are interested in getting TEN meals into your freezer in ONE HOUR, MyFreezEasy can help you make that happen!
You choose the recipes your family likes, then MyFreezEasy pulls them together and gives you a customized meal plan with:
- complete recipes plus doubled version to freeze so you can easily prepare and cook your meals
- shopping lists so you can get in and out of the store
- streamlined assembly instructions so you can spend as little time as possible on the freezer meal prep
- downloadable labels with directions for cooking so you know what to do when its time to cook/reheat the meal!
You can create your customized meal plan from your computer, or even from your phone while you are at the grocery store!
Click here for more information about becoming a MyFreezEasy member!
And happy Freezer Cooking!!
xo
Erin
{FREE} Freezer Cooking Workshop
Put an end to dinnertime stress with MyFreezEasy – check out the different meal plan options available in our Shop!
