Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Freezer meals

We have a new baby joining our family next month. As everyone knows, babies take a lot of planning. But even more so in a gluten-free house. I have a hard enough time getting dinner on the table these days with my 15-month-old under foot doing her best to thwart my cooking plans. With a nursing newborn on top of that I have no hope of cooking dinner without a lot of screaming and stress for a while. And while other people might rely on friends to bring meals over, or a call to the pizza guy or other takeout, that's not a luxury we have. The only "safe" restaurant close to our house that we know of and trust is a Thai restaurant that has delicious food, but it gets a little old (not to mention expensive) to rely on that too often. So I've got a plan I'm beginning to implement: freezer meals.

At this point I've just started, but just making a few meals makes me think I might begin to regularly rely on freezer cooking in the future. Just things like having cooked ground beef, cooked chicken, or cooked taco meat ready to defrost and use in throwing together a meal at the last minute seems like a big time-saver.

Thus far this is what I have in the freezer (I'm working on posting the recipes I haven't yet):
Chicken enchiladas (since Jake is off dairy for now, we're going with the dairy-free version, but this one also freezes well)
Tortilla Soup
Taco Chicken
Taco meat
Ground beef (for spaghetti)
Meatloaf

I have plans to make many more meals between now and next month whenever the baby gets here.
Some of my plans:
bread (I now use the recipe from Gluten-free on a Shoestring rather than my old one)
muffins
Salsa chicken
Shepherds' Pie
Chicken Pot Pie (from GF on a Shoestring)
Chili
Cafe Rio Chicken
BBQ pork
biscuits (from GF on a Shoestring)
pizza dough (again, from GF on a Shoestring--can you tell I like that book?)

I've also looked at a few websites that do GF freezer meals for some ideas, and I'll probably end up trying some of those. Like this one or this one.

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