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Video Summary
I’m getting everyone ready for my favorite time of year – Shelftember and Stocktober! These are my pantry challenge months where we use up everything in September and then restock our freezers in October. I shared my 10 best freezer meal tips to help everyone succeed:
My top tips include sizing meals for your family (we’re just two, so smaller portions work better), choosing meal styles your family will actually eat, and preparing marinated meats ahead to reduce mental load. I love making complete meals with protein, veggies, and starch all in one container – so much easier than preparing multiple sides!
I also covered practical storage tips like flat freezing meats for faster thawing, pre-chopping garden vegetables to preserve the harvest, and keeping breakfast options stocked. My labeling system with three different markers is a game-changer, and I showed how to use silicone molds for portion control.
The key theme is reducing mental load – having these meals prepped means no thinking required on busy days. Just grab, heat, and eat! I’m so excited for fall and can’t wait to start the pantry challenges again.
Video Transcript
I have 10 tips for you today all about freezer meals and storing food because it is almost pantry challenge time again. I’m so excited for it. Shelftember starts in September, which is just weeks away, and then followed by Stocktober where we stock up our freezer. So between using everything up and restocking, we need all those great tips to help us be most successful. So let’s jump right on in.
Tip 1
To tip number one, which is to meal prep with your family size and portions in mind. So I like to meal prep in family size, which are a lot smaller than a lot of people’s family-size meals because we are just a family of two, and I like to take that into consideration. If you have a large family, maybe a 9 by 13 pan isn’t big enough. Maybe go for the 11 by 15. These are some different of the family size meals that I make. This is like three servings in here. So we’ll have it for dinner and one of us will have it for lunch. That’s typically how we eat through one of these sizes. And I like to do individual-sized meals as well for if I’m at work or if I just want a quick lunch at home. So sizing matters. If you make a ton and you’re a small family, you’re going to be eating that for so long and there’s a chance that you might go bad before you get to it. So that’s why I like to do smaller portions. Sometimes what I’ll do as well is I’ll take out two smaller portions and cook them at the same time. That way I still have a lot of food cooked at once and I only have to like turn my oven on once, but I have variety so we don’t have to eat the same thing over and over again.
Tip 2
Now, I already talked a little bit about how I could bring this size to lunch, but the style of meal that you’re making is important as well. So I like to do these little individual-size meals. I also like to do handheld meals. I don’t have a ton of them right now, but we have some burritos and we have some little breakfast muffins. I like to do pizza pockets. My plan is to make pizza pockets today because I made some for the freezer and they didn’t make it to the freezer—they were that good. Some other styles that I’ve done is dessert prep in little containers. I’ve also done breakfast prep that’s just really quick and easy to take out, put in the microwave or in the toaster. And then it doesn’t stop there. You can prep ingredients. This is just bacon. This is tomato soup, but I also have just crushed tomatoes in these type of containers as well. Some of my favorite freezer meals are ones that are ready to go in the air fryer, like a little pizza. Those are—I mean, gosh, we like pizza in any form, right? But the most important thing when picking what style of meal to make is to make whatever your family will eat. That’s the most important thing through all freezer meals is make food that your family will eat in a way that your family will eat it. If having freezer meals in your freezer that are uncooked and need to be cooked doesn’t really work for you, then have pre-cooked meals in your freezer.
Tip 3
Something else that I have recently found to be super helpful is marinated meats. I didn’t always do these because it’s so quick to throw together a marinade. This is just some salsa verde plus a few other ingredients and chicken which doesn’t take very long. And I always thought I could just do that the day of. It doesn’t take long. Why would I do this ahead of time? But here’s why. You don’t have to think. You don’t have to think about what to make. You just pull a marinade out and it’s already done. Otherwise, I’m like, what kind of a marinade would I like to make today? Okay, let’s go find a marinade. Here’s the recipe. And that part takes a long time. And then you guys are the part of putting it together. You have to make sure to already have thawed out chicken to make your marinade and then you get to make your marinade and then you have to have long enough for it to marinate in order to have your marinated meat. So that’s a lot to kind of put all together. But if you have marinated meats in your freezer, all you have to do is maybe the night before pull it out and then let it thaw overnight in your fridge and then you can cook it. This is just so much easier. Basically, this one takes away the mental load. It’s not necessarily the how long it takes to put the ingredients in the bag. It’s the mental load that comes from having to marinate your meats on the day of. And this is such a timesaver and a huge win. And one of my favorite go-tos now for freezer meals.
Tip 4
Now, my preference when I make freezer meals is that I want all of it to be in one. I don’t really like—even when I cook meals that aren’t freezer meals—actually, I don’t like to do a main, a side, a vegetable. That’s a lot. And I prefer to just have it all in one. It’s so much easier to eat. It’s so much less thinking when you’re eating. I mean, I don’t know about you, but do you have an order of what you eat things on your plate? If I have everything just all together in one, that’s my preference. Some examples of this would be like a stir fry where you could put your meat and veggies over your rice—that’s all in one. You could freeze that as well. I like to freeze stir fries in individual containers because they just make for a super quick and easy lunch. I also like to make things like burritos where I’ll have the veggies and the meat all inside of a tortilla. That’s your veggies, meat, and starch all in one. Basically any meal that I’m making, I try to have at least two of those. I try to not have it be just the meat or just the veggie or just the starch. I recently made sloppy joes with biscuits on top. I put those in my freezer. That’s what we had out earlier. So what I did here was I just took sloppy joes, put it on the bottom layer, which you could stop there and then put it on a bun after you warm it up. But I put biscuits on top and then I can just bake that. And then that’s the biscuit and the sloppy joe. We do need like a side salad or something with this, but at least we’ve got two out of the three. But my biggest goal with getting all the different food groups in one meal is the mental load. It’s so much more mental load to make four things or three things than it is to just make one thing. Especially if it’s a freezer meal. If all I have to do is put it in the oven, that’s fantastic. Or even the microwave, that’s so much less work than putting in the oven, figuring out a vegetable for the side, figuring out if we want to have noodles with it or rice with it or bread with it. It’s just all ready to go. No thinking involved. And that’s the way that I like to cook on days that I don’t want to cook.
Tip 5
Okay, we’ve come down into the basement because I wanted to show you another tip. And this is one of my favorites that I use all the time. And that is to flat freeze. So when I package up something like diced chicken—whoo, that’s cold—I like to freeze it as flat as I can get it. Same with if I get a bulk pack of ground beef and then I need to freeze it in individual packets. I could, you know, get it all in the bottom and roll it up or I could flatten it out as much as I can. And I choose to flatten them because you guys, they’re so much quicker to thaw. So if you decide, hey, I feel like cooking today. Oh shoot, I didn’t take out any meat. You have this and it can thaw so quickly. If you just take it out an hour or two before and stick it in a cold water defrost, it’ll thaw out just fine for you. And you know what else I do? I do use the microwave to thaw meat sometimes, and that’s okay. And these thaw out within minutes. And I don’t have to worry about the center being completely frozen, the outside being thawed because they’re so thin that none of that happens.
Tip 6
Now, of course, we have more freezers in this house, and freezer meals come in so many different shapes and sizes. Something that I like to do is pre-chop my vegetables and freeze them, especially when they’re coming in from the garden. But not only garden produce. I do this with produce from the store, too, specifically if it’s getting towards the end of its days or if it’s onion. So this is some zucchini from last year’s garden. And what I did is I just chopped it up, threw it in some bags, stuck it in the freezer. Of course, I labeled them. I did that with yellow squash as well. And I did that with green beans all out of the garden last year. We have fresh garden produce for the whole year long, which is great because this year we didn’t get a ton of green beans. So good thing I had a bumper crop last year. Really even more sad, my yellow squash didn’t grow at all. I even replanted it. So that’s a big bummer. I like to have them prepped because I could just grab some diced chicken. I could grab some diced zucchini. I could throw it all in a meal and we’re basically halfway there with what we need to do with the meal. I don’t have to think too hard. Just dump it all together. It’s like dump and go at its finest.
Tip 7
Now, we briefly touched on freezer meals for breakfast, but this is an important part that you don’t want to skip. Breakfast can be one of those meals that just gets so overwhelming because there’s so much going on in the morning and then you end up just not eating and then it’s noon and you’re like, why do I feel like yuck? I like to keep a variety of breakfast options in my freezer. I have breakfast burritos right now. We have pancakes with sausages inside. Sometimes I like to do pancakes without sausages inside. I do have bacon prepped. We have some bread. I could just do like toast and eggs. That’s a really quick thing even though it’s still cooking. But I do like to keep different kinds of bread in my freezer as well—homemade bread so that it’s ready when I need it. So anything breakfast related in my freezer is going to save me so much time. It’s again, it’s that mental load. We are decreasing the mental load by having the meals already made and ready for us and portioned into the proper size.
Tip 8
Now, you may have noticed that on my meals, they are all labeled. And you know, the longer I leave them out, the more the label is hard to see, but when you don’t take it in and out of the fridge, it stays on really well. Make sure though when you’re labeling to label with the right kind of markers. So I actually keep three different markers in my utensil drawer, which seems a little crazy, but this is what I like to do. So I have a black Sharpie. I use this for labeling bags, like a Ziploc bag, also my canning jars. I have a silver Sharpie. I use this for labeling—not a freezer meal related, but—the tops of all of my spices because I have them stored where I can only see the top and I don’t want to go digging through them. So I label the top of them. These are all my overflow spices. And then this one is my specialty. It’s just a wet erase marker. And I use this to label my freezer meals that are in reusable containers. Oh, I guess I also use my black one for freezer meals that are in disposable containers. But this is a game changer because I can label what’s in there. When you put it in the freezer and then you leave it in the freezer, it doesn’t come off. We can read it. We can see what we want. And then it just washes right off when we put it in the sink. As soon as water gets on it, it’s washed off and then we can reuse the container. So these are my three kitchen markers that I can’t live without because what would I do if I wasn’t labeling things? We wouldn’t know what anything was.
Tip 9
Now, earlier I mentioned that I had some crushed tomatoes. These are the crushed tomatoes. And this is another one of my tips is to freeze in different portions using silicone molds. Did you know you could use molds to freeze? Instead of having like each thing of crushed tomatoes inside of its separate own baggie, I was able to just freeze it in a silicone mold and then just stick it right in my freezer all together. And even cooler, if you’ve seen those chocolate covered Oreo molds, I use those to put apple juice in it and I use this for smoothies.
Tip 10
Okay, the very last tip is that packaging is so important and can be so versatile. So for this meal, I use just a glass container that has a lid. And this packaging is fantastic because one, I can wash it and reuse it. Two, I can stick this bottom part in the oven. And then three, I have the lid that I can put back on to put it in the fridge. I wouldn’t do this if I had something raw inside, though, because I wouldn’t want to put a lid that had raw food back on top of my freezer meal after it’s cooked. That is—this also is a great option. This is a disposable freezer meal container. This is great for if you want to gift a meal or if you just don’t want to deal with cleanup. I can just throw the whole thing away. Two different options for this one. Of course, you could do something like we did with the burritos where all the burritos are in one bag and then you just take one burrito out. When you’re done, you can reuse the bag or throw the bag away. Or what I used to do with burritos is I used to wrap them individually in foil. You could do that as well. If you just want like a quick one where you can take it with you outside of the house, that’s a great option, too.
So as we get closer to Shelftember and Stocktober pantry challenge months, I want you to remember all these tips and also I want to know what tips you have. So if you have extra tips, please leave them down below for all of us. We would all greatly appreciate it because it is the fun time of year. My favorite months are coming, not just because of pantry challenges, but the fall is just beautiful. That’s when the garden is in full bloom. If you’re interested in pantry challenge, we’re not there yet, but I did do a pantry challenge earlier this year. I’ll link you to that one here. And then last year’s Shelftember, I will link you to our kickoff here. Thanks so much for being here. I can’t wait to see you next time. Bye-bye.
