Chicken and Dumplings: We ended up not making this one. I messed up when making baggies of food. I made two batches of the italian chicken for each person. It looks really good though.
Lasagna: Each pan of lasagna takes about 9 noodles (I do not precook the noodles). I take about a pound of ground beef and brown it with onions and garlic. Drain off the fat and then mix in one or two jars of spaghetti sauce and one to two jars of water. (I use equal parts water and spaghetti sauce) In another bowl, mix one container of either ricotta or cottage cheese (we used cottage cheese this time), one large bag of mozzerella, one can of parmesan cheese, some garlic salt, basil, oregeno, and a couple of eggs. Put a layer of the spaghetti sauce on the bottom of the pan, add three noodles (cover the pan), add some cheese mix, more spaghetti sauce, noodles, cheese, sauce....keep going til you get three layers of noodles. Top that layer with a good amount of sauce and then cover with more mozzerella cheese. Cover with foil and freeze. When you are ready to cook, you can put it directly from the freezer to the oven, or you can thaw first and then bake. If you thaw first bake around 350 for about an hour. (Til noodles are soft) If you cook from frozen you can up the temp to 400 and it will likely take around 2 hours.
If you are making this in bulk, just multiply ingredients by the number of families or lasagnas that you want to make.
Manicotti--About 7-8 manicotti tubes will fit in one pan. Mix one-two jars of spaghetti sauce with one to two jars of water (the water helps the noodles get soft). In another bowl, mix one container of ricotta, one bag mozzerella, on jar parmesan cheese, garlic salt, basil, oregano, and parsley flakes. Put a small amount of sauce in the bottom of your pan. Stuff each tube with the cheese mixture and lay it on top of the sauce. Pour the sauce over the top of the shells....it should cover them. Top with a bag of mozzerella cheese. Cover with foil and freeze. When you are ready to cook, you can put it directly from the freezer to the oven, or you can thaw first and then bake. If you thaw first bake around 350 for about an hour. (Til noodles are soft) If you cook from frozen you can up the temp to 400 and it will likely take around 2 hours.
If you are making this in bulk, just multiply ingredients by the number of families or manicotti that you want to make.
If you are making this in bulk, just multiply ingredients by the number of families or manicotti that you want to make.
Beef with mushrooms--You can just dump this one into the crock pot when you are ready to cook...I will serve this with noodles or rice.
applesauce--you can freeze or just put in the fridge and eat.....Ours never makes it to the freezer. We did about 40 apples this time. We added a whole bottle of honey and only used about 3/4 cup sugar. We also added cinnamon. Once the apples are cooked and soft, just dump some of the apples and the liquid from the pan into a blender and mix it up....Adjust the consistency by controlling how much of the liquid you mix up with the apples.
Italian Chicken--We just take a ziploc gallon freezer bag and put 2-3 chicken breasts in it with one pack of italian dressing mix, a can of cream of chicken soup, a block of cream cheese and about 1/2 cup water or chicken broth. You may have to add a little bit of water or broth on cooking day, but it should be pretty thick. On cooking day, just dump in crock pot for 4-6 hours. Shred the chicken into the sauce--it will be very tender. Serve with rice or noodles.
Taco soup
In each
bag put some ground beef (we cooked ours with onions and garlic) , 1-2 can tomatoes, I can black beans, I can kidney
beans, I can corn, taco season, dry ranch dip, onion. Dump in crock pot and cook all day. Top with sour cream and tortilla chips.
Chicken and Rice soup
BBQ--We bought 3 huge pork roasts. They were on sale $1.99 a pound. We cooked them in a slow cooker for about 8 hours with some chicken broth. Meat was very tender. We shredded it without the broth....and then added bbq sauce. Bag it and freeze. You can reheat in slow cooker or microwave.
Enchiladas
Roast with veggies--We took beef roast and cut in chunks. Added potatoes in fourths, onions in fourths, baby carrots, a pack of onion soup mix, and some water (about a cup). Just put all of it raw in gallon freezer bags. On cooking day, dump in crock pot and cook 6-8 hours.
Pancakes--we cook these and then freeze on cookie sheets individually. Once they are frozen you can bag them in gallon freezer bags...You can just thaw and eat or microwave. We added frozen blueberries to them this time. (If you dust the blueberries with flour while they are frozen and put them in the pancakes that way, they don't make it all blue.)
apple bread--we add brown sugar and cinnamon to the top of this....
banana bread--we ended up saving the bananas for next time. We peeled them and put them in a bag in the freezer.
pineapple bread--we added brown sugar to the top.
http://allrecipes.com/recipe/pineapple-bread/detail.aspx?event8=1&prop24=SR_Title&e11=pineapple%20bread&e8=Quick%20Search&event10=1&e13=A%3aSearch%20Results-List%28control%29&e7=RecipeWe bake all of the breads and let them cool. Then we wrap them in foil.
You should make labels with name of food, date, and cooking directions and put them on the ziploc bags before you fill them if you want the labels to stay on.
We had a lot of extra eggs. We cracked them and put 12 in a bag and froze them.
We also froze extra sour cream, ricotta, cheese, and butter. As long as they are just used in recipes, they will be fine, but the sour cream and ricotta will change in texture from freezing.
We had four people cook this time, but we made two extras of everything for two families that need some stuff. Our budget was $150 per family. I went over a little, but we had quite a bit left over for next time. We also made two full extra sets of food.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I'm also a single mom and am always looking for ways to make life easier!
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