Making Fast and Easy Freezer Meals During a Pantry Challenge!

hey friends welcome back to acre homestead my name is becky and today we're going to be making quite a few freezer meals these freezer meals are for my sister she just had her second baby i'm putting two pounds of pasta in my pot of boiling water these are large macaroni noodles one of the meals she requested was baked macaroni and cheese and broccoli so my sister wasn't supposed to have this baby till next week and this has kind of thrown me for a loop just a little bit because i was not planning to make these meals for her until next week and i just sat one of my bags of pasta on my hot stove and just melted some plastic on it so we're on to a great start for her baby shower gift i said i'm gonna make you some freezer meals for baby number two i said can you send me a list of ideas of things you might like so that i can make sure that i make her meals that her and her husband are gonna like she also has a two-year-old baby girl so we're gonna do baked macaroni and cheese with broccoli we're gonna do sweet and sour meatballs and i'm gonna do three different marinated chickens for her i have in my microwave right here some shredded zucchini because we're gonna also make some zucchini muffins for her for breakfast snacks and for my niece and then i have some pumpkin right here and we're gonna also make some pumpkin muffins it is almost five o'clock right now it is 450 and this is very late for me getting started so we're gonna see how fast we can get these meals thrown together i'm gonna make double of the macaroni so josh and i can have that for dinner this week and double of the sweets our meatballs so we can eat that this week for dinner so i'm going to be cooking for her but i'm also going to be cooking for josh and i for the week i have some ginger snap cookies that i made earlier and i'm going to bake these and send them off to them as well i don't have the time today to make up cookie dough but since i have these in the freezer i'll be able to bake them up some fresh cookies to bring over to their house tomorrow i'm going to salt my pasta water you always want to salt your water when you're making pasta and anytime you're doing a freezer meal or you're baking your pasta again it's always a good idea to under bake your pasta just a little bit so that's what i'm going to do and we are still in the middle of pantry challenge this is february 1st today and i'm doing my pantry challenge all the way through the end of february so you are going to see in some of these recipes that i'm going to have to do a few substitutions because i don't have those items on hand but i think the substitutions we're going to make are going to not affect the recipe at all so you can kind of see how you know maybe if you don't have the exact ingredients in a recipe you can substitute as needed i'm running some cold water over the pasta to stop the cooking we're gonna make our cheese sauce in this pot so we have less dishes to do before we make the cheese sauce i want to make the meatballs up because those need to cook in the oven and while those are cooking we'll make up the cheese sauce and we'll make the marinated chicken i am out of bread crumbs right now and i don't have any bread made up or anything so i'm going to substitute oats in the meatballs you can substitute oats for bread crumbs in meatballs or meatloaf anytime especially if you're gluten-free that's a great substitution i just throw it in my blender and i blend it up a little bit these are just rolled oats you want just kind of a bread crumb texture so i don't turn it into flour i have a t we have a ton of garlic we're going to mince for the meatballs and for the marinated chickens we're going to make and one onion i'm gonna dice for the meatballs all the recipes that i'm gonna be using today will be linked down in the description box below at scratchpantry.com if you're interested in checking out any of the written recipes for yourself and with no effort at all we have some fresh baked cookies to bring up to them i'm going to bring all these dinners over to them tomorrow i just peeled all this garlic for all the recipes now we get to chop it all up this is the bowl we're gonna make our meatballs in the first bowl i had was a little too small so we have our onions our garlic in here now we're gonna add our oats eggs these are fresh eggs i just collected today so i'm tripling this recipe [Music] that was ginger i just added i don't have any fresh ginger so we're using powder today and that's it for the meatball ingredients i'm going to give this a little bit of a mix first and then we'll put the beef in here and then we'll make it into meatballs i probably should have cut these onions just a little bit smaller oh well smells good that ginger smells really nice we have our grass-fed grass-finished beef i almost forgot the salt i'm going to get in here with my hands and i'm going to mix this all up i have two containers this one's for my sister so she doesn't have to worry about dishes right after having a baby and this one is going to be for us i'm going to use my cookie scoop for the first time to make meatballs and i'm really excited about it i think i'm going to just make all the balls first and then i'll go through and i'll roll them all out so if one of your goals is to try to get homemade scratch made dinners on your family's table on a more regular basis one way you can do that if you don't have the time to do a massive freezer cooking day like i do sometimes where if you're new around here you can go watch those videos where i'll make 28 meals in five or six hours if you don't have time for that or you may have little kids running around and it's just not a practical use of your time another way to try to get those scratch-made meals on your family's table is by when you're making dinner one night instead of just making one serving of it one meal's worth double it and make two and put that second one in your freezer it really doesn't take that much more time to make two you've already dirtied the kitchen that one time and then you have one for now and one for later that is basically what i'm doing here except i'm not gonna freeze the second ones for me and josh we're gonna eat the macaroni and cheese for dinner this week and we're gonna eat the meatballs for dinner this week i am passionate about eating at home as much as possible that is one way josh and i like to save money is by not eating out a ton nothing wrong with eating out we used to eat out all the time we still do but we try to save it for special occasions but i don't want the pressure of having to cook every night i that's why we used to eat out at least twice a week is because i didn't plan ahead i didn't have freezer meals in my freezer i didn't bulk cook or batch cook or anything like that and so when i was tired we would resort to eating out which is fine you know there's nothing wrong with that except you know we realized we added it up how much we spent in 2019 versus how much we spent in 2020 and when my husband came back to me with that number of how much we ate out and i about fell over that's just me sharing the journey of us learning to eat at home more than eating out i have our oven set at 400 and i have my butter melting in our pot to make our roux for our macaroni and cheese so this beef that we used is 100 grass-fed grass finished beef if you sign up through my link to butcher box you will get two pounds of free beef in every single box you get because it is a subscription plus you'll get 10 off your first box so if you're interested in grass-fed grass finished beef i will leave the link down in the description box it's a great deal i've been using them for over two months now and i absolutely love them the quality is fantastic the chicken that we're going to be using for the marinades is also butcher box and it's organic chicken and i've just been really happy with the quality we have one cup of butter in here i'm gonna add one cup of whole wheat flour normally i use white flour to make a roux but because we're in pantry challenge i have way more whole wheat flour right now so we're going to go ahead and use that we're going to mix that in and we're going to cook that flour for just a few minutes i really prefer to use block cheese and shred it myself because it doesn't have the anti-caking agents in it it's creamier it's smoother and i think you get a better product in the end but you can certainly use shredded cheese in this recipe if you'd like we're going to go ahead and add our milk now we're going to add milk and half and half now i am getting very close to running out of half and half during this pantry challenge we need two and a half cups of milk and we're doubling this do we need to add a little bit of mustard the time it took me to finish shredding all that cheese our sauce is nice and thick i tasted it with the whole wheat flour and it tastes really good has a little bit nuttier flavor and i kind of like it so we're gonna turn it off the heat and we're gonna add our cheese the original recipe calls for parmesan cheese monterey jack cheese and sharp cheddar cheese well i don't have any parmesan cheese because we are in mixed up pantry challenge and i used it all so the reason there's monterey jack trees in this recipe recipes because it gives it a nice melting quality and so i have some mozzarella so we're gonna put mozzarella in place of that i have my sharp treader and i'm just gonna add an extra cup of sharp cheddar in place or in lieu of the parmesan cheese we just don't have it so we're just not going to use it and that's okay it'll still taste cheesy and ooey and gooey and delicious i'm glad that i have the mozzarella though because that is what gives us our nice creamy texture so we're going to mix this in i have it off the heat or the heat is turned off i should say i haven't moved it yet and anytime i shred cheese i always shred extra so this will just go in the fridge and i'll have cheese for next time we have tacos or something and that way i don't have to shred it every time i want to use it because it isn't my favorite thing to do look at that perfect okay i'm gonna take this off the heat now i have three bags of broccoli i'm gonna add to this big bowl my family really likes broccoli in their macaroni and cheese who doesn't love cheese and broccoli together that is why i'm adding it i always use frozen broccoli anytime i put broccoli in my macaroni and cheese [Music] that way you don't have to blanch it i'm going to cut some of these up because these were the florets these were the steamers and they're kind of big so trying to make them bite size but you could certainly leave this out if you don't want broccoli in your macaroni and cheese then we're going to add our pasta and our cheese sauce i did taste the cheese sauce right after i took it off the stove and it needed a little bit more of that garlic salt so i added a little bit more garlic salt we want to get every last drop of that cheese sauce because that stuff is pure gold a dish for me and a dish for my sister so one of kind of the funny things i'm going to do for this recipe is i'm going to use corn chex for the crunchy topping on this normally i use bread crumbs when i top my macaroni and cheese but i'm plumb out of breadcrumbs like i mentioned earlier i'm not sure why this wouldn't work i mean it seems a little weird putting cereal on your macaroni and cheese but there's a potato casserole we make every christmas where we put corn flakes on the top and i figured once i crunch these up it'll be kind of the same effect as corn flakes so i'm going to put some in a bag we're going to crush them up and we're going to put them on top and we're going to top with cheese and we'll see how it is we need to make the sweet and sour sauce for the meatballs this is brown sugar white vinegar sriracha ketchup this is homemade ketchup and flour just to thicken that sauce up a little bit you want to get that flour in there before anything heats up really quickly or it'll get really lumpy you want everything going in there at the same temperature so once we get this whisked in i'll turn the stove on and we'll thicken that up a little bit our sauce has thickened up nicely so now what we're going to do is pour that over our meatball we're gonna pour half of it on each pan that's going to go back in the oven until those meatballs are done this is one of my favorite freezer meals because the meat is already cooked so all you have to do is warm it up so if you have this meal completely thawed when it goes in the oven it doesn't take very long to cook the vinegar in the oven just whoo my eyes my favorite way to serve those meatballs is with some white rice and steamed broccoli or roasted broccoli roasted carrots peas whatever kind of vegetable you like the sauce is incredible i mean obviously it has a lot of sugar in it so it's not the healthiest sauce but these sweet and sour meatballs are fantastic this is really good on chicken too so if you don't want beef you can definitely you know use chicken and substitute the chicken all right now what we're gonna do is we are gonna make muffins i cannot find my large muffin tins i have two of them and i have no idea where they went so i only have these small six muffin trays so i do want to still make both the pumpkin muffins and the zucchini muffins so i want to get that going so we can start getting that in and out of the oven while we make the marinated chickens after looking for probably the sixth time i found my muffin tins and as my grandma would say if it was a snake it would have bit me it was right right where i thought it would be i want to make enough muffins so that josh and i can have some in the freezer and so that my sister can have plenty for her and her kids perfect i'm weighing out my pumpkin because this is homegrown pumpkin that's crazy i have the exact amount of pumpkin i need for two recipes i'm going to do a little bit of whole wheat flour because i'm running a little bit low on my white flour to get through the rest of the pantry challenge i want to make sure i have enough white flour so the recipe calls for a double recipe three and a half cups of flour so i did one and a half cups of whole wheat and then i'll do two cups of white pumpkin pie spice i need to refill my baking soda in my kitchen so i definitely did not do this in the order you're supposed to so i would recommend you do it in the wardrobers books too but i don't have time for that tonight like i said i just collected these eggs today so they are nice and fresh so i'm not worried about cracking them into another container and i don't have a rooster so i don't have to worry about them being fertilized now that's everything we're just gonna mix that all up together then we have a double recipe of pumpkin muffins i'm gonna double check my recipe just to make sure i didn't forget anything i've been known to do that oh i did vanilla i just ordered more vanilla beans because i need to make more vanilla extract that's all i have left and i go through a lot of vanilla i always double the vanilla that's the second time that oven is interrupting me i would add walnuts to this or be cans or pecans but my husband doesn't like nuts so we're not going to do that today i didn't thaw out enough zucchini to make a double recipe so we're gonna do a single recipe with the zucchini josh just got home so my dogs are barking because they they want to see their dad do you have a bit of a christmas trophy out there what do we have a bit of a castro's trophy out there oh yeah yeah that was very disappointing but i thought maybe you were using it to like soak something up no here's some pumpkin spice i just used pumpkin spice in my zucchini bread a little bit of salt too much salt take that out that should be fun josh just got home so you can probably hear him this is baking powder flour vanilla that's why i'm about to run out of vanilla because i pour a whole bunch in there that's everything so we're just gonna mix this up and then we're done with our muffins well i have to bake them first but with all that being said i did thought enough zucchini to make a double batch so i'm just doubling everything now what josh and i were talking about is i like to store my bulk grains and rices and things in the freezer for at least two days before i put them in my bulk food storage and i had a 25 pound bag of rice that i just purchased and when i went to take it out of the freezer it ripped in half never had that happen before half of it is down in the freezer and the other half was all over and still is my garage floor so i need to go clean that up today i didn't show you or talk about it but i took the meatballs out of the oven and our muffins are perfectly done yep i have all my bags of chicken here this is all chicken from butcher box i'm thrilled with the quality i have four bags of chicken thighs and two bags of chicken breasts the chicken breasts i cut lengthwise so they're half is thick these we're going to do smashed chicken i wish i had a better name for it it's basically a lemon garlic worcestershire chicken and it's fantastic it's one of my favorites and we're gonna do garlic honey chicken and fajita chicken i'm gonna keep one of each bag and my sister's gonna get one of each bag i'm evenly dividing this garlic between all three of these actually i'm gonna put a little bit more garlic in the smashed chicken this is the garlic that i pre-chopped earlier so i'll have the recipes down in the description box but i kind of just do it by eyeball this is worcestershire sauce and then we're going to put avocado oil i'm i'm running low on olive oil that's why i'm using avocado oil but you could use olive oil all of these recipes need all oil so i'm just going to add a little bit while i have it out to each one oh shoot this one was supposed to have butter oh no we'll do butter here this is homegrown basil and go in the here homegrown oregano this is our redmond real salt i can leave this and a discount code down in the description box if you want it it's mined in utah and lemon juice and that's it for that marinade that marinade is so good i'm going to add one onion to each bag i just sliced up a large onion [Music] mine i'm not going to put any peppers in because i have a bunch of these packages of peppers i'll just know when i go to cook it i'll need to add peppers but for the one for my sister i'm going to add these frozen peppers i didn't thaw them they're still frozen because they're just going to go back in the freezer a little bit of honey and taco seasoning this is homemade taco seasoning i'm probably going to add about a third of a cup or half a cup mine is going to be easier to mix because it doesn't have the peppers in it but i will just make a note on the bag that when i go to cook this i'll need to add peppers you know what i'm going to add to this i'm going to add a little lemon juice to each one of these maybe a quarter cup last but not least we're going to do the garlic honey chicken so we have our garlic in here we are going to put a little bit of sesame oil which i'm almost out of you can probably hear josh in the background he's putting more wood on the fire and we're gonna add some soy sauce and i make it a mess a little bit of salt not too much because there was soy sauce in there some butter we're going to use butter in this recipe instead of oil and this is a clean cutting board and a clean knife for good measure this isn't in the recipe but i'm going to add a little bit of the korean red pepper flakes just a little bit oh i forgot one very important ingredient apple cider vinegar otherwise there wouldn't be any balance it would just be too sweet and salty but the vinegar is going to add just a nice little bit of brightness [Music] so i'm going to go ahead and wrap these up typically i wrap them in foil twice and then put saran wrap on but my sister is going to go through these pretty quickly so i'm not going to worry about the saran wrap this is what we're going to have for dinner tonight so i'm not going to worry about wrapping it i am going to put one piece of oil on the mac and cheese for us for tomorrow or whenever i decide to bake it this week we got ten meals done today and five dozen muffins that was super productive we got five meals for my sister and five meals for me what i'm to do is i'm actually going to text my sister before i put her meals in the freezer and she can tell me which one she wants frozen and which one she wants fresh i haven't had a chance to talk to her since she had the baby and it was quite the delivery so i wanted to make it as easy for her as possible before i run over there even though it's pantry challenge i'm gonna go pick up a couple salad mixes some sour cream some tortillas so that she can finish off the fajita chicken the best way to cook that fajita chicken is thaw it out if it's frozen and then i like to put it on a 9x13 or a cookie sheet put it in the oven at 400 degrees for about 40 minutes until that chicken is pull apart tender you can cook it in the crock pot but it's gonna get really watery and i like it cooked in the oven because then it gets really caramely and just browned and the onions caramelized and it doesn't it's not cooking in a moist environment it's cooking in a dry environment so it just gets really really good so then she can pull apart the chicken and i want her to be able to have all the fixings for fajitas avocados and things like that and then for the garlic sesame chicken and for the smashed chicken those could be cooked on the grill those could be cooked in a crock pot or in the oven i like to cook them in the oven because i don't have a grill but they would be really good on a grill if my brother-in-law feels up to grilling the macaroni and cheese if it's frozen it takes about two days in the refrigerator to thaw if it's thawed put it in the oven and it takes probably about an hour to cook 350-375 when it's about 10 minutes from being done take the foil off let it get nice and browned on top you want it really bubbly that's how you're going to know it's cooked all the way through well it's already cooked but you'll know that it's warmed all the way through the meatballs i will probably i'll ask her if she wants me to pick up minute rice or she has rice and then i'll probably pick up some chopped salad or some vegetables or something to go along with that to make it really easy for her maybe like one of those asian chopped salads or something like that i don't want her to have to worry about cooking sides necessarily i'm sure she could cook rice but i'll just text her and figure out what would be easiest for her the muffins i'm going to freeze and those are easy and she can just take those out those only take usually about four or five hours to thaw and then you have fresh muffins and that is how i would prepare all of this stuff you guys ask all the time how do i cook these freezer meals if you watch my day in the lives or vlogs or even this pantry challenge series that we're doing right now you can see how i cook freezer meals and that's typically how i do it i do like to cook them when they're thawed because if you cook them frozen they take two three hours they take a really really long time to cook so i really do prefer to thaw them first my husband is starving so i need to get this food put away and we have the meatballs and i already have rice cooked from leftovers and i have some leftover vegetables so so dinner tonight is already done dinner this week the macaroni is done i probably only have to cook one other time this week for us and we have a ton of meals i might actually leave the fajita chicken out for us so we can have that this week as well just in this evening alone we got my sister taken care of for five meals we got my husband and i taking care of her this week plus a few extra tons of muffins and this was a very productive freezer meal food prep day i hope this video was encouraging to you to kind of think maybe a little bit outside the box of how to fit in home-cooked scratch-made meals into your life cooking should be a joy it is for me at least but i don't want to have to cook every day because then it becomes a chore it doesn't become something enjoyable when it's a must do every single day and this is how i really can fit cooking and enjoying cooking into my life is by pre-cooking some stuff sometimes and then if i feel inspired to cook a really fancy from scratch meal on a night of the week then i can but i don't have to rely on my own cooking every single night of the week but then i don't also have to rely on takeout i want to say a huge thank you to every single one of you who took time out of your day to spend time with me i greatly appreciate it i appreciate every single one of you i hope you guys are doing fantastic please give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it if you're new please consider subscribing if you enjoyed this bulk cooking video i have a ton of bulk cooking videos i can link right up here i also have a bunch of videos where we spend time in the garden and we harvested some of the stuff that we cooked with today so i'll link that video down here as well for you i hope you guys are having a fantastic day thank you again for spending time with me i can't wait to see you next time bye guys

Channel: Acre Homestead

Views: 237,194

Keywords: Freezer Meals, Easy Freezer Meals, Filling my Freezer, Scratch pantry, Acre Homestead, cooking from scratch, real life cooking, Homemade meals, Easy Meals, Easy make ahead meals

Id: epOMmG1s06o

Length: 31min 35sec (1895 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 05 2022