Weekend Rewind: Pre-Cooking Saves The Day..er...Dinner!

To go along with our freezer cooking focused recipe hops this month, I've been sharing past freezer cooking posts with you for my weekend rewinds.

This post was originally posted on November 14, 2011.  It is a great example of how even just pre-cooking and bagging the meat (if you don't have time to create entire freezer meals) is a huge time saver!  Pair that with a fully stocked pantry and a little imagination, and the possibilities are endless!


Here is the original post:


Yesterday, my houseguests left and I was all alone with the kids.  They were going nuts, and I needed to feed them.  I didn't want to eat any of the complete meals that were in the freezer because we'd eaten them all recently.

I wanted something different. Something fresh.  But, also something easy that I had all the ingredients on hand.  So I started digging around in my freezer, and I found a pack of pre-cooked ground beef that I had forgotten about.  This could work, I said to myself, and I went to the pantry.

I had already decided against anything spaghetti-esqe.  I had a bag of that in the freezer I could have thawed.  But one kid doesn't like spaghetti, and the other kid does everything the first one does, so I wasn't feeling that fight tonight.

In my pantry I had egg noodles, and cream soups, so I decided to toss together a quick beef stroganoff type meal.  I put my thawed, cooked ground meat into the skillet with a can of cream of mushroom soup.  (I seasoned the meat when cooking it so I didn't need to add any seasonings now.)  I decided to toss some frozen peas into the skillet just to make it a one dish meal.  I also added a bit of my fresh basil and rosemary to add a little flavor to the sauce.  Tossed it over whole wheat egg noodles, and dinner was served.

My girls both loved this and ate without complaints, so that was a big win in itself.  The other plus was how easy and inexpensive this meal was to make.  Having the meat already cooked was a huge time saver, and all the other ingredients were right there in my pantry.  The pasta I had gotten for FREE I think.  No more than $0.20 for sure.  The cream of mushroom soup was $0.30, and then half a bag of $0.95 Aldi frozen peas.

I write this post to show you (but mostly myself) than pre-cooking, even if its just the meat and I don't have time to create an entire meal for the freezer, is still worth it!