Today I got home from work and made a quick dinner or pork chops with very oniony gravy, peas and mashed potatoes. A quick, basic evening meal that costs basically nothing to make and is nice and satisfying. We’ll normally also have a salmon dish, tilapia or spicy chicken wraps. Just normal every day meals.
We mix these kind of meals up with parts meals we make ahead of time and freeze is big batches. My freeze ahead staples are – dahl, coconut chicken curry, a basic red pasta sauce that we load with mushrooms and bell peppers (we also put this through a blender and it makes a delcious sauce for homemade pizza or chicken parm), mums chicken fettici (yes, we spell it that way) and we also have some mashed pumpkin and sweet potatoes in there at the moment. Sometimes we have soups frozen and ready to go – whatever we feel like. This week I am focusing on making a big batch of curried sausages to freeze (these reheat so well) and also a double batch of mashed cauliflower.
This means that eating at home is never a bother and we have different stuff every night. I find it a lot easier to cook big batches than consistently cooking meals for two that need a lot of prep work for one small meal. It also means it is super easy to cook on weeknights – you just have to spend your weekends cooking ahead. We have our portions evenly spread so it means there is never leftovers (this can be annoying!) but it means there is always something in the freezer. I have been working at building this up so that over summer we are not spending our weekends cooking away in a hot kitchen and also means we pretty much stick to only eating our once or twice per fortnight which is great budget wise. My pet peeve of summer is almost always getting stuck with salads because it is too hot to cook. Some of these freeze ahead meals means we can mix up the salads with other meals to save us from becoming bored after a week.
If you have any other suggestions for great freeze ahead meals, let me know!