How to Freezer Cook to Save Money on Food

Freezer cooking can save you ENORMOUS amounts of time and ENORMOUS amounts of money… but how?

How to freezer cook to save money.

When it comes to cooking, I used to always be someone who liked to fly by the seat of her pants. I didn’t like to plan our meals in advance, but instead, I would wait until it was suppertime to decide what I would make that night.

This proved pretty quickly to be one of the worst things I could have done for our finances.

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It wasn’t long after I left my job to become a stay at home wife that I was putting all the numbers together and realized I had spent more money on groceries that month than we had spent on rent.

We had spent over $1,000 that month on groceries… for TWO people.

Two people!

(And here’s exactly what we did to bring that amount down by $700/month.)

I was floored when I realized how careless I had been being with our money – especially since we had just gone down to one low income and we needed to be cutting costs wherever we could.

Enter: Freezer cooking and meal planning.

If you’re in a hurry:

✔️ Make sure you have LOTS of these on hand before you start freezer cooking. (I went through SO many of them.)

It didn’t take long to realize that a change had to be made if we were going to continue living as a single income family, so I started meal planning (if you’re curious, this is the meal planning method I use to save us over $700 every month on groceries alone).

Meal planning was proving itself to be one of the most effective ways for us to save money fast, and it continued to work for us month after month.

But there was still something missing – see, on the extra busy nights, or the nights that I just didn’t want to be bothered to cook, my husband and I would still either pick up take-out, go out to a restaurant to eat, or eat a store-bought freezer meal we had packed away in our freezer.

Have you ever had days where you didn’t have time to make dinner, so you ended up taking the family out to eat or ended up picking up takeout?

So, while meal planning was bringing our grocery bill down substantially, we were still overspending on food on the nights that I didn’t have time to cook (or just didn’t want to).

That’s when freezer cooking became an important part of our lives.

Freezer cooking has allowed us the flexibility to spend time doing stuff in the late afternoons and still come home and have a healthy, homemade dinner without having to spend an hour plus making it.

Since I started freezer cooking, I’ve been able to save hours of time prepping and making meals, and we’ve been able to bring our food bill down by another couple hundred dollars EVERY month.

Because, when you have a freezer full of homemade meals that are ready to eat, it’s a lot less tempting to go out for dinner. (It really is!)

When we found out we were expecting our first child, I decided early on that I was going to stock our freezer to the brim with freezer meals so I didn’t have to worry about spending time making supper for a LONG time after our baby was born.

Of course, I ended up waiting until I was 7 1/2 months pregnant before I went ahead and stocked our freezer… If you’re pregnant, I would recommend stocking your freezer before you’re that pregnant.

I made 20 freezer meals in ONE evening.

I got twenty freezer meals prepped from scratch (chopped veggies, prepared sauces and rubs, cooked and split up meat, packed them up individually, etc.) and into our freezer in a matter of a couple of hours.

Here’s the thing:

You COULD learn how to freezer cook by looking up articles online, making your own freezer meal prep plans and grocery lists and figuring out all the prep/assembly/freezing/cooking methods on your own…

…or you could sign up for this freezer meal membership to do the work for you.

(THIS is the freezer cooking membership I use and I absolutely love it.)

I had tried freezer cooking in the past, but I had many failed attempts where the meals I froze did not turn out good at all when I took them out of the freezer and cooked them up for dinner.

Most of the meals lost virtually all their flavor, while other meals turned slimy and gooey – NOT how they should have been.

After many failed attempts at freezer meal prep and cooking, I gave up and went back to buying those incredibly expensive pre-made meals that you buy from the store, and continued to stock our freezer with those meals.

But, when my husband and I moved several times in one year and changed to a lower paying job, those expensive pre-made meals just weren’t in our budget.

We had two options:

I would cook a homemade meal every.single.night. (even when we didn’t get home until 7 pm) or,
I could start making my own freezer meals

The idea of having to cook a homemade meal EVERY single night was not appealing. (Don’t get me wrong, I love cooking, but some nights I just need a break.) But, the idea of going back and spending hours of time trying to find freezer meal prep meal plans and probably end up with a lot of wasted food from meals that didn’t freeze well sounded even less appealing.

So I decided to take a course to learn how to freezer cook – properly. (This is the course I took.)

Since signing up for this freezer cooking course, I have been able to spend less time freezer cooking and less money on meals – while still having a fully stocked freezer.

Like I said earlier, I’m sure you could learn how to freezer cook for free – but to me, the course I took was worth its weight in gold. I didn’t have to do any of the work of freezer cooking besides actually make the meals.

The MyFreezEasy freezer meal plans have been a game changer for me. All I have to do is pick a handful of meals that I think my husband and I would like out of the MANY different new recipes supplied each month (we haven’t come across any meals we don’t like, yet!), then MyFreezEasy will combine the meals all together and provide me with a completely filled-out grocery list of everything I need to make the meals I chose.

It also supplies me with assembly and cooking instructions for EACH meal I’m making, so I can make them all together as quickly as possible (rather than spending an hour prepping each freezer meal, I can spend an hour prepping all the freezer meals).

I was able to make 20 freezer meals in one evening – for under $100!!

If you’re curious:

MyFreezEasy was created by Erin Chase of $5 Dinners – so all the meals she provides are budget-friendly and simple.

How to freezer cook (and how it saves you money)

1. Spending less time in stores

The more time I spend in grocery stores, the more money I spend. Whether I’m running in to grab “just one thing”, or I’m walking around with a buggy, I always seem to end up buying something I didn’t need in the first place.

Freezer cooking helps you spend less time in stores by providing you with a whole freezer meal plan grocery list so you only have to go shopping ONCE to get everything you need for a week, two weeks, or a month.

2. By shopping what’s on sale

When you’re planning your freezer meal plan, you can plan the meals around what items are on sale at the grocery stores when you go shopping.

I like to look through store fliers while I’m making my meal plan. Just last week I was able to shop cheaper since our grocery store had ground beef on sale for a SUPER cheap price, so when I made my freezer meal plan I made sure I included lots of dinners that had ground beef in them, rather than other meats.

3. By eating out less

I find when we have a freezer stocked full of homemade freezer meals, my husband and I spend a LOT less money on eating out every month.

On nights when I don’t feel like cooking, rather than going out to eat we can just grab a homemade freezer meal out of the freezer and sit down and relax while we wait for it to heat up in the oven.

4. You buy in bulk

When you freezer cook with the freezer cooking strategy that I use, you’ll be making a lot of dinners at one time.

Really, you can choose how many dinners you want to make, but I always find it easier to spend an hour extra making 10 more freezer meals than it is to spend an hour EACH night 10 different nights, prepping individual meals.

Plus, when you freezer cook in bulk, you can also buy your groceries in bulk, which helps bring down the overall cost of the meals.

5. Eliminates wasted food

When you do one big grocery shopping trip and spend a day turning all that food into freezer meals, you will substantially cut down on the amount of food that gets wasted around your house!

The same food that goes bad after one week in the fridge can last months upon months in the freezer (as long as it’s prepared properly!).

If you’re interested in freezer cooking, I highly suggest signing up for MyFreezEasy, which you can do here. It will teach you EVERYTHING you need to know for freezer cooking.

If you’re interested, here are some details about it:

Everything you need to know about MyFreezEasy Freezer Meal Plans:

Can’t I just learn how to freezer meal prep and freezer cook for free?

If you’re wondering why you would need to purchase something to help you learn how to freezer cook and why you couldn’t just find all the information for free, here’s my take on it:

Before you go out and purchase anything, it’s a good idea to ask the question “is this worth it?”. You don’t want to spend your hard earned money on something that ISN’T worth it, after all.

I have been in that terrible situation where I’ve spent money (big money) on courses and products that sounded like they were going to be AWESOME, and they ended up being nothing remotely close to what I was expecting them to be.

Money. Wasted.

While I can’t speak for you, I can say this: Learning how to properly and effectively cook with freezer meal plans (it turns out there IS a wrong way to go about it…who knew?) has helped my husband and I lower our monthly eating out costs from a couple hundred dollars down to next to nothing.

I no longer use the excuse “I don’t want to cook” or, “there’s no time to cook”, because our freezer is stocked with meals that are READY to be put in the oven and eaten in less than an hour.

Using freezer meals has stopped us from eating out on a limb, and the amount that it has saved us in ONE month more than covers the cost of this entire membership for a YEAR. (WAY more than covers it.)

If you’re wondering why on earth you would pay for something like this when there are thousands upon thousand of articles online that could teach you how to freezer cook, here’s the thing:

You can find just about anything online – but that doesn’t mean it’s the right way, the easiest way, or the most effective way of doing something. I believe that the things Erin teaches, shows you, and supplies you with in this membership AREN’T things that you can find anywhere online.

She supplies you with step-by-step instructions (via email, video, and articles) to help you learn how to use freezer meal cooking to save money and time, and she shows you exactly how you can make 10 freezer meals in under an HOUR (which to me is priceless).

I am extremely skeptical about spending money on stuff.

I will always try to find a way that I can get free information rather than spending money on something – but I decided to “splurge” (if $12 a month is considered splurging), and since I went ahead and bought this membership, I have realized that this is stuff you just can’t get anywhere else for free (at least not that I could find!).

Is freezer cooking a good idea for YOU?

I could go on and on all day telling you how freezer cooking has been a game changer for our finances (and my sanity), but what about YOURS?

Could freezer cooking really help your finances that much? Let’s look at a few things you’ll get with the MyFreezEasy meal plans to see if it’d be a good option for you.

You will get access to pre-made freezer meal plans (or make-your-own freezer meal plans), you get a pre-made grocery list, step-by-step assembly instructions to put the meals together and instructions on how to thaw and cook those meals to help them have the BEST taste possible, even after being frozen.

On top of all of that, you’ll also get to:

Learn the proper way to freezer cook to spend as little time making meals as possible. Again, Erin will show you exactly what she does to make 10 meals in less than an hour.
Learn how to use freezer cooking to drastically bring down your grocery bill. I was skeptical about this one, but when I made 20 freezer meals – in one evening – for less than $100, I was sold. Plus all the meals I made were filled with meat, which is extremely expensive where I live.
Pick your own recipes/meals. This way you can ensure you’re making meals that you and your family will enjoy.

Adjust serving sizes. Whether you have a large or small family to feed, you can make freezer cooking work for you.

Access to the mobile app. They have mobile and desktop apps, so you can easily create and customize your freezer meal plans on the go (and access your grocery list, assembly list, etc.)

Use the simple drag and drop web tool. The drag and drop tool is something I use all the time while I’m creating or customizing my freezer meal plans.

Tag your favorite recipes. This is an awesome feature so you don’t have to go hunting through hundreds of recipes to find that one that you loved (even if you’ve forgotten what it was called).

Save your meal plans. This is one of my FAVORITE features, and something I always use. I like to be able to look back on previous freezer meal plans to remember which meals were a hit, and so I can ensure I’m not making the same meal too often.
Get access to new recipes and themed meal plans each month. You won’t have to worry about making the same meal over and over since new recipes get added every single month.
Easy to make meals, pre-made shopping lists, and instructional videos. The recipes are easy and quick to make – even for beginners. The shopping lists will help you spend less time in the grocery store and less money. The instructional videos help you learn while you’re cooking.

Even if you or someone in your family has special dietary needs, you can still make these freezer meal plans work for you. You will get access to hundreds of meal ideas including traditional recipes along with gluten-free, paleo, whole30, keto, and clean eats (and many more).

Are you ready to get freezer cooking? Before you get started, be sure you have LOTS of these on hand! (You’re going to need them.)