A Spin on Freezer Cooking Plus Cookies!!!!

I've really been wanting to do a whole day full of freezer cooking.  Somehow my time plus the sales plus my budget haven't made it happen.  I have a really busy week with the normal routine plus a coupon class and a few other extras ... so I knew it wouldn't happen this week ... or so I thought!

(I know this picture isn't so appetizing! How do you get a good picture of marinading chicken?) 

I made my Menu Plan on Saturday.  What I didn't plan on though was taking that plan a step further.  Instead of freezer cooking with lots of meals for the weeks to come, I ended up doing some prep work for this coming week's meals.  It all started with browning the ground beef I'd bought on Friday.  I added some onions, divided it up in half and put 2 bags of "meat mix" in the freezer.  One is ready for our Beef Vegetable Soup later this week and the other will be there for another dinner.  Next I thought about the 3 packages of chicken breasts in the fridge.  6 chicken breasts went into our smoker.  They are now diced and ready for tonight's baked potato bar and tomorrow's chicken salad sandwiches. I cut the third package of chicken breasts into pieces and made the marinade for  Quick Weeknight Pineapple Sesame Chicken.  Now it's in the freezer and Thursday night's dinner will be 2 steps easier!

I recently saw this Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe that I wanted to try.  If you know me personally then you probably saw my Facebook post a few weeks ago asking why my Chocolate Chip Cookies always come out flat.  Well this recipe was slightly different, the picture looked good plus it won an awesome prize!  Saturday night was "Family Movie Night" here which of course means some kind of special snack.  I was on a roll with the freezing cooking thing and decided to make a double batch of cookies.  I baked up enough for a day or two and then flash froze the rest of the dough.  Now there are 4 dozen cookie dough balls in my freezer.  YUM!  Oh and the cookies ... they were as good as I had hoped!!  I forgot to take a picture of the baked cookies and of course they are gone now.

Now that I had the coming week's meals planned and started, it was time to prepare Saturday night's dinner.  Homemade Pizza!  As I measured the yeast into my mixing bowl for the pizza dough, I thought why not double it too?  I've never tried freezing pizza dough but I've heard that it works.  After mixing all the ingredients but the flour I wondered if my stand mixer mixing bowl would hold enough flour for a double batch.   The good news is that it was big enough!  I put 6 pizzas worth of dough (or 3 dinners worth) into the freezer.  I'll let you know later how it works out.

Wow!  A freezer cooking day with a twist.  Just a menu plan.  This may become a new routine!

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