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For most of our married life, I have put dinner on the table using a common food prep method that goes something like this:
Plan meals,
write shopping lists,
drag everyone out to shop for ingredients,
haul it home, and
put it away.
Then EVERY evening:
Pull out ingredients,
prepare the meal from scratch,
put away the extra ingredients,
feed everyone,
and then clean it all up to repeat again the next night.
This process requires many hours in the kitchen every week, and that doesn’t include the time spent staring into the dark recesses of the pantry deciding what to make.
Now I Know A Better Way
I’ve since learned that there is another way! It gets you out of the kitchen, freeing up HOURS in your week, and it’s been a game-changer for me! All thanks to a freezer meal planning service called MyFreezEasy (and wait, before you dis freezer meals, hear me out – I’m a convert from my former life of hating freezer meals, and it turns out they don’t have to taste like cardboard! More about that in a minute…)
My mornings are much less stressful – I don’t need to think about dinner until a few minutes before we need it. The evenings go SO MUCH SMOOTHER, and handling schoolwork and activities isn’t as much of a chore when there’s a meal all ready to go.
Before learning about this method of freezer cooking, I was getting fed up with reaching the end of the day with nothing ready for supper. My days are jam-packed with caring for my youngest with Spina Bifida, as well as homeschooling his older siblings. I’m not even thinking about supper until 6:30 PM, and by then everyone is starving. If there’s not a plan in my mind at the start of the day, there will be nothing prepared for supper by the end of the day.
10 Meals in No Time!
When I stumbled across the MyFreezEasy method, another busy mom I trusted was saying it’s possible to make 10 meals in 1 hour. I had to read that again. TEN MEALS?! That would last for 2 weeks in my family, and to only work for 1 HOUR on 2 weeks worth of meals seemed like it had to be a bluff!
I could hardly imagine being that efficient myself, and I needed to see what all this wizardry was about – that certainly wasn’t happening in my kitchen! My hubby and I decided to spend the $12 to try this service for one month to see how it worked for us.
And I was shocked. Wow, she was right! It is totally possible to prep ten freezer meals in one hour (if done without interruptions, that is. It usually takes me 1.5 – 2 hours if I’m also feeding Jotham and fielding questions like “why did God give us boogers?” and “why do ants exist?”).
My whole day goes so much smoother when supper is settled. I’m not pulling my hair out wondering what I should make, then putting off the decision until the next moment I think about it. Having meals prepped and ready to go gives more clarity to my day (one less thing to think about) by taking away that “cloud” overshadowing everything if I have no plans for supper.
It’s Not Just Recipes
I LOVE the fact that the MyFreezEasy service isn’t just curated recipes. Every meal plan includes a packet of recipes, shopping lists, assembly instructions, and labels, but the shopping lists are one of my favorite features. I am not a fan of sitting down to scrounge through recipes, jotting down lists of ingredients to buy. It’s probably rooted in laziness, but I can think of many other things to do besides writing a shopping list, so I’ve been stuck in a taco rut more weeks than I care to admit (crunchy tacos, soft tacos, and taco salads 3 nights in a row, anyone? 🤦♀️).
Besides the curated shopping lists, there are step-by-step preparation and assembly instructions, as well as labels to put on each freezer bag so you know how to prepare it when you pull it out later (I don’t print the labels, but instead take 10 minutes to write the instructions on the freezer bags with a permanent marker).
Very Delicious – Nothing Like Cardboard
I used to poo-poo freezer meals, thinking that there’s no way they can be as flavorful as cooking from “fresh,” and I even tried several meals from a local freezer prep company that were so bland and tasteless, my suspicions were confirmed. I completely wrote off freezer meals, preferring to do all my food prep without involving the freezer. Anything to avoid eating the equivalent of cardboard.
But then our youngest was born, and his special needs completely changed the dynamics of my day, and the amount of time I had to dedicate to food prep (my sister recently compared his level of care to being like having a newborn, and in many ways, that’s a fair comparison).
It may show how desperate I was to be willing to try this freezer meal plan when I thought freezer meals taste like cardboard, but I trusted the source that told me they were good, so I jumped in with both feet. I sure hoped it would live up to the hype and at the very least have SOME flavor. I was shocked once again! The meals are GOOD! The seasonings and flavor combinations are stellar. My kids can be fairly picky if we’re trying a new dish, but many of the meals have gotten 5 stars from them.
SO MANY RECIPES to Choose From
As of January of this year, MyFreezEasy rolled out TWELVE different meal plan themes to choose from every month! These include:
- traditional
- gluten-free
- clean eats
- slow cooker
- keto
- paleo/Whole30
- dump dinners
- Instant Pot
- only chicken
- only pork
- only beef
- 20 meals
You can choose from any of the categories above, OR if you like to be a rebel like me, 😉 you can create your own meal plan and still get all the lists and prep instructions at the touch of a button! When you create your own meal plan by choosing any recipes from the site, you get to choose from these additional meal categories:
- skillet recipes
- dutch oven or saucepan recipes
- grill recipes
- one dish recipes
- lunches
- dairy-free
- gluten, dairy, soy-free
- top 8 allergen-free recipes
- vegetarian
- seafood
If you’d like to check out the individual recipes, you can browse them without a subscription (there are 22 categories! Go here, and click “Recipes” at the top of the page). With 800 recipes across all of the categories, it’s a huge collection – it feels like we haven’t even dented the surface after a year of using MyFreezEasy.
There’s even an app that brings everything straight to your phone, which is very handy. It’s available for both iOS and Android, and any meal plans you save on the website are in your account on the app as well. I don’t always take the time to print my shopping lists since can refer to it in the app when I’m at the store.
Cook 2 Times Per Month
Though I do spend a few minutes each night getting the meal from the freezer to the table, I feel like I only cook twice a month. At the beginning of each month, I choose a curated meal plan (or create my own) and then prep 10 meals for the freezer. We eat off that plan for a week, and at the end of the week, I repeat the process with a different meal plan and add those 10 meals to the freezer (which leaves us with about 15 meals for the remaining 3 weeks of the month).
For example, here is a screenshot of the Instant Pot plan for August 2019:
The 5 recipes listed above are doubled during the prep of this meal plan, so there will be 10 meals to put in the freezer. Since I’m not a fan of eating the same thing 2 weeks in a row, I make another meal plan the following week, like this traditional plan, for example:
Then we have an assortment of food to keep everyone happy, AND I am off scot-free for the rest of the month because I did all my cooking (all 2-3 hours of it) in the first half of the month. 😁 You could easily do a whole month of cooking in several hours, but since my time blocks are usually short, I stick to twice a month and it works great for me.
No More Hungry Hubby
I think one of the best perks is not having the guilt of my husband coming home from working hard all day, and then having to scrounge something up from the kitchen to feed the family (he never made me feel bad about that…he’s a gem…but I still felt bad even though there wasn’t a lot I could do about it on the days I had to be more hands-on with the kids).
Instead of Micah coming home and asking what the supper plans are (with the answer being “zilch”), I usually have a freezer meal thawing in the sink, or already have it in the instant pot or oven. It’s so easy to get it from the freezer to the table compared to starting from scratch! Even if I think of it right when it’s time for supper, there’s a meal ready and waiting, and it just has to be cooked or heated.
Pricing
There are multiple pricing options for the MyFreezEasy membership. For the monthly membership it’s $12/mo, quarterly is $33 for 3 months, and the annual subscription includes 2 months free at $120/year.
If you’d prefer individual meal plans instead of a membership plan, there are multiple options available here (including plans to help stock the freezer for an expectant mom – a “freezer cooking party” is such a fun baby shower idea!).
I started off with the monthly plan to see if it would be worth the investment. Once we realized how amazing it worked for us, we switched to the annual membership.
The time-saving aspect of MyFreezEasy has been a huge blessing to our family (and it’s even enabled me to help others again – when a friend is in need, I can drop off a frozen meal if appropriate, or prep it and bring it hot without much stress). I really like food to taste good, and there’s no compromise on flavor with these plans. PLUS being able to feed my family healthy, hearty meals every night is so much better for our waistlines AND wallets.
Do you have any questions? Let me know in the comments, or shoot me an email!
If you’re interested in learning more on the MyFreezEasy site, click this link. 😊
