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Originally Posted by Shelby&Seymour  I was wondering if anyone has had any luck with Freezing "ready made meals"??? They have chicken breasts on sale this week and I LOVE to marinate them in italian dressing and bake or grill them. I was thinking about making them with rice..... and since they are on sale, making about 4-6 extras and freeze them (possibly with the rice in individual containers). Has any done this kind of thing? Like buying large quanities of what is on sale and "loading" the freezer with some in-expensive meals?
If I do this for a few months, I may end up with a freezer of dinners AND keep my grocery costs down............... but I just wonder about putting this stuff in the freezer and if it will lose it's quality. What do ya think? Would it be worth it? |
Yes, you can definitely do that. You can freeze them right in the marinade. I have used a service that combines dinner ingredients and then you freeze it and thaw it out when you need it. The other night we had rosemary pork chops. The chops were frozen in a large bag with the seasoned breading in a separate bag. All I had to do was thaw, dredge chops and fry or bake them. Tomorrow I'm having pepper steak. It is all frozen together and I've thawed it in the fridge and will put it in the crockpot and let it cook tomorrow. There's a separate bag of rice and I'll cook that when I get home. We've also had marinated chicken thighs that were frozen in the marinade and then we thawed them and cooked them on the grill. Of course, buying dinners like this is not necessarily cost effective, but my point is that you can make things up ahead, freeze it all, and then thaw and cook as needed and they taste like you just made them up fresh.