Portion Controlled Meals Pre-packaged

Hello,

Someone mentioned having portion controlled meals prepackaged in their freezer. This sounds like an absolutely wonderful idea to me! If any of you do this, I'd like to hear some suggestions. I'm considering packing meals once a week for lunch and/or dinners and storing them in the freezer. At any rate, if any of you practice this sort of thing, please post what types of foods you generally do this with.

 

Thanks much.

I've never done this with a whole meal, but I do make mini meatloaves.  They cook in half the time, and you just wrap them in foil after and put in a plastic bag to freeze and reheat later.  My mom would do this growing up...just need a good decent meatloaf recipe.

Yum!

We do this all the time; it saves time, money, and prevents the I don't care situations that leads to trouble. 

As far as pre-made foods go soups, stews, sauces, and cassaroles tend to freeze well. 

If you're making something that contains potatoes, add them when your going to eat it as they don't freeze well at all.  The same thing goes for delicate seafood like shrimp which will overcook when you reheat.  You may also want to add in fresh vegetables to frozen soups if you like crunchier veggies since they'll soften when thawed.

We use those mini loaf pans (you can get throw-away ones, but I like the real ones for garbage reasons) to initially freeze the portions.  This produces frozen blocks that make storing easier.  Once they're frozen, we take them out of the pans and seal them up with a Food Saver. 

Here's what I've been making this week for freezing purposes.

Spaghetti sauce:  Onions, peppers, hamburger, fresh and canned tomatoes, and broccoli.  A batch tends to make up about 26 1 cup servings.  ~121 cal/4 total carbs. 

Lasagna:  2 servings spaghetti sauce, 2 noodles, 1 package of sliced portabellas, 1 cup of non-fat cottege cheese, and 4 ounces of low-fat mozerella.  4 servings (works out really well in the loaf pans).  It was 533 cal/33 carb but that was before I reworked things a bit.

Jambalya:  chicken broth, chicken, low-fat turkey kielbasa, stewed tomatoes, peppers, shrimp and onions.  Keep the shrimp frozen seperately and add it when you eat it or they get tough.  makes 8 servings.  305 cal/8 carb

Stuffed turkey meatloaf:  ground turkey, mushrooms, onions, spinach, onion soup mix, bread crumbs, egg, and mozerella.  4 servings.  283 cal/ 20 carbs

Omelettes:  eggs, peppers, mushrooms, 1 ounce of shredded cheddar, 1 ounce of lowfat mozerella, and sandwich ham (I also do this with spinach and chicken breast).  4 servings.  ~165 cal/12 carbs

If you interested in any of them, I'll flesh 'em out for you.

Meats can also be weighed out on a scale and frozen individually, but I wouldn't cook them first.

You would want to plan out what you're eating too.  Stuff stays good longer that in the refridgerator, but it'll still go bad if you  leave it too long.   

 

 

Those are some really good ideas. I usually cook huge pots of vegetable soups and chilis only to end up throwing half of the pot away after a few days. It would save a ton. Not to mention labeling the calorie content on packages.

I'm curious about preparing and freezing omelets? I've neer considered that one. It'd be a nice break from cereal and oatmeal.

I usually have a freezer full of vegetable chillis, chilli con carne, bolognese sauces, chicken curry and other casserole-y type dishes.  I also soak, cook and freeze the larger pulses (kidney beans, chickpeas, black-eye beans) in big bags so that I can grab handfuls for dishes as required.

The omelettes are stupidly easy. 

I mix up a carton of egg substitute,

a can of mushrooms (I'm sure you could use fresh ones, I just have a hard time keeping the fresh if I don't get to it right away),

~half a medium onion(63 grams),

~half a medium-large sweet pepper (72 grams),

5 slices of extra lean ham cut up into small pieces,

1 ounce of cheddar,

1 ounce of lowfat mozerella (I get mozerella fresca from the deli section, they come in tiny little balls so I don't have to shred anything) 

Mix all that up in a bowl,

spray a 9 x 9 inch baking dish  sprayed with cooking spray

chop up about half a roma tomato and sprinkle that on top.

bake it a 350 for ~50 minutes

Let it cool and turn it out onto a cutting board,

quarter it and freeze it (you can either put them in sandwich bags, or wrap them up in saranwrap before you freeze them.  If you have the room, putting them on a small sheet pan and covering them with saranwrap until they freeze works too and it save on the plastic trash)  If you don't have something like a Food Saver, the sandwich bags are probably your best bet. 

I normal take them out the day before I'm going to use them, so they're thawed, but I would guess you could take them straight fromt the freezer.  I haven't tried that though.  When they're thawed, it takes 2 minutes on high in the microwave to reheat them.

They travel well, mom makes breakfast sandwiches out of them at work.

 

with the omeletts don't they get watery when you heat them up? that always happens to me and it gets me super skieved out and i just wind up throwing it out.