What are your favourite meals you can make-ahead and freeze?

[roamingcat]

As per the title, I'm trying to be more organised this year and one thing that massively helps is if dinner just needs to be reheated from the freezer, so I'm looking for some new suggestions. We currently have bolognese, cottage pie, mac & cheese and a chicken & black bean chilli in the freezer...

Thanks 😁

Fish pie
Our favourite lasagne recipe
Chicken tagine
Chicken and chorizo ragu
Sausage casserole
Halloumi pasta bake
Tuna pasta bake

Korma

I make my own mango/almond korma sauce, then freeze just the sauce. Then it takes up less space and I can add chickpeas when it defrosts.

I also make vegetable sauce, which can then be adapted into various things, pasta sauce by adding basil, or Moroccan spices, etc

Red cabbage freezes great, I cook up a huge pot with apple, onion, spices etc then it reheats quick.

Today I have done mince 3kg

I fried off 2kg of mince and onion and grated carrot and portioned it up into casserole dishes and turned 1kg into cottage pie, the rest split into spag bol and chilli, all cooked in oven

With 1kg raw mince OH made burgers and meatballs. Meatballs in the oven in casserole dish and burgers wrapped in baking paper and put in the freezer.

I do similar with chicken, so have a big cook up at the weekend and fridge/freeze lots of it. So we can just pick what we fancy out the freezer, day before. The kids prefer different things, so means they can choose what they prefer as we just cook the rice to go with it.

Sweet n sour
Curry
Chicken casserole
Chicken chasseur
Chicken fajitas
Spanish chicken

Right now I'm waiting for my 1.5kg of mixture of brown and black rice to finish cooking to freeze in individual bags.

it saves so much time and cooking costs to batch cook brown rice, I soak it overnight to get the cooking time down even more (plus it's better for you soaking and draining that water).

You just have to cool it quickly and reheat fully. I use freezer icepacks to cool it fast once it's bagged separately.

That's interesting. I've not heard of soaking rice first, tell me more? How is it better for you? Just any only freezer bags?

Unfortunately due to pollution, lot's of rice has low (not actually dangerous, but still!) levels of things like arsenic. Soaking removes lots of that.

BBC news story

It also cuts brown rice cooking time from 40 to 20 minutes. And what's not great about that when gas costs a fortune!

And yes, just let it cool some before bagging it, otherwise it's too hot to handle and the bags can break. Bag it, stack on ice blocks to cool fast and then freeze. I microwave it when I need it again.

@purplepencilcase forgot to tag you when I answered above.

Amazing- thanks so much! 👍🏻

I currently have mild veg curry (good as a side dish or with a biryani), veg chilli, shakshuka base, beef and pork meatballs, tomato pasta sauce, Arrabiata pasta sauce, pork and prawn dumplings all batch made and stored in flat bags (except the dumplings in boxes).
I also keep boxes of leftovers: roast pork made into pulled pork, mashed potatoes, cooked veg which aren't quite enough to make soup but will be another day when I have more to add.