Frugal Cooking idea - Crockpot meals

by Susie
(Stillwater, OK)

There are a lot of things we do to save money. I am disabled so it is rather tough to do many things. My family is great though. I plan and supervise and they execute!

I have become fascinated with the idea of cooking and freezing meals for a month. Sadly I cannot cook for long enough times to achieve this.

Instead I am going to try something I have not heard of. Crockpot meals for a month. I plan to put all the ingredients for a crock pot meal into 1 or 2 ziploc bags. Then the items can be put into the crock pot in the morning with 1 cup of water and we will have a nice dinner with minimal cleanup.

I have a lovely food processor that will make chopping veggies easy. Cleaning it involved multiple pieces so it is better to chop large amounts of veggies and other stuff at one time.

The 1 cup of water is added not so much because recipes require it but because the food will be frozen. When you put frozen food into a crock pot you have to add water because otherwise the food will cook so slowly as to keep it in the danger zone for food poisoning and food born illnesses. The danger zone is 40 degrees to 140 degrees. That is why refrigerators should be set no higher than 38 degrees.

From the time a food is picked or killed to the time it is eaten it should spend no more than 4 hours in the danger zone. Adding the water usually does not hurt the flavor and the water heats up and helps the slow cooker heat the food.

I will keep you posted on how this works. I think it could be a valuable and easy to do method to prepare healthy, tasty dinners with minimum work.

I do plan to label each ziploc type bag with the name of the dinner and I will store the used bags in the freezer. That way when I go to fill my freezer bags I will be able to reuse them. I don't find washing them to work well with my living dishwashers. They will wash them but then they won't let them air dry inside. I used to have a whatsit that they could be opened up and hung on, but no one ever used it but me. As I no longer can wash dishes, it eventually got knocked off onto the tile floor and broken.

If I keep the bags in the freezer, flolded up inside another bag, I will not risk food poisoning and I won't waste the expensive bags or add to the landfill!