As a homeschooling mom of 5, my life is busy. Days are filled with cooking, cleaning, schooling, caring for my little ones, along with various other responsibilities, so I appreciate when I can review a product that makes my life easier. And MyFreezEasy is designed to do just that--make my life easier.
I've been using the premium annual MyFreezEasy.com Freezer Meal Plan Membership to get meals in the freezer for those too-busy-to cook days. I've always been one to make freezer meals--whether it's doubling what I'm making for dinner or preparing recipes specifically to freeze--but I've never followed a plan that does all the legwork for me. This plan by Erin Chase & $5 Dinners offers a collection of quick-prep freezer meals that will "help ease the pain and stress of getting a delicious, wholesome dinner on the table."
Using this plan, you can get 10 meals (2 meals each of 5 recipes) in your freezer in 1 hour. There are 8 meal plans available:
- Traditional
- Gluten-Free
- Slow Cooker
- Clean Eats
- 20 Meals
- All Chicken
- All Ground Beef
- All Pork Chops
This month, I opted to build my own plan in order to get a feel for multiple types of meals and cooking processes.
- Lazy Lasagna Bake -- ground beef meal cooked in the oven
- Sloppy Joe Sandwiches -- ground beef meal cooked on the stove
- Spanish Rice Skillet -- ground beef meal cooked on the stove
- Honey Mustard Shredded Chicken -- chicken meal cooked in the slow cooker
- Chicken Cacciatore -- chicken meal cooked in the slow cooker
Making the grocery list was more of a hassle than I anticipated. The grocery lists are given on separate pages divided by individual recipes. So, I had to swap back and forth to determine what I needed. Lasagna--3 lbs. ground beef, sloppy joes--3 lbs. ground beef, spanish rice--3 lbs. ground beef, so a total of 9 lbs. . . . And it was that way for each ingredient. No, it's not difficult, but it is time-consuming, and if we're talking about a system that is designed to save time, it can be frustrating. A program that would combine like-ingredients and allow to print an interactive grocery list would be a huge plus.
The directions are thorough and easy-to-follow. There are a few discrepancies though. For instance, the directions shown in the picture above are for the Spanish Rice Skillet. The ingredients for single meal sections lists 3 cups of white rice, but the cooking directions for single meal says 2 cups of white rice. Another example is for the Sloppy Joes, the amounts are given for a serving of 6, yet the ingredient list shows only 4 sandwich buns are needed.
I am a cook-from-scratch girl and love to be in the kitchen. One of my favorite things about cooking is making a recipe my own, not necessarily following directions or amounts, but adding as I see fit. That aside, I kept to the recipes exactly in order to review this plan. My family liked the meals ok, but unfortunately we found them a little bland. The sauce for the chicken cacciatore tasted practically like plain tomato sauce. Not bad, but didn't give us that wow factor. Next time, I will change ingredients and add spices to our liking, like normal. That's not to say anything was wrong with the recipes themselves, but that they just weren't perfect for our family.
Over all, I think this program has great potential. So much work has been done to gather recipes, organize them, and make it easy to purchase the ingredients and prepare the meals. The concept is wonderful and can be adapted to fit any and all needs. With a few tweaks, MyFreezEasy could be the perfect freezer meal program.
You can connect with MyFreezEasy on the following social media sites:
If you'd like to see how this membership worked in other homeschooling families, please read the reviews on the Homeschool Review Crew blog.
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