Healthy Eating With the Help of Your Freezer

One of the easiest and fastest ways to have home cooked meals, even when you have no time, is to keep meals frozen for easy preparation. Fall is a great time to do that, because you can make your garden vegetables or farmer's market purchases last all winter. The best thing about it, though, is that with a little planning it takes you almost no extra time to get a freezer full of goodies.

Getting good things to eat into your freezer can happen several ways.
1. Have a day at home with a bit of free time? You can easily make chili, vegetable soup or homemade pasta sauce while doing other chores around the house. These types of meals require some prep, but the majority of the cooking time will allow you to do other planned activities such as laundry, dishes, computer work or just relaxing.
2. Make twice as much for dinner. Making something that freezes well (pasta sauce, chicken noodle soup, shredded chicken)? Make twice as much and freeze half. It takes very little time to double a recipe. You will be grateful the next time you want something good to eat and don't feel like cooking!
3. Freeze individual serving portions of ingredients. You don't always have to have something completely done to save time freezing it. For example, green peppers are much cheaper in the summer than the winter. Therefore, I will freeze them for use in stuffed peppers all winter long. It saves prep time too, as you don't have to wash, core and slice them. You just pull them out and use them. You can also save extra zucchini by shredding and freezing it for baking casseroles or zucchini bread. This works well with corn too. Nothing is quite as good as summer corn on the cob. You can buy several dozen and freeze the whole ear or cook and cut it for great tasting corn all winter. It's much healthier than grabbing the bag of french fries in the bottom of the freezer and takes no more time!

I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Instead, I will just share my favorite freezer recipe:

Cabbage Soup
Add together in a large pot:
1 head of cabbage, cut up into bite size pieces
1 lb of hamburger
1 onion, chopped
3 T sugar or Splenda
2-3 T Worcestershire Sauce
6-10 cups water
1-2 bay leaf
salt and pepper to taste
a dash or 2 of cayenne pepper
Cover and cook until the cabbage is soft and the hamburger is cooked
Then add:
1-2 cans of diced tomatoes
1 12 oz can of tomato paste
Cook for an additional 15-20 minutes, remove the bay leaf and serve.

This soup makes A TON and freezes VERY well. Enjoy!