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Gone are the days of putting boxed convivence supplies into your freezer and forgetting well-nigh it!

Your freezer can be your weightier tool for streamlining meals by building a Freezer Pantry and having meals, ingredients, or meal starters ready at your finger tips!

Starting to build a freezer pantry

Starting to build a freezer pantry can finger overwhelming. Don't try and build up a whole new freezer in a day - that is impossible.

Rather, make a list and plan what is most useful to your lifestyle and family tastes. Then over time, build it up. Let me show you how!

Freezer Space

First thing to consider is how much freezer real manor you have to work with. If it is in your upkeep and you have the space, I highly suggest getting a secondary freezer.

If you have wangle to only the freezer tying to your fridge, have no fear, all of the information in this post is still relevant, you will just have to be highly selective of what you segregate to put in your freezer pantry.

We have a post on organizing the small fridge freezers that might help you with your limited space.

I have both an upright and chest freezers and they both have their advantages and drawbacks.

I love my upright freezer considering is is far easier to organize and wangle my freezer goods and they take up a smaller footprint of space.

However, they are increasingly prone to be accidently left unshut and lose your freezer treasures, and they tend to be increasingly expensive.

What to put in your Freezer Pantry?

Freezer pantry with everything frozen flat

Think well-nigh your lifestyle and your own personal preferences and style of cooking, and decide which types of freezer items will work weightier for you.

Here is a list of some options of types of items to build your freezer stock up.

Cooked Meals for Reheat

This type of meal can get a bad reputation. Usually that is considering meals that are not unconfined for the freezer, or reheat are chosen. Let's fix that.

This type of meal is unconfined for if you don't love to melt from scratch and don't enjoy the cooking process daily. With this method you can do a prep marathon weekend and stock your freezer with many meals and have easy, low effort weeknights.

Our Meal Planner, The Meal Plan Collective makes towers a stash of cooked meals easy by permitting you to stilt and waif the recipes of nomination into a meal plan, and a grocery list is automatically generated. You then prep the meals and freeze them!

Family Style Casseroles

I do this type of freezer cooking for larger family style casserole style meals. These are often in larger foil pans and some unconfined recipes that work for this method are:

These work unconfined for worthier families but less platonic for students, singles, and couples.

Individual Cooked Freezer Meals

For singles, couples, students and anyone's lunches, individual freezer meals that just need to be reheated are the way to go!

I used to stockpile my freezer with these types of meals in glass or plastic containers, but that did take up a ton of space and tied up a lot of my containers into the freezer...... until Jake and Michelle at Souper Cubes created their sunny silicone trays to freeze individual meals.

Not just for soups, I use Souper Cube trays to make all my lunch meals or if I am road tripping and in hotels, or camping, these cubes travel well and make for the easiest meals.

You can trammels out their recipe section of their blog for a ton of inspiration too - be sure to trammels out the posts I wrote over there - Chicken Pot Pie, Meatloaf, Pizza Kits, & One Pot Veggie Mac & Cheese.

Freezer meals in cubes — Recipe links are unelevated for all of the meals shown here.

Looking for inspiration to build your freezer with these types of meals? Here is what is often in my freezer frozen in individual portions:

Freezer Meal Starters

Freezer meal starters are a component (usually the most time intensive) part of a full meal that can be thawed and widow to fridge ingredients to make a quick dinner. Typically, you add a fresh component to these to make a well-constructed meal – in a fraction of the time.

As an example this Pantry Staple meatball soup uses freezer meatballs and you can use your freezer goop and freezer veggies, too!

Sneaky Veggie Meat Sauce Stacked in supplies saver bags

With this method you can often prep just a handful of staples that can be used to make hundreds of variegated recipes. Seriously. See how I use FIVE meal starters and can create FIFTY variegated meals.

My go to freezer meal starters:

Chili - I use the recipe in The Meal Plan Collective
Meatballs
Meat sauce
Taco Meat
Pulled Pork
Butter Chicken Sauce & Tika Masala Sauce - make these as per directions but don't melt with the meat, add it the day you want to eat it.

Prep, Freeze, and Melt

Often referred to as "dump and go meals" this type of prep has you preparing meals in tons with limited to no cooking on the day of prep.

When you want to have a fresh meal, the bag is thawed and the contents cooked - usually in a slow cooker or Instant Pot.

Ingredient Freezer Stash

Like a traditional pantry, you freezer can be a source of ready to use ingredients. You can really go next level here, and prep your ingredients in the souper cube trays I mentioned older so that your most wontedly used ingredients are once portioned and ready to toss into your meals.

Yes, of undertow you can buy many ingredients once frozen from your local grocery store.

Usually, my freezer pantry ingredients are made when things are headed south and I don't want to use it now, when I find a good sale on something but can't slosh it all surpassing it goes bad, and when I preserve my garden in the summer.