Healthy freezer meals for busy dieters and their families

I recently attended a meal making cooking class with a group of friends. Basically, it was a Once a Month-Freezer Cooking session combined with a Prepare Your Own Meals store. Our hostess (this was in a private home with a very large kitchen) shopped for the food, chopped the veggies, browned the ground meat, and prepared the prep stations.

Our group made eight meals. There was one dish per station with two to four people working on putting together the meals. Using printed instructions, we measured out the ingredients, and put them into labeled freezer bags or aluminum casserole dishes. When then loaded our pre-made meals into coolers and placed them in the freezer when we got home.

For $95, I walked away with eight dishes. This may seem like a lot of money, but I only spent a couple of hours making them, and I didn't have to drive all over town to buy the ingredients. I didn't have to do the prep work or clean up. And I have healthy meals in the freezer for those nights when I'm too busy to cook or out of town. The time savings alone made it a bargain.

So now I'm trying to figure out how to do a similar party with friends and not do all the work as the hostess. I'm thinking that each person could shop and prepare the ingredients for one dish for X amount of people. Then we could get together, assemble the meals, and help each other with the clean up and cost.

Healthy Freezer Meals for Dieters

It would be fun to get together with friends to make freezer meals, but it wouldn't be as easy as my class. Luckily, there are many terrific websites devoted to once a month cooking, like Once a Month Cooking World. Other sites have pages devoted to making freezer meals, like Real Food 4 Real People.

The challenge is finding recipes that are healthy for the whole family and will work with your diet. You can easily lower a recipe's calorie count by using leaner meats, adding more veggies, and using condiments like salsa and soy sauce.

Or you can pick your favorite Weight Watchers, low-cal, or low carb recipes and figure out if they can be prepared ahead of time, frozen and reheated in a microwave or slow cooker (crock pot).

Here is a recipe from my class. I did a search on it and found out that it's originally from Erica's Recipes blog. My kids love it and you can make it dieter-friendly by omitting the bun and serving it on spaghetti squash or brown rice.

Spicy Beef Sloppy Joes

Control the spiciness by adding more or less cayenne pepper and using a mild or spicy salsa. You could also substitute ground turkey. We used ground venison.

Because of the veggies, lean meat and salsa, I'm guessing that this is probably 4 to 6 Weight Watchers POINTS per cup. Serving it on top of steamed veggies will add zero POINTS.

Ingredients:

• 2 lb lean ground beef
• 2 (16 oz) jars salsa
• 3 cups sliced fresh mushrooms
• 1 ½ cups shredded carrots (3 medium)
• 1 ½ cups finely chopped red and/or green bell pepper
• 1/3 cup tomato paste
• 2 tsp dried basil, crushed
• 1 tsp dried oregano, crushed
• ½ tsp salt
• ¼ tsp cayenne pepper
• 4 cloves garlic, minced

Directions:

1. In a skillet, cook beef over medium heat until brown, stirring to break meat into pieces. Drain fat.
2. In slow cooker, stir together beef and remaining ingredients.
3. Cover and cook on high for 2-3 hours or low for 4-6 hours.

If you're turning this into a freezer meal, brown the meat and drain the fat. Then combine all the ingredients, except for the buns, into a freezer bag. Freeze and label with instructions.

Reheating instructions:

1. Remove frozen sloppy joe mix out of bag and place into crock pot for 4 hours on low.
2. If defrosted, place in pan and heat up on the stove.