Welcome!

I'm Tonia and this is my family. There's Hubs, my wonderful partner; Bug, my darling daughter; and Boo, my charming son. We are the Collins clan. We are a homeschooling family who try our best to live out God's will for our lives every day. There are lots of stumbles along the way, but we love each other and this little life we're carving out for ourselves. Recently we found ourselves called to make some big changes in our lives so we're packing up the McMansion and moving out to a little farm in need of a lot of TLC. We have tons to learn and tons to do and we invite you to share the journey as we turn our not-so-new heap into a home.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Turning Holiday Leftovers into Freezer Meals

What do you do when you are given a ton of ham and turkey leftovers after Thanksgiving? Well, first you celebrate a little and then you sit down and plan out freezer meals to make with all that meat. WooHoo!

First off I looked for the recipes I wanted to make. I love having meals in the freezer that can go straight into the crockpot so I started there and then moved on to freezer meals that would be easy to thaw and make. I finally settled on these:

Creamy Chicken (Turkey) Taquitos  (I made two bags of this)

Ham and Noodle Casserole ( I made two casseroles of this)

Loaded Baked Potato Soup 

Homestyle Chicken (Turkey) and Rice Soup


 
I started by getting bags and casserole dishes ready. I labeled each bag with the recipe title and also with any cooking directions that needed to be noted. I did this because I know it is very likely I will eventually lose the recipe print outs and this way I'll still know what I need to do to finish the meal.
 


Then it was on to prepping the veggies I'd need and cutting the shredded turkey into smaller pieces. I purposely chose recipes that didn't require a lot of prep to put together so that this part would be easy. After all the prepping was done for the turkey recipes I just took one bag at a time and put everything together in it.


I carefully sealed up the bags so that they could lay flat in the freezer and so that there was a minimal amount of air in the bags.


Once I had the turkey meals done, I followed the same process for the ham meals. I put the casserole meals into aluminum, disposable pans simply because it was easiest. After about an hour of work, I had 6 meals ready to go in the freezer, plus an extra bag of ham to be used in beans and a bag of turkey bones to make broth out of.


I'm just going to be honest here- this sight makes me SO proud. I love knowing that I have meals ready for a long day or to bless another momma with a moment's notice. I'm also incredibly grateful for being blessed with all this meat to make meals from. Our family is going to eat well!



Tonia



 

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