Baby, It's Cold...Inside

With our tax return, Sweet Hubby bought something for me that I've wanted for a looong time...a chest freezer!!  I love that I have room to stock up now when I find great deals at the grocery store!  With my new toy, I want to get more into making freezer meals so that dinnertime is easier throughout the summer.  If I can heat my kitchen up only one day a week, that will be great!  And if I can get good at this freezer meal thing, hopefully that means less eating out once school starts back up in August!

In my quest for freezer meals we might actually eat, I stumbled onto Carlee's recipe for Freezer Spaghetti Sauce.  I made it last week and ohmuhgoodness, is it delicious!!  We loved it (so much better than the stuff I used to make from scratch...this is much more flavorful!)  The Italian sausage makes all the difference.  This makes a lot and my stockpot has never been so full before! (I should have taken a photo of it cooking; that would be much more appetizing! LOL)

Two days a week I take lunch to my grandparents.  The day I made this, I used two cups of sauce and made lasagna buns.  (Sweet Hubby declared them a success and wants them on the menu again and my grandparents liked them a lot, too.)  I measured 4 cups of sauce into each freezer gallon-size zipper bag and ended up with 5 gallon bags and 1 quart bag (with 2 cups).  That's enough for at least 6 meals in this house!  (Carlee says the yield is 13 cups, but I ended up with closer to 24 cups, probably because I couldn't find the right size cans and used more.  I just added a bit more seasoning to make up for the difference.)

The cost is great too!  Here's what I actually used (which differs a bit from Carlee's recipe) and what I estimate the cost to be:

2 onions 50 c
2 tsp garlic 5 c (total guess; I have a giant tub of minced garlic from Sam's.)

1 cup crumbled bacon (didn't use this time)

4 pounds browned hamburger $10

1 tsp fennel seeds 50 c (again, this is a guesstimate)
4 large (28 oz) cans tomato sauce $4*
4 large (28 oz) cans diced tomatoes $4*
2 cans black olives, sliced $2*
1 large jar mushroom slices $1*
5-6 TBS italian seasoning 25 c (guesstimate)

2-3 TBS dried basil 25 c* (guesstimate)
salt and pepper to taste

*Purchased from Dollar Tree

Total Cost $22.55/6 meals = 3.76 per meal

For the Lasagna Buns meal, I purchased a pack of 6 sub buns at Wal-Mart for $2.50 so that meal cost just $4.38 and fed 4 people (before we added fresh veggies to the plate.)

This recipe is going in my keeper file for sure!!  Thanks for sharing it Carlee!