Cooking for one or two doesn’t have to mean boring dinners.
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0:00 Intro.
4:40 Cauliflower Red Lentil Curry: https://freezermeals101.com/red-lentil-curry/
11:38 Lazy Chicken Parmesan: https://freezermeals101.com/lazy-chicken-parmesan-casserole/
23:04 Korean Ground Beef Rice Bowl (in the Club): https://mealplan.freezermeals101.com/recipe/korean-ground-beef-rice-bowl/
32:29 Chicken Alfredo Stuffed Shells (in the Club): https://mealplan.freezermeals101.com/recipe/alfredo-chicken-stuffed-shells/
40:41 Alfredo Chicken Mixture on Rice
42:03 Chicken Taco Soup (based somewhat loosely on this recipe: https://freezermeals101.com/chicken-taco-soup/ )
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welcome we are so excited because today we’re going to be making some inexpensive meals for one or two and all of them are ones that you can just reheat lots of times we make things with raw ingredients when we’re doing freezer meals but this time pretty much everything is going to be cooked up ahead so that it’s such a fast reheat on the day you go to make this and actually the first recipe we’re going to jump into we’re going to do it now because it needs to it needs to get into the crock poot this is our red lentil cauliflower Curry and it’s going to be doing its thing cooking in the slow cooker while we do the rest of the meals so that’s why it’s the first one we’re getting to today and so christe is going to start I’m going to start with the chopping um a lot of people like to just break off their cauliflower and um that’s you can totally go ahead and do that I’m a big fan of cutting it um because in the end I mean who am I serving this to the queen um it’s all going to taste the same so you can cut that core out of the middle and cauliflower is a messy one right but that’s okay you just carry on I don’t have the best luck when it comes to online shopping orders it’s funny because Christy always gets like exactly what she wants I mean not always but mostly right U yeah I’m pretty lucky in the online shopping Department so I did an online order for the recipes in this video and it went very badly um one example is that I ordered a tube you know the tube of ground beef and this is what I got and so I have to tell you we had planned for you today um some taco meat uh with the remainder of the taco meat we were going to make beef taquitos just you know roll it in the flour tortillas there individually wrap them they’re great for the air fryer or the oven like so great for individual meals anyway we’re going to do that and we were also going to do oh oh hamburger Hobie soup because it’s always nice to have a soup then you can have it for lunches or dinners goes well with a bun you know all the things and it’s a pre-cooked one so it’s just a reheat it’s so nice but not today not today so today we are only making the Korean ground beef rice bowls with our tiny little bit of ground beef that we have not the tube and nor normally we Brown our ground beef on cookie sheets when we’re doing like a lot of meals at once but since this is just a teeny tiny bit I’m just going to heat it in the skillet and uh we’re just going to Brown it right up here and then we can get going on that one ground beef [Music] recipe so while you do that I’m going to go check on our meat Christy put some chicken in the oven earlier because when you’re making like larger quantities of chicken it’s really fast just put it out on a baking sheet and I’m going to start Gathering ingredients for our next recipe awesome I love tag teaming this honestly it just goes so much faster right it’s really really great now you’re going to laugh the very first time when I started like cutting these um I put my good parts into my garbage bowl with the bad parts and we had to do a little bit of a retake there and and sometimes that happens and you just move on right um it’s a clean Bowl it like it’s totally fine to use it but that happens sometimes and that’s okay charotte who did we know that their grandparents lived on cauliflower for years um I think it was our friend Jeremy from Supper Club and the family was paid in cauliflower and they lived with this the people that they worked for and like they’re they lived in like this one room house and that’s how they were paid well you would have to get really creative about different ways to eat cauliflower all I all I know is that the end of the story when he was done telling it they once they left there and were able to like move away and you know move up in the world they never ate cauliflower again I don’t blame them and I love cauliflower I but I don’t like that’s what yeah you would have to get very creative day in and day out that is something else hey [Music] next the onion we’re going to add in after our head of cauliflower it’s just one onion because we’re only doing a few meals today we are I’m just going to cut it with my fancy knife here it’s Charla’s knife but if we had you know more than five or six I would probably get out our handy dandy Chopper which we do really like for large amounts it makes everything so consistent you can actually find that in our Amazon store we have a link for that [Music] below I have managed to not throw the good part of my onion into my garbage bowl next after the cauliflower and the onion we are adding in cloves of garlic now we are big fans of the garlic around here it is so fast they make them nice and big at Costco for us and it works really well and we’re going to add in our split red lentils now we have rinsed and drained these it’s solid in there that’s so funny so what is extra funny is when we first Charlotte first measured these I’m breaking them up as I go although I don’t think it’ll probably matter once everything gets in there when Charlotte first measured these they were uh it was two cups and then she rinsed them and by the time she went to put them back in they had started to swell a bit and it was no longer two cups so you’re going to laugh at this but I’m going to get the rest of the lentils and put them in and I’m just breaking it up with my spoon um they were a little bit clumpy but it’s okay so if you were making this like in real life not on camera you would just rinse them and put them into your pot and that would be fine but because ours had to sit for just a little bit while we were getting ready for filming um they Clump together so now you know that that happens we’re nothing if not real we are that oh I didn’t get the ginger over here we’re going to add in our squeezy tube Ginger which is kind of along the same vein as the garlic um I need a tablespoon and honestly I guesstimate because that’s just okay to do when you’re making freezer meals and that way if you like things like really gingery you could like make it a generous tablespoon if not so injury then you uh make it a little less the next is the curry paste now this recipe calls for um red curry paste which I believe is a Thai curry paste this is mild Curry because that’s what we had you know Charla when while she was doing her fantastic order her online order she was thinking I probably have some because honestly there’s a curry section in her fridge we had a little chuckle about it this morning I have madess Curry P vindaloo curry paste spicy curry paste and Mild curry paste and multiple jars of some of them mhm but no red curry paste so today we are doing just the mild Curry and that is AOK again freezer meals are you know there’s a little bit of give and take here two tablespoons I probably have one there I’m not measuring with the real tablespoon and I’ll tell you why because I’m going to have to do all my spices next and I don’t want to get it wet and then have to like clean it and then come back and do my spices so I’m just a nerd that way and that’s okay you got to do what works for you if you want to use it and wash it you just go right ahead we’re going to add in our salt 1 and 1/2 teaspoons again I’m just going to kind of measure the half in this in the vein of being Speedy we’re going to add in a teaspoon of turmeric turmeric is supposed to be one of those super Foods yeah like it’s supposed to have anti-inflammatory properties and you know the more turmeric the better the more turmeric the better um garam masala which is like kind of a must in any sort of Curry you know oh so I’m reading this book it’s called The Covenant of Water by Dr Abraham vares I don’t know if I’m saying his last name correctly and they actually talked about how it’s it’s set in India and in at the turn of the century so they’re under British rule and they are going uh starts in 1900 but it goes all the way up to 1977 apparently so it’s it’s it’s like one of these sweeping epics but they talk about how to make curry and how to make curry paste and the G and all the spices that go into gam Masala it’s very important Cayenne cuz we like it spicy well one of us likes it spicier than the other one but that’s okay and we are going to add in our tomato I’m going to go measure out the water okay thanks and we’re going to use our trusty can opener here um sometimes I’ve noticed lately it doesn’t always hold the can as as it when it’s done it’s supposed to and this time it did but our last session I just trusted it and it dropped a can on me so not on me it dropped the can we haven’t made this one in a really long time we made it when my father-in-law had his knee surgery we did and my daughter was in labor at the house that day that day it was such a weird day we make freezer meals like all the time so we make them through all the things through good and bad and like that was a that was a fun day but it was weird it was weird she was like in the other room and I was checking on her and helping her how are things going she was early stages still and but later that day we ended up at the hospital and I was there when my grandson was born and you know it was it was a pretty great day so it was a pretty great day whoops oh no my new apron good thing good thing we had a Lal emergency it’s cuz they were clumpy it’s on my shoes that’s okay um I just felt the need to stir it I actually probably didn’t need to do that even but here I am I I feel better that I’ve stirred it even though I made a mess my MK oh this is so sad my new apron you have to come over here so they can see this christe just made this apron I did I made this apron on the weekend and now it’s ruined well I’m glad I’m wearing a white dress I’m glad that I have my apron on it’s true okay we’re going to get this wiped down and plugged in and then we’re going to move on to the next thing this is going to do its work and cook while we’re making the other meals which is awesome because then we can portion it into like individual or dual containers and it’s going to be [Music] great the next thing we’re going to put together is a lazy parmesan chicken this is really super super easy one I think it’s like how many ingredients one two oh it’s actually more than I was going to say it’s like five ingredients but it’s not but it’s still depends if you count salt and pepper Rachel R she’s my oh yeah I suppose and and garlic and olive oil is that really an ingredient uh so Christy is going to cube the chicken I’ve got some water boiling on the stove because I’m making rice for our next recipe this is just like scurrying around day but we’re going to get a lot made and in a short amount of time here really and this will probably give you if you were to make this exact thing um like 2 weeks worth of meals if you’re cooking for one or two so that’s kind of awesome that is very awesome yeah cuz I think by the time we done we estimated that we’ll have 16 we’ll we’ll see what it really turns out to be by the time we’re done 18 or 20 but [Music] yeah this is our box of frozen chicken this is why we were able to make inexpensive meals with chicken because normally it’s a little tough unless you do bone in chicken which is fine or ground chicken which can also be inexpensive but to do actual like boneless skinless chicken breasts can be pretty expensive so the way that we were able to do these today and include them in like a Frugal video is because we were able to get this giant box of chicken Half Price Plus 15% off in addition to that and so we thought we had cooked up enough chicken um for two recipes but the chicken parmeson uses four cups and this this is four cups and that’s all we have so now we have to cook more chicken but thankfully we had not used the whole box so we have lots to go let’s get this on a baking sheet and since we have to turn the oven on again instead of making one more chicken recipe we’re just going to cook up all the rest of the chicken cuz like it’s going to use the same amount of electricity and all of that so we’ll just cook it all up and then I’ll just invent another recipe as we go okay so I’m going to mix together the chicken but you know the chicken that caused all this uproar and oh in theory I’m going to open this fast to do you need help oh my goodness this is embarrassing must work on strength you can try I’ll try oh she’s going to do it no problem then I’ll be so embarrassed you you loosened it no I did not not even a little bit oh my goodness I need to start working out okay we’re going to dump the pasta jar in here you can use any pasta sauce or you can use our red sauce from the club which is the best pasta sauce that you’ll ever try um today we didn’t want to make a whole thing of red sauce cuz this is our only only recipe that we’re using pasta sauce in okay so we’re just mixing this together it’s really easy and then we’re actually going to portion it out into these little containers they’re just foil trays these are a little smaller than I would like and this is definitely an individual portion not one for two but you can get them larger and then you could make this for two people so we’re just going to portion these out now I’m thinking cuz they’re so small we might need to do six cuz well we don’t want it to be super thick layer let’s just let’s just see again freezer meals um are versatile freezer meals are sometimes by the seat of your pants today is definitely turning into a by the seat of our pants day cuz it was supposed to have all these beef recipes and now there’s chicken it is like chicken Extravaganza I think you’re right I think it’s going to be six yep okay I’ll get more trays thank you this is adorable and if you had an oven at work you could even bring these for your work lunch and cook it up there or a toaster oven and of course at home you can throw it in your oven or your toaster oven yeah don’t put these in the microwave hey do you want to mix together in this bowl the cup of Panko bread crumbs and some Italian seasoning and a splash of olive oil okay and I think a little bit of salt and pepper I’m on it awesome oh yeah this is definitely going to make six hoay hooray for lunches okay so we said we’re going to make two weeks of meals for you might be like a month we we’ll see how this pans out and christe’s probably starting to work because she is going today to a different town that’s like 2 and 1/2 hours away it’s an hour and a half um my son he is in band um at school and he is going to provincials he plays the trombone he plays the trombone actually he plays a lot of things um he plays guitar he plays guitar not in band and piano and uh and just uh the piano selftaught uh he had lessons to begin with and so he can read music and stuff and then now that he’s in junior high he is in the band and and he also plays guitar I have we have lessons for him on the side but this the the band is going to provincials this is their provincial yearly festival and they will be graded and I think they’re going to be awesome I haven’t heard the songs so I have said you know from a month ago or more whenever I found out the date that’s the day I’m going and so we are sure dragging our feet here to get me out the door so I was like no problem we can just film this quickly in the morning and then my grandson who lives with us he’s a year and a half and uh he usually goes to daycare do these just go one so yes you can just spoon let me just double check no first cheese aha then breadcrumbs okay good thing we checked so both cheeses yes we’re doing mozzarella and Parmesan so my grandson yeah he lives with us and he usually goes to daycare um because my husband and I work and you know so to this week he got handf foot and mouth which is like common in kids and it’s really catchy so he can’t go to daycare so this morning um we were kind of getting these meals ready and getting the kitchen ready and to some extent figuring out what we were going to do today and also watching a to and he was a very like he’s not feeling well so he’s cuddly which is great but he only wanted me toeni so I was trying to hold him if you’re a parent you’ve been there right you’re trying to hold them and do things at the same time so you only really have one hand free but he didn’t even really like that because he wanted like the full snuggle because you know he’s not feeling well so which is totally fair but anyway it was um so we lost a bit of time there yes we made up for it in snuggles right but we have all our ingredients out like we were ready to go but you then the chicken is an issue so I I might end up finishing these on my own which is totally fine uh because Christy has got a deadline and heck I ditched her halfway through the mega session that’s true oh I’m going to pop a link to our Mega session there we made 126 freezer meal and some of those recipes we’ve had the chance to try a lot of them already not a lot of them but like you know five or six of the brand new ones yep and so far this is panning out to be maybe one of our best yet so a while ago Charlotte invented some copycat Costco recipes and one of them is the chicken street tacos and honestly I think it is probably the best freezer meal that we have and I have a lot of favorites actually this is probably one of them but wow is it delicious yeah so yeah you should check that out these are so cute aren’t they do we have these little guys in the Amazon store too we do we have links in our Amazon store in the description below to these little containers I think the ones in there are a little bit bigger they’re more a size I like and then um we also have links to these microwave safe dishwasher safe safe freezer safe containers that we’re going to be showing you in a little bit so this Korean ground beef Rice Bowl was an invention yes yeah at the end of one of our Mega sessions for those of you that don’t know every 3 months Christy and I get together we make three months worth of meals for our family like that one that we just finished that we were talking about and I always prep more than we need in terms of like ground beef if you’re going to Brown it anyway you might as well Brown some extra pan and you know unless it’s chicken today right and that was my fault I was the one who who prepped the chicken but yeah so we have some left over and then charotte gets to decide what happens with that and that’s where the magic really does happen sometimes because she’s a foodie and she is great at deciding what flavors go nicely together and about what amounts you should make things and this we play around with we play around with it and sometimes they’re flops but I would say more often than not they are they’re great need minor tweaking or they’re good off the bat and in that particular Mega session we had purposely you know done the extra ground beef so that because and the reason that we were trying to invent more ground beef recipes is in our freezer meals 101 Club you can filter by the different proteins and so I could see at a glance that we had more chicken recipes than beef recipes and particularly we knew people were asking for ground beef or they like ground beef right so I’d made a lot of extra ground beef and I invented the curried ground beef and this Korean rice bowl and both were and the Thai Basil that was a while ago yes but again I think that was an invention of yours made with the ground beef and all three of them were complete hits and so now you can find them in the club so we’re going to make this one because it’s one that portions out so well in these little containers that I was telling you about before um so I’m going to be like your do Chef oh you you do oh all right I need the the garlic please okay I have a pound of ground beef in here you saw that that lonely pound that we got from the online order so this is like three cloves of garlic which is exciting cuz that’s like a whole blob of it from the jar next is fresh ginger ooh our squeezy tube szy tube one of my favorites um how much do I need a tablespoon oh yeah I just eyeball that sucker next we need the low sodium soy sauce now listen to me in our recipes I think a qu cup do you want me to get you a measuring cup or you just GNA I’ll just measure it with tablespoons sure cuz it’s four tablespoons to make 1/4 cup if it says low sodium soy sauce in one of our recipes by goodness we mean it um it means that it did not make it through the testing phase with the regular sodium exactly Christy Christy is my neighbor tutors down so we we text back and forth call back and forth see each other a lot and so we’re like yeah did you find that Egg Roll in a bowl was too salty right and then we go back and and you know like try it with the low sodium and if it’s still too salty there’s a problem with the recipe but right it’s not balanced it fixes it totally um honey please ooh okay look it’s already measured out it is um I measured this with my eyeball as well but I think I bet you I got exactly a tablespoon in there it looks perfect tablespoon perfect tablespoon last guy oops almost last sesame oil sesame oil three teaspoons which is also a tablespoon how convenient oh well a teaspoon is 5 ml and a tablespoon is 15 Christy and her math skills actually it’s because I do the club it’s be it’s because I put the recipes in the club if you find the mistake in the club it’s my fault usually some times there’s other reasons that there’s a problem but yeah it’s usually my fault and red pepper flakes thank you very much I’m going to grab a spoon and I’m going to go and put this in the sink okay we’ll just give this a [Music] stir uh I’m going to grab frozen green beans and then we’re going to make up these like full dinner bowls yes so how do you want do you want the the rice first then the ground beef and then the beans or do you want rice at one end ground beef on one end and then beans in the middle I think the rice the beef and the and the green beans now if you know that you’re the kind of person one of my sons is this way and I have a really good friend that’s this way too that you just like mix everything together like my son will mix like Caesar salad and pasta and bread and like he’ll put it in the bun and eat it like I’m making a face cuz I’m not that way like it’s separate I just finished saying you were a foodie yeah but like it has to the opp of and so if you’re that kind of person that is going to mix it all together anyway then what you could do is do a bed of rice and then cover the rice with the ground beef mixture and then put your like sprinkle your veg on top now for veg you could do like I think frozen broccoli would be really good in these frozen peas would work we’re using frozen green beans because I also think that has a bit of an Asian flare and and that we have them yeah we have them and you know what was on sale so I’m going to grab those ni but yes we’re going to separate just because some people like things separate and this way it’s a little more Verso that’s right and if you’re that person go right ahead all right this one I got a little heavy so I’m going to transfer some and make it a little more even looking [Music] so for these normally you would want to cool your rice first and that’s why we’re not putting the lids on right now because if you put things into your freezer and they’re not cooled you get condensation condensation is bad when it comes to freezer meals because it can lead to some Frost and some ice crystals and all the things that you don’t want you want to extend the life of these speaking of which we are also when the rice cools we’re going to put a thin just a single layer of plastic wrap right down on top not like a dome but like right pressed on top of the food yes because that’s going to take out some of the air and air is the other thing that can lead to frost and freezer burn and so we’re going to have cooled ingredients yeah the plastic wrap and then the lid and so that’s how that’s all going to work last night my sister-in-law came over for supper she’s from The Province next to us we are in Canada we’re in Alberta and she’s in BC which is a beautiful Province so is Alberta but BC is known for how beautiful it really is and so she was here and I was trying to think of what I was going to make that could feed like a crowd because my mother-in-law was originally going to come too and lots of our kids were excited to see their ants so I knew that they’re all going to like Flock yeah um so I took out one of the pork carnas from our session and we had tried two different versions so this was like the new version and it was really good like really really really good and of course like with the toppings and everything and I made I don’t know if you would call it an aoli or a Crema but it was like with some I think it would be called an aoli because I made it with May versus sour cream aoli is mayonnaise made with olive oil instead of vegetable oil okay so I don’t know what you would call this topping that I made but I did Mayo um salt pepper lime juice quite a bit of lime juice and some Cajun seasoning oh I think that’s lovely it was really nice I would call it Cajun mayonnaise well there you go and I made it quite a lot of lime juice so it was quite thin and you could just like drizzle it over and I had this cornflour tortilla blend that we really like and then you know your your pork mixture shredded um cabbage and purple onion jalapenos really good however I am not convinced that this recipe is better than our original pork Caritas recipe which is what we were testing and so I’m actually going to have to have the new one like pretty soon to compare so we’ll see basically what I’m saying is like like if you watch that and you’re wondering I don’t totally know yet but I know this one was really good yeah and flavorful and it was and I’m going to have the leftovers today for lunch and I’ll share if you want I do want to try it I brought myself some Cowboy beak beans which we had a few nights ago partly because I’m going to go get on this bus to go to the provincials the band teacher suggested we eat later because the kids will actually be playing right around dinner time and so I made sure I brought a lunch to today depending on how long I was going to be here but yes I will happily I will save that for my son he can have it on the bus I will happily have the pork carnitas with you okay we’re going to clear this I’m going to give that lentil cauliflower thing a stir we forgot to mention that we are going to be adding in coconut milk towards the end of cooking but we’re not adding in in yet and um we’re going to check the chicken so and at some point we have to cook up some shells because we are making some Chicken in shells so stay tuned for that we should actually get those started because we do want them to cool before we put them in the containers otherwise we’re going to end up with the same problem that we had with the rice that’s right okay let’s do that we took a lunch break so we could eat those the pork carnitas uh they were delicious absolutely delicious and I would have a hard time deciding between now you’re right we have to have the other one right away mhm mhm so next week I I think it’s going to be like maybe I’ll cook mine oh yeah you could and then I’ll share it with you and maybe I’ll have you over and then we could decide oh that would be fun yes and it’s getting to be nicer out I know we could eat outside we um because we’re neighbors and because we work together we see each other like a lot a lot and then in our downtime we still get together we like each other do and it’s just been really great and our husbands like each other and we have game nights and weat eat together a lot and it’s just kind of funny and my daughter and her daughter are like best friends and sometimes your son has to drive my son to guitar lesson it’s true the lives just intermingle we it’s really great it is okay shs we finally have chicken we have chicken and then we have more chicken so after Christy leaves to go to this exciting band provincials thing I’m going to make one more recipe with you and then we got to wait for the cauliflower lentil thing to be done anyway so we might as well like make more meals right so I’m doing some math here how many four in each do you think um oh yeah now cuz we have 21 shells actually we have 22 the recipe calls for 21 shells and I I cooked 22 in case there was like a tear or a shell mishap a shell mishap so now just doing some Mental Math here do should we do three in each or do we do four in each I think four and then so that’s going to be five and then we can squeeze some in I think that’ll be okay if you are hungry you could eat all four yeah and if not you could this could be for two people or you could have leftovers totally so in our Bowl we’re just going to mix together our cooked somewhat cooled chicken that’s cubed and some alfredo sauce oh I opened that one oh first try way to go do you want to grab me a a spatula spatula yes ma’am is teaching me I have to use spatula I’ll be your Sue Chef oh yeah we can switch off with the Sue Chef thing uh I don’t know where your skinny one is there you go thank you you’re welcome and then we’re going to add some mozerella cheese that we already had um measured out so that’s super easy very [Music] handy so here we have our shells and I have to leave right away and I know that Charla wanted to hurry up and get this one done so that I could do the shells before she leaves before I leave I mean we should both do them then it’ll be twice as fast yes it will cuz then she’s cooked up one more chicken recipe for you uh that she’s going to do all by her Lonesome my mom always taught me that many hands make light work and it’s one of the things that I live by I I over stuffed that one yes you did it looks delicious though so Christy added a little bit of pasta water into I didn’t I saved it back in case I needed it you know when your pasta sticks together um and it gets sticky do you know if you save back reserve a bit of your pasta water you can add it back in with your pasta and it just makes it slippery again all that starch that goes into your pasta water can make your pasta slippery that’s all I have to be on my tiptoes to reach into the spot but look I’m tall look how tall you are can you grow in your 30s and 40s well I’m not in my 30s and 40 oh yeah I am in you’re still in your 40s why am I making myself older than I am you’re making yourself taller than you are there you go my husband is in his 50s I’m calling him out now and he has been telling people I am still clearly in my 40s like I say clearly because I’m like I’m I’m not even 49 but he’s been telling people like we’re in our 50s and I’m like speak for yourself like we are not in our 50s one of us is in our 50s not that there’s anything wrong with being in your 50s I love a lot of people who are in their 50s and someday you’re going to be in your 50s and it’s going to be just fine it’s going to be fantastic I hear but don’t put me there when I’m not there yet so anyway I always laugh when he says that and I’m like no only one of us um a couple of years ago when my dad went from Independent Living to living in a home my brother took him and so he said so how old do you have to be when you’re to get here anyway and she the actually and it was in a small town and the lady who runs the lodge was my cousin and so and so my cousin said well typically 65 but if you’re 55 live um and have you know some um you know disability like say you have bad knees or you’re in a wheelchair or something then you can come in earlier but it’s on a caseby casee assessment and so he he went oh my knee you know to try to get in cuz he’s like oh man three Hots and a cot Dad this is going to be pretty good yeah oh look at us go see many hands make work it’s true now I’m kind of wondering if we’re going to have more filling we have shells well maybe we should have cooked up the whole box oh well I’ve been making this particular recipe oh like for as almost as long as I’ve been a mom which is a long time um I can’t get this one open there we go I my fingers are covered in alfredo totally this is very messy and very fun um yeah I my friend we might need another tray Julie uh taught me this she lives in Seattle now but uh she taught me this recipe I I mean it’s hardly any ingredients it’s not it’s not difficult but she was the one that make made this and taught me and sometimes I’ve swapped out the mozzarella for cheddar cheese just you know if you prefer change it up um but and I’ve also done it with asparagus instead of the peas I’ve often done that um Frozen asparagus it would be good with broccoli too but you can’t eat the broccoli no I’m allergic to broccoli uh we are definitely we’re done here we have one of those has a tear okay so we are on the last shell so you’re going to have to squeeze one in somewhere and we have some filling left over so I guess your options are you can make a few more shells or I would just bag this up and someday make yourself a nice little pot of pasta and put this on as your sauce I think you know what that’s probably I was also considering we have a little bit of I we have a little bit of rice rice left so I was thinking maybe I could just put this in a container with the rice I like that that’s another option because then it’s more like a done completely done and then I would add more peas maybe totally I like that better let’s do that let’s do that let’s just get it done okay I’m going we need to go wash our hands we’ll be right back so I’m all washed up I’m all washed up I’m so washed up that I’m leaving uh it is time for me to go my son is going to be in provincials here this afternoon this evening and it is a bit of a travel time so I got to get going um but it was really nice to see you all today and it was always great to cook with charotte and I you can stick with me if you want if if you miss Christy too much and you have to leave I understand she is pretty likable but if you want to stick with me I would laugh if if everything all the viewing just goes when I go that doesn’t happen you guys love her I know that um but I’ll make some other things with you and um we’ll just kind of see what we end up with and it’ll be a surprise for you it’ll be a surprise for me I’d like to know how many you end up with and I’m really looking forward to the lentil cauliflower dish because it’s been um a hot minute since we’ve had it it has it’s been a while it’s been a good one 20 months oh yeah yeah probably since we know well yeah we know how old the baby is oh my goodness is he 20 months he he’s getting older yeah what a he loves her he calls her mes yes he does and the only things he likes to watch on TV is Annie you know the classic musical Annie and Us on YouTube and so he’s like he calls me Mama and so he’s like Mama Ms a sweet he so cute he’s great okay signing off um have a great day and happy cooking bye Lu thanks okay we I’m going to grab more peas that’s what I’m going to do because I do feel like this is a little bit white like it’s like you know we’re we have white rice white Alfredo white cheese white chicken we need some color in here so hold [Music] on you know that I’m all about not wasting so I umum have used what we have left and now I didn’t waste anything I got to use more peas and we’ve got two more meals we had planned on kind of doing well the original plan with all the ground beef that we were supposed to be getting was to be doing a month’s worth of meals but then when we had the ground beef grocery order mishap I was like oh this might end up being two weeks like I kind of thought we’d end up with 16 meals but now like it’s going to be maybe once worth of meals again so it’s kind of exciting because sometimes you can just stretch things and that means that you can stretch your dollar too because we’re still using the same amount of groceries that I had originally planned on and we’re just able to make more and more meals and of course when you’re making something with lentils or with rice or whatever that allows those grocery dollars to just stretch and stretch and stretch so I’m going to get these put away and then I will let you in on the plan for the rest of that chicken [Music] so what I was thinking that we could do is just throw together kind of like a chicken taco soup or chicken tortilla soup of a really amazing recipe you can find that recipe at fral 101.com or in the club at fs101 club.com or I will have a link to it directly in the description below this video but that one requires beer and we don’t have beer here it’s not one of the things that we like regularly stock so when we have a recipe that calls for it we have to actually go and get it and so I don’t have beer I also don’t have cans of chili style beans so this is sort of like inspired by that but not exactly that I’m going to make some changes as I go so I just shopped in my pantry and you know whatever we came up with is going in this soup great thing about soups is that you can stretch them really far now one of the changes that I’m making is do have onions and I could mince up or dice up an onion and that would be great however then it would require this soup to be cooked for longer so that the onions would you know soften I’m just going to use a three onion powder blend that’s going to go in here and it’s going to give the flavor of the onion without needing anything to soften so that way if you wanted to cook this up and just like quickly microwave re heat it or you know you could do it on a stove top pot but not for very long just until it’s heated through that would work just fine so we’re going to mix everything together in a bowl because we are portioning it out into smaller bags we’re going to use the quart size bags I am going to use some garlic because why not and it’s sitting right here I’m going to grab that electric can opener because I’ll be glad to have it now I’m going to use some canned corn you could also use frozen corn but I got these in a Cas slot sale recently that also fell on that same 15% off and so this was really inexpensive I got all the cans you see here at the case slot sale actually that’s not entirely true I did not get my diced green chilies in the case flot sale but if they sold those by the case count me in because this is a soup I’m not going to bother draining these but you could if you prefer um I am however going to drain the black beans they kind of have a little bit of like I don’t know what you call it sludge in there and I prefer to drain them I also gave those a rinse before I put them back in the can now we’re going to use some tomato sauce and diced tomatoes one of the things I like about doing a recipe with cans in multiple sizes is then when you go to recycle the cans you can Nest them so that they take up less space it doesn’t take much to amuse me as you can hear then we’re going to do some DIC green chilies some taco seasoning salt and pepper and lastly we’re going to add in a container of chicken broth in Canada we call these Tetra packs I don’t know what they’re called elsewhere but I know they’re not called Tetra packs because when we used to just say Tetra pack in the video people would ask us in the comments what a Tetra pack was so I’m assuming that that’s not a common word elsewhere this is now a very full Bowl but we were just using the bowl that we had put the cooked cube chicken in because then you know creates a little less dishes and so it just worked out this way but this looks like it’s going to be delicious I do kind of wish that I had one of those chili style Bean cans to put in but when you go to serve this what you could do is you could sprinkle some cheese on top you could even do some like crushed tortilla chips or you could crisp up some like flour tortillas cut into strips in your air fryer if you have an air fryer put that on top you could do a little dollop of sour cream you could add some fresh cubed avocado on here there’s so many ways that you could fancy this soup up because you know we’ve heard from some of our viewers over the years that because they live on their own they feel like they can’t make nice meals for themselves and that makes me feel so sad because everyone deserves good food and nice meals and I feel like those lazy chicken parmesans that we made earlier I mean that’s kind of fancy I get that they’re the lazy version of chicken parmesan but the flavors are there and it makes me smile to think about some of you getting to enjoy that and if you wanted you could even make a little bit of pasta on the side and make some extra red sauce for that and just like enjoy a really fancy meal and yeah I just I love I love that because like I said everyone deserves good food I’m going to grab those quart size bags and get this in this might be a little bit precarious because it’s soup so I think I’m going to use a little trick to hold those bags up I’m just going to fold the bag over in this cup so that we don’t have spells that happen now I know you can get the bag holders they’ve never worked really well for me especially because sometimes we’re making so many meals at one time even you know of the large family size meals that it just slows me down I find I have a good system of like folding those bags over but when it comes to the smaller bags they don’t hold up quite as well and sometimes you need a little hack like this so I’m just using a regular cup you could also use a large um like a tupperware kind of container and fold it over that but we’re just going to spoon our soup down in here and it’s going to do the job of holding the bag open for me now if Christy was still here then this is something that we help each other out one of us will hold the bag open once it reaches that point of being a little precarious and uh that works really well but you know not everyone has a freezer meal buddy I’m so forunate that I do um but I know that not everyone does and so sometimes you need to learn these little tricks like this so it’s a little tricky to get out I’ll be honest with you because if you’re not careful and you take it out too fast you can end up with some splashing but we did pretty well there now you’re going to get as much air as you can out of the bag because again air is going to be that thing that causes your freezer burn so we’re just going to get that out carefully and then we’ve got our bags of chicken tortilla [Music] soup I went ahead and added some water to what I’ve got left because it was getting to the point where it was like not so much soup anymore and water or broth can really stretch a soup which stretches a dollar so I like that too so we’re going to end up with more bags of soup but I think it’s still going to taste great and um that just gets us more bang for our [Music] book now we’re going to stir that coconut milk into our cauliflower lentil dish it also called for some fresh cilantro to be stirred in at the end and we did that last time we made it but of course in the grocery order I made last night the cilantro did not get added and so it was just you know A Series of Unfortunate Events when it came to that grocery order and that always seems to be the luck that I have with grocery orders but anyway we’re going to allow this to cool before we bag it because again we don’t want the condensation in the bags now we have ended up up with we’ve got 23 meals not including the cauliflower lentil Curry I think this will make seven or eight meals so that means that all told we have 30 dinners which is pretty darn amazing and it didn’t take us all day we were able to get that done including our prep which we kind of did as we went along today and actually you know we had that that issue with the chicken where we had to actually cook two C of chicken instead of just having them both in at the same time which would have taken half the time so if we’re able to do this even though there’s two of us this took us less than a day if there’s just one of you you could do this it could take you one full day maybe it would take you an afternoon if you’re more experienced as a freezer Mealer and you’ve gotten a little faster as you go cuz that’s what happens um but also it’s okay to portion this out over a few days you can make one dish one day and then you know get that all in your freezer and of course you can have a portion of that for your dinner that night and then another day maybe you could do all the chicken meals because you’re going to prep the chicken anyway you might as well do those all together and then another day you do you know the ground beef one or whatever it is that you do and of course you don’t have to make what we made here you can check out the freezer meals 101 Club where you can create your own custom meal plans and you can even and just toggle to change the serving size so it’s super easy you can double things you love and Portion them out into lots and lots of containers or if you’re just trying it for the first time you might want to take that down to one or two servings and see how you like it before you make a large batch anyway that’s a really great option if you’re looking for more variety in your dinners and a way to just make it easier for yourself so you can check out the link for that down below I’m going to get this portioned out once it’s cooler and then that’s it so thank you so much for joining us today we had a lot of fun even though it was a bit of a Gong Show between the grocery order and the baby and Christy having to go to the band concert or band provincial festival and so we still were able to get a lot done and have some fun in the process I hope that this was helpful for you today thanks again and happy cooking I think I’m good your head my head’s great my head is intact