With summer I focus a lot of my energies towards gardening. As a result, you’ll often find me working in the garden till supper time, dirt smudged on my fingers and knees, and absolutely no interest in coming inside to clean up and cook supper for my family.

So I love it when I can go prepare meals at one of those new supper places where you pay to go and prepare 12 meals to freeze for later. But we don’t always like those meals, and it can get expensive. So I’m doing what one mom suggested: figure out our family’s favorite meals, then, once in a while, prepare enough to bag and freeze extras for later.

So I’ve started doing this. One night I made our favorite Pot Pie recipe, making enough to freeze 2 extra. A few days later I cooked up a huge batch of homemade chili, and froze 5 extra portions along with hot dogs for our Chili & Dogs favorite meal. Yesterday my ten year old daughter and I spent all morning making homemade cinnamon rolls; we froze an extra tray of them for a nice easy breakfast someday. If we’re doing all the work and cleanup to make it, why not double or triple the recipe and do enough for several meals? With a big family like mine, it just makes sense.

UPDATE: I have started posting some of my Make Ahead Meal recipes. To see them, go here.