As I said HERE, Monday’s blog posts are going to be based on the theme of Motivational Monday! Here’s something that I hope motivates you!
If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail – Benjamin Franklin
Meal planning is a HUGE help for me. Planning helps me eat good, nutritious food, it helps me not stress out about what to cook for dinner, and it helps save money. Now that we’re an empty nest household of two, meal planning has become a little challenging.
Cooking for 4 people meant SOME leftovers, but not many. Adjusting to cook for 2 people has been a struggle for me…especially when making soup. I CANNOT make a small pot of soup – can anyone relate? I found a great product that has helped with those huge pots of soup and so much more!
Here’s my method. I make two soups on Sunday. I like to call that “two soup Sunday”. Initially I was doing one, but found it’s pretty much just as easy to make two, so why not!
We keep some out to eat that week and then the rest goes into my SOUPer Cubes. I mostly use the one and two cup cubes. I put a piece of tape on the cube to identify the contents with the month and year. Then into the freezer they go.
Initially when I bought the SOUPer Cubes and started using them, I would take the frozen servings and put them in a Ziplock bag for storage. Recently I have upped my food prep game – introducing, the Dash vacuum sealer! The gray sealer is showing a 10% off coupon, but hurry as it expires on 1/13/25!
Once I have several containers frozen, I set up the Dash and get to work!
First I cut the bag and double seal the bottom.
Next, load the bag –
Vacuum and seal – and you’re done! Put the label (from the SOUPer Cube lid) onto the sealed bag and move on to the next one.
I like to freeze the soups in both the 1 and 2 cup cubes so that I have a variety of sizes. Once you’ve vacuum sealed all the cube containers and put the label tape back on, you have a nice variety of options!
I recently got some containers for the freezer to keep similar items together.
Easy as that! Here’s a list of the options inside the “Soups” bin right now – what should I add next?
- Chicken Taco Soup
- Chili
- Beef Stew
- Corn and Chicken Chowder (I added chicken to the recipe to bump up the protein)
For anyone who is interested, the recipes for the two soups shown can be found on Pinterest. Click the link in the list above for the post I followed the recipe from! I try to keep my Pinterest boards fairly organized so that I can find favorites again. I use my “Pinned and Done” board to keep track of items that were a hit.
I hope this post has motivated you to give meal planning a try. The SOUPer Cubes have proven to be really helpful and very functional. They clean up easily and are possibly one of my favorite kitchen gadgets. The vacuum sealer is one of those “I guess I’m at that age” things, but I do find it really satisfying to have those neat little packages of soup “at the ready”. I can put those on our meal plan for days that life is busy or substitute them out for a day when I don’t feel like cooking.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments about meal planning, soups, or freezing. Or, let me know if you have a favorite soup recipe that I need to add to Two Soup Sunday prep!
The Neverending Lori 