Hi I'm Sharla with Freezer Meals 101. Today I'm going to be making meals to take with us on
our annual family ski trip and we've been doing this for so long that i kind of know
what works best, and so I've got a menu planned out so I'm going to be making
buffalo chicken quesadillas dr pepper pulled pork chili chicken noodle soup breakfast quesadillas
hash brown casserole also for breakfasts mexican lasagna is my husband's favorite
italian sausage pasta sauce and then I might make some muffins or zucchini loaf or something
like that to bring that we can just have in the freezer and pull out for quick snacks
anyway I think this is gonna go really well it's gonna make my life so much easier when we're on
the hill I actually don't ski but I still love going on our ski trip it's so great for family
time we play board games in the evening it's just a very relaxed atmosphere I work while
we're there but I still feel like it's a break for me because I've got the beautiful mountain
views I'm actually going to be editing this video when I'm there so I'll put some pictures in it
so that you guys can see what I mean about these gorgeous mountain views and it makes it feel like
not work at all but the other thing that makes it feel like a break is when I plan the meals ahead
and don't really have to do much when we're there so we're going to start with the buffalo chicken
quesadillas for these I take this for my lunches when the kids come in off the hill for lunch
they usually have something like leftover chili or soup or something like that whereas
I'm there for longer and I can take a longer lunch break so I make myself a quesadilla either in the
oven or the skillet and i make some homemade guacamole to go with it I love it and I could
eat it every day so it's actually a huge treat for me so what I've done is I've gotten all the
things prepped here so we actually we had a nacho bar with my brother and his wife the other night
and so this is actually left from that so that was two nights ago so this is still pretty fresh
I've got green onions purple onions tomatoes red pepper jalapenos and buffalo chicken,
and so I'm just going to be putting that on the flour tortillas now the trick when you're freezing
this oh and of course cheese I forgot to mention cheese but cheese I like to have an arrow blend
you can use tex mix or you can grate your own cheddar matzo whatever cheese you like it works
with this what you need to know about freezing quesadillas though is that you want to put them on
a cookie sheet and then you know fold them in half once you put all your things on there and then
you're gonna freeze the cookie sheet once it's fully frozen then you'll take it out transfer it
to your bag I can usually fit I think four or five in a bag and then you get the air out of there
seal it freeze it again and then you're good to go you don't want to put them right into the bag
because everything's going to fall apart it's not going to be solid it won't turn out well trust me
so we're going to do this the proper way today and we're going to get this going
great thing about quesadillas is you can put anything you want in them you could make these
with taco meat instead of the buffalo chicken you can make them vegetarian if you want you could put
olives in here you can I mean you can add whatever you want and if you don't like jalapenos
you can skip that or if you just don't like it as spicy you could use the pickled jalapenos
so there's a lot of variety that you can do when it comes to quesadillas
I'm just gonna stick this in my freezer and we'll get started on the second tray.
The next thing I'm gonna make is the breakfast quesadillas because of course I'm gonna use a lot
of the same ingredients the cheese the onions um I'm gonna cut some more red pepper but I'm
gonna use red pepper for that and then I've got a little bit of cooked bacon here that I'm gonna
use um and scrambled eggs and I'm gonna do them on smaller flour tortillas the reason I am doing uh
breakfast quesadillas and not breakfast burritos is that I am so bad at rolling the burritos
which I think has been well established here so anyway we're just gonna do breakfast quesadillas,
so I'm just gonna scramble up some eggs to do that and then I will be back we'll get that started
especially good if you serve them with salsa but anyway that'll make a great breakfast for those
early mornings when kids want to get on the hill as soon as it opens and be nice for me because I
will not have to make breakfast so uh yeah I'm off to scrabble eggs so here's a bit of a funny thing
when I was planning this I didn't really think about the fact that I only have a certain amount
of cookie sheets and a lot of the things I'm doing require cookie sheets today, so um I have a cookie
sheet in the oven with some um italian sausage meatball kind of things that I squeezed out of
the casing and they're cooking in the oven on a cookie sheet and then of course I had two cookie
sheets being held hostage in my freezer while the regular quesadillas were freezing, so I'm
going to transfer those into bags now then we will get started on the breakfast quesadillas so
that they can use the same cookie sheets okay here we go these are pretty frozen but they're not as
frozen as I would normally wait for them to be but they're frozen enough that they will hold together
and then I will just freeze the bag pretty flat initially so but we're doing good here.
Okay let me grab the other one
okay pop this back in the freezer and we will get started on the breakfast quesadillas, so for these
I'm going to use these smaller flour tortillas and just again this is one of those recipes where you
can change anything up so your basics is you're going to need your scrambled eggs other than that
you can use cooked breakfast sausage bacon and have no protein in that whatsoever you can use ham
then you can add whatever vegetables that you want usually when I do my scrambled eggs
I add some whipping cream to fluff them up and I add some chives fresh chives
but right now my herb garden that is usually right there and brings me a lot of joy I'm washing it
and kind of restarting all of them so I don't have any fresh chives,
so I'm gonna do green onions in place of the fresh chives today and won't be quite the same but
I have a similar idea and then I chopped up some more red peppers because I really wanted that,
so all I'm doing for these is some scrambled eggs bacon cooked already bacon
and then a little bit of vegetable with the green onion and red pepper don't think I'm gonna add
any jalapenos or anything because these are mostly for my kids and my husband but
that way I don't have to label what's what so just add some red pepper green onion and bacon
and then I'm gonna top them with some cheese that way when we go to cook them which will probably
just cook them on a plate on a paper towel in the microwave just heat them up that way and
that way the cheese will melt it'll stay together and be really delicious.
So we ended up with nine breakfast burrito or breakfast quesadillas which might sound like I
planned it perfectly since there's nine people in our family but all I did was cook up 10 eggs
and this is what it gave me, so it was not as planned as it sounds anyway we are now going to
move on to making our hash brown casserole so we are just going to melt some butter
and I'm just going to do that in the microwave so
and then we're going to add some can of mushroom soup some onion pepper paprika and cheddar cheese
and mix that all together and then I'm going to add some frozen hash browns and that's seriously
it sometimes I add some cooked sausage into this either breakfast sausage or our preference
actually is just a spicy italian sausage in this but this time I'm just going to make it as is
it's kind of going to feel like we're getting to have like a special branch I'll probably make eggs
with it that morning but it's just you know when you're on vacation you kind of want to feel like
you get special food so because this is usually something that we have
for holidays like christmas morning or um if we're having company over or something like
that I know that we're all gonna really like it it's gonna be a treat so let's get this underway.
Now we've got our hash brown casserole ready to go into the slow cooker or the oven once we get there
you'll notice that I'm choosing a lot of slow cooker recipes and the reason for that is I'm
gonna bring the crock pot with me and I'm not sure what they have at you know the condor that we're
staying at I don't know what kind of things they have for the oven if they're big enough
to hold something like this I don't know if they have casserole dishes that kind of thing so if I
bring the crock pot that way not only will it work perfectly for things like the pulled pork and the
soups but it will also make it so that for things like this if it doesn't work out to go in the oven
I can use the crock pot as a backup so that's my plan I love my crock-pot I even sometimes bring
it with us when we go camping because again it just makes things super easy I can smell
that italian sausage that cooking right now in the oven it's not quite ready but it's getting close
those italian sausage meatballs are almost cooked but I realized that they're gonna have to cool
before I actually put them in the bag because if you put things that are too hot in your bag causes
moisture which again can lead to your freezer burn and to things just not having the right texture
when you thaw and reheat them so we're going to skip that for now and move on to it probably do
it at the end I'm going to do the mexican lasagna which is like I said it's my husband's favorite I
often make this and double it and we have one for dinner that night and um then we have another one
you know in the freezer but um oh I have a video on doubling your dinners, so I will put that link
right there anyway uh this will be a good one to show you overhead, so I'm gonna flip the
camera to an overhead view so that way you get the idea of what I'm doing when I'm layering
and when I'm creating like the mixture thing that goes in the layers so we'll get to that and then
um at the end then I'll do the the chili the pulled pork the chicken noodle soup
and then at the end we'll come back and once those sausage little bit meatbally things have
cooled then I can show you making that pasta sauce for my mexican lasagna I always make it with the
eaves mexican ground round which is a veggie beef so this is vegetarian but you can make it
with real beef if you want I mixed that with some cheddar cheese soup green chilies cheese and salsa
and then I layer that in between those oven ready lasagna noodles and then cover it with foil and
cheese before the foil and then before I bake it I add a little bit of water and it's ready to go.
The chicken noodle soup I just use two chicken breasts some carrots onions garlic thyme a bay
leaf chicken broth water parsley salt and pepper if you're not allergic to celery like I am then
you can totally add celery on the day that I cook this I'm going to add egg noodles into
the crock pot at the end of the cooking well 20 minutes ish before the end of cooking and then
we will have this delicious chicken noodle soup which is perfect for like a cold day when the
kids come in off the hill and they're hungry but want kind of that warm comfort food thing
the Dr Pepper pulled pork is going to be perfect because it feeds a crowd and it's great
for a really easy lunch or supper we like to serve it on buns with a coleslaw and sometimes with
garlic mayo anyway we've just got a pork in here and onion a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
now if those peppers are too spicy for you then I suggest that you still add them at this point
but then when you go to serve it you can just pull them out and that'll make it a little less
spicy actually take them out before you shred it really and then you're going to add two cans of Dr
Pepper some brown sugar salt and pepper and that's it but this is such a flavorful meal well I messed
up on this one I didn't push the record button when I was filming making my chili overhead,
so I have added a video clip from the last time my neighbor Christie and I made Freezer Meals and of
course when we do that we make four at a time so you can see us assembling this exact same chili
recipe that I made to bring skiing but uh this is obviously not the one I made for this trip
so it's got our ground beef lots of onions cumin chili powder pepper uh it's got tomato
paste tomato sauce kidney beans pinto beans or we use the chili style pinto beans
sometimes um and some diced tomatoes a can of tomato soup it's just a really good hearty meal
and this will be perfect for skiing for the italian sausage sauce we've got our cooked
I don't know sausage meatbally things and then the the thing that makes this recipe
so fast come together is we're using salsa, so everything in there is like pre-cut
you use a chunky salsa you can use medium mild spicy whatever your preference is and the salsa
also contains some of that flavor that you're looking for uh recipe calls for green pepper
I of course had red pepper and so that will still work in there and then we're gonna add some garlic
and
capers you can find this recipe as well as the other recipes that we used except for things like
the breakfast quesadilla where obviously I didn't use a recipe for that um in the description down
below we really like capers, so I'm adding a little more than what the recipe calls for
and that's it now we have a very tasty pasta sauce and when we're there I can just cook
up some noodles drain them throw this on top and we've got another dinner things like the breakfast
quesadillas I didn't use a recipe but everything that I used a recipe for I did go to theFfreezer
Meals 101 club to print off those recipes really easily and of course to make my shopping list
because that's the part about freezer cooking that I used to dread and now it's super easy so you can
find the link for the Freezer Meals 101 club also down below thank you so much for joining me today
it has been a slice and now that I have these meals done I know that this ski trip is going to
be so much more relaxing for me and even if I'm working I mean it doesn't really feel like work
when you've got views like this I'm going to stick a video right here of fast and easy slow cooker
meals because as we've established today I kind of am in a love affair with my crockpot anyway
don't forget to hit that subscribe button thanks again for joining me today and happy cooking.