Hi! I'm Sharla with Freezer Meals 101. Welcome to my second ever What's for Dinner? video.
In most of my videos, I'm showing you how to save time and money by assembling the
freezer meals but then you don't get to see what actually happens and what they look
like when they're served, so these "what's for dinner?" videos are a great way for you to see
how those actually work in real life like how a busy family can take those freezer meals
and be able to eat delicious dinners on those busy weeknights. This week, we made Lasagna Soup which
was a new recipe to us, but it was delicious. It's definitely going to go into the rotation
for next time we do freezer meals because it was amazing! We also did tacos and for that,
I put Salsa Verde Chicken Tacos in the slow cooker and cooked up regular Taco Meat in a skillet.
That way, my family could choose between those two or have both. It just gives more variety
and a little bit more fun and tacos are one of our family's absolute favourite meals.
This week we also did Pasta Puttanesca which is a recipe that my husband and I made on at
home date night. Super fun and delicious too and I'm going to do a video next week where
I try to turn that sauce into a freezer meal because I know that it would work. I
know that it has the right ingredients to be able to freeze and thaw and reheat well so
that's coming up next week but that's one of the things we had this week and then and then another
new recipe which was the Taco Tater Tot Casserole. My friend Nikki shared that recipe and so when we
did freezer meals this last time, we decided to turn it into a freezer meal and give it a try so
that's something that we cooked up in the slow cooker. You could also do that in the oven and
it's a really, really, really family-friendly, kid-friendly recipe. It'll be a big hit of course
with the kids. You know you can't really go wrong with the tater tots and then we just
did egg salad which is really easy, but egg salad on croissants and not a freezer meal, just
that's just what worked out for one of our days. So I'm going to share with you how we made each
of those recipes and how easy it would be for you to make them too. Be sure to subscribe to
us here on YouTube if you're looking for really, really easy family friendly meals.
I had forgotten to take the lasagna soup out of the freezer in the morning, so I had to thaw it
in the sink and then I simmered it on the stove top and towards the end, I added in eight broken
lasagna noodles. We served it in bowls topped with ricotta and parmesan. It was delicious!
Taco Tuesday is always a huge hit at our house. For this week, I took out both salsa verde chicken
and two bags of our regular taco meat. The salsa verde chicken I cooked in the slow cooker
and then shredded it using the mix and masher which is the easiest way I know to shred chicken
and for the taco meat, I took out the two bags because we have a large family and they love
tacos, so for us, I needed both bags and then I reheated those in the skillet. You can see
that there's cheese right in there but it melts as you're heating it and just makes the mixture nice
and cheesy and has a great texture and then I set out kind of a taco bar for everything. I sliced
some extra green onions knowing that I could use them later in the week when I did egg salad.
I also sliced tomatoes, jalapeños, avocado, and lettuce and we shredded some cheese
so that's what we set out for our taco bar along with the two meats and some hard shell tacos as
well as some soft tortilla shells. This is that amazing Pasta Puttanesca that my husband made. I'm
going to be attempting to turn the sauce into a freezer meal. The flavours in this are just
so good. It's got those kalamata olives and the capers. We topped it with some parmesan and some
red pepper flakes and served it over fresh pasta. Remember that Taco Tater Tot casserole I was
telling you about? Well this is it. I put a crock pot liner in my slow cooker because I find that
when you have something that has a lot of cheese in it or that has the tater tots or hash browns,
it just sticks to the crock pot and makes clean up a mess so I was just making my life easier by
using a crock pot liner. I don't use it for every meal just the ones that I think are gonna stick.
I put it in when it was still a bit frozen, so I had to do a bit of work to get it to all fit in
the crock pot but once I had that going, I could just stick on the lid and set it and forget it.
Because this is the first time we were making this as a freezer meal, it's a bit of an experiment and
because I had made two for our family and Christie made two for her family. This way,
we could try one in the crock pot and next time I'll try it in the oven and then we can determine
which method works better so I will also put the cheese in a separate bag and attach it
to the main bag next time because I think it would have been better with the cheese on top.
I know it looks a bit of a jumbled mess, but the kids all loved it. For the egg salad croissants,
I just boiled up the eggs, added some salt and pepper, some dry mustard powder,
and paprika and then added in some mayo. This is just the way that my mom taught me to make
egg salad and then I added those sliced green onions that I had made on Taco Tuesday when I
was slicing the onions for the tacos. Next I washed some lettuce and I washed a bunch of
extra because again it just makes sense to do more and use the extra for another recipe
just saves so much time that way and I knew that I was going to be making some souvlaki pitas
and that way I could use the lettuce for those as well as using them for the egg salad sandwiches.
So we just sliced up some croissants, put lettuce and egg salad mixture in there
and then I served it with just some raw veggies on the side and the kids could pick which of the
raw veggies they wanted so everybody got what they wanted and had a pretty balanced meal.
So normally sandwiches would be more a lunch thing, but it just worked out to have them
for dinner this week and that's it. Thanks for joining me today guys and happy cooking!