Hi! I'm Sharla from Freezer Meals 101 and today we are making three tortellini meals for the freezer.
I'm glad you joined me. If you're looking for more freezer meal recipes as well as meal prep ideas
tips and tricks that can help you save time in the kitchen and spend more time with your family,
be sure to subscribe to me here on Freezer Meals 101.
The first meal we're making today is a soup that I've been making for decades. It's hearty. It's
great and it's even got some veggies in there, so it works if you're trying to eat a little
bit healthier. Now this is a freezer meal and normally, I would be making it in a freezer bag,
but today I'm actually making it for dinner and I wanted to show you how you make it when you put it
in the crock pot, so I'm going to be showing you putting it directly into your crock pot.
Imagine though that we're putting all of these ingredients into a freezer bag.
You're going to start with one chopped onion and then add a tetra pack of chicken broth, one jar of
pasta sauce, three cloves of minced garlic (I just used jarred minced garlic today to save time),
three teaspoons Italian seasoning, one teaspoon of chili flakes (I added a bit more because we
like things spicy), three cups of frozen mixed veggies. I'm using an Italian style blend that has
a lot of different veggies in there so you can use whatever is your family's favourites
and then you're going to do two to three cups of water. Now my trick for the water
is that I actually measure out the water and then pour it into the empty pasta sauce
container because that way, I can shake it up and pour it in and I'm not wasting a drop
of that pasta sauce and it cleans out the jar really nicely for me so I can recycle it.
Now you're gonna cook that on low for four to six hours if you're putting it directly into
the crock pot and then you'll be adding the tortellini at the end, simmer for 15 minutes,
and then if you want, you can top it with some parmesan and if you like things spicy,
add some of those chili flakes again. Now if you're doing it for the for the freezer,
you'll do everything that we initially did and put it into a large freezer bag.
You can add the water at that time or you can add the water on the day you
cook it if you want to save some space in your freezer and have the bag be um less thick so
and then on the day you cook it, you're just going to add your tortellini. So that
is it for that recipe. It's really that simple and you've got tortellini soup already made.
The next recipe that we're going to do is a baked Alfredo tortellini. This is really good and it's
amazingly easy to make. So normally when I get my tortellini, I buy the three pack from Costco
and I get the rainbow three cheese tortellini. I didn't want to risk the Costco lines right now.
We have COVID restrictions where I am and the Costco line last week when I went went was insane.
I didn't want to risk that again today, so I just picked up some jumbo packs of tortellini from the
grocery store. Now the reason I like to get the three pack is because when Christie and I make
our like marathon freezer meals and make for three months at a time, we get two of the
three packs and then we can make six of the... actually, last time, I think we made 12, but
you know normally we can make six tortellini meals with um two of the three packs. You can also take
the three pack and take some scissors and just slice it along the lines and then freeze the
tortellini if you're not going to be using all of it, so it's another nice little tip for you.
So for this baked Alfredo tortellini, again, super easy and lots of variations that you can do. This
is one that I pulled out of my freezer to show you how normally I make it in freezer bags because I
just find that these containers take up a lot of space in my freezer and then we can't keep as many
meals in there, so I like to do them right in the freezer bag. The drawback to doing them in the bag
is that you can't put this obviously directly into the oven, whereas if you make it in a foil
container or a casserole dish, then you can put it from the freezer directly into the oven or
thaw it in the dish and put it in the oven. So you have to judge what's more important to you:
convenience or freezer space and make your decision based on that. So I am just adding
a jumbo pack. That's one is it one pound I think. It's one pound of cheese tortellini right in there
and then I'm doing two jars of Alfredo sauce, so I buy these Classico jars.
There's also another brand. I don't remember the brand name, but that has similar jars
and the reason that I do this is not so much the flavour of the Alfredo which is fine. It's
good. It tastes like an Alfredo, but it's for the jar because when these are cleaned out,
they make a really nice cup. So they look like a mason jar when they're
when they're clean and you can use it as a drinking glass. They also have measurements
four ounces and eight ounces on the side. So I just like the look of these mason jar bottles
and because we have a lot of teens and we know that some of them eventually will be moving out,
it's one of those things where I can keep collecting these and then when they move out,
they can have a set of glasses already. So I actually have two sets of 12 already because
we make this meal so often! So now I'll have two sets of 12 plus these extra two so
um You can use a spatula to scrape out the rest of it. If you've watched any of my other videos you
know that I don't like to waste food so I scrape out as much as I can get also when you're feeding
a large family of nine, you need all the food you can get, so just giving that a scrape here. Now
I was saying that you can make a lot of variations of this, so you can you can add into this
a little bit of pesto. You can add sun-dried tomatoes. You can add cooked chicken, cooked cubed
chicken or I guess shredded. We always do cubed. You can add some bacon and sun-dried tomato.
What else do I do? Oh one of our favourites is sliced mushrooms and frozen peas. That's a really
good one and because it's cheese tortellini, then it's a vegetarian meal, so um yeah. That's one of
our favourites. When we add the pesto, we don't like to add too much. We find it's a bit too rich
if you add too much, so just like a couple of tablespoons is enough.
So we've got our Alfredo there and I'm going to today, I'm doing bacon so
I had some bacon left over from some other freezer meals that I made the other day... just going to
slice it in there with the kitchen scissors.
It's hard to go wrong with bacon
and drop that in there. These kitchen scissors are gonna need a good wash.
Okay, I'm going to wash these. I'll be right back. Now we're going to add about one cup of mozza
cheese so I just got some pre-shredded to again save a bit of time and normally again, I would
get it at Costco, but this time, I had to get it at the grocery store, so it's a smaller bag than
I would usually have. It doesn't have to be exact measurements here. I'm just going for the general
idea and even when you make it, this is a no-fail recipe. So you're going to give that a stir
and again, this can be something you mix up in a bowl and then add into freezer bags or
it can be something where you throw all the ingredients into a freezer bag and then give it
a really good squish to mix it all together before sealing getting out the extra air and freezing.
So that is nice and mixed. I'll just show you what that looks like so far with the
rainbow tortellini. It's nice and colourful so I like that so that's it so far and
then we are going to put some grated parmesan on top you can use parmesan or asiago for the top and
so you're gonna do a quarter to half a cup and again, just eyeball it, throw that on top.
Now before you put this in the freezer, you want to add foil and you want to lay it right directly
on top of the pasta. You don't want to put it just over the container because you don't want
any air in there and then if you want to, you can add an extra layer of foil just on the container
just so that it sits nicer in the freezer and seriously, that's it! So that is your
baked Alfredo tortellini and let me look up the cooking instructions. 375° for 30 minutes or if
you're putting it directly from the freezer into the oven, then you're going to cook it for about
an hour at 375° and you're going to take the foil off in the last 10 minutes or so and that's it.
Dinner is done. So you've got that one and then this next one is a skillet meal. So um we've got
this Italian sausage that I cooked up earlier on a baking tray. I'll just show you it's a
similar package to this which is 500 grams of Italian sausage. The one I used for this
was a herbed Italian one, but it doesn't matter what kind you use. You can use spicy Italian.
You can use just a mild or like I said, this basil one I thought would be really nice,
so you're gonna add these little, I call them sausage meatballs. I don't really know what the
proper name is, but basically, I squished the sausage out of the casing onto a baking sheet,
bake them in 350 degree oven, flip them over halfway through. They don't need long to cook.
Watch yours a little better than I watched mine because mine have too much of a sear on them
(a little bit on the burnt side) and then you can transfer them into your freezer
bag. I like to blot mine on a paper towel first, so that you're getting the grease off
and then we're gonna add peppers. I've got a mixture of green, yellow, red, and orange. Here,
just gonna add that in you can do sliced peppers or cubed, chopped, whatever,
whatever you want. I had some sliced mushrooms from
a lunch that I made earlier and again, I don't like to waste food, so I'm just adding that in.
You don't need the mushrooms. They're not in the original recipe, but I always like to add extra
vegetables whenever I can and then an onion. This is purple, but you can use white
or purple, whatever you want and then we're going to add our tortellini. I'm gonna use this
larger container for um the soup later and because they had run out of the large containers, I got
two small ones here. I'll just add that you should add one large or two small and add that
now this is going to make a skillet meal. So the nice thing about this is that we've taken
tortellini which you can get in many varieties and we have made it into a soup, a pasta bake,
and a skillet meal so we have a lot of variety here.
So add our tortellini. This is going to be a really thick bag when it's done,
but that's okay, how it goes sometimes, and one jar of pasta sauce so when you go to cook this,
you're going to take it out of the freezer to thaw and then you're going to add the whole thing
into a skillet, cook it over like medium heat covered, give it a stir once in a while,
and the tortellini should cook right up. You'll add about a quarter of a cup of water just so that
there's enough liquid for the tortellini to absorb and this won't look at all soupy when it's done
because the tortellini will absorb the moisture of the pasta sauce so as it's cooking.
So we're gonna actually seal it without getting air out first and then
toss it around to mix everything there.
Now we're going to take out that extra air because in case you're new to freezer cooking,
air is what causes your freezer burn, so air is the enemy and you want to
get as much air out of your freezer meals as you can. So that one
will now lay flat in the freezer and it's really nice and colourful
and you can see that it's quite different from the other two meals. So we have taken
just a regular package of tortellini and transformed it into three different recipes.
If you enjoyed these tips today, then I invite you to subscribe or like this video.
Thanks guys for joining me. It was fun! Happy cooking!