3 healthy soup recipes + 1 day = 12 frozen meals

Have you ever attempted to make 3 giant pots of soup in one day?  I love healthy soup recipes, so last weekend I was on a mission to make a freezer full of meals!  It’s hard working full time and planning healthy and delicious meals.  I’m not overly organized with it, and there are days that I’m exhausted and I’m just at a loss for what we should have for dinner.  So I am very excited to have 12 healthy dinners in my freezer to fall back on now!

Chopping took a LONG time.  I used about 3 lbs of carrots, about a bunch and a half of celery, 5 onions and about 6 cloves of garlic.  The picture really isn’t conveying how much food it was:

Chopping took a LONG time.  Probably about two hours.  I have yet to master the art of chopping carrots, so they definitely took forever.

And chopping 5 onions?  Soooooooooo not pleasant.  I’m usually pretty sensitive when chopping onions, but this time I was crying and sniffling like I had broken up with my first boyfriend.

I had two giant pots going on the stove.  The problem is, I only own two giant pots, so I was at a loss for what to do with the 3rd soup.

So it had to go in the crock pot.  Not by choice, or because it was a good recipe for a crock pot, but because it was my only option:

I more or less doubled all the recipes, so the pots were filled right to the top.  After I took this photo I decided too much liquid had boiled off so I added even more water to get it up to the top again.

Hamburger Soup Recipe

I made Hamburger Soup by modifying a recipe from AllRecipes.com:

Lentil Soup Recipe

Then I made my very favourite lentil soup recipe:

Creamy Chicken Noodle Soup Recipe

Followed by Creamy Chicken Noodle Soup based on an amazing recipe from I Heart Naptime.  This is the poor soup that got banished to the crock pot.  So if it looks a little chunky, that’s because it was.  But even though it doesn’t photograph overly well, it was DELICIOUS.  Seriously, give it a try some time (in a regular pot on the stove… not particularly recommending the crock pot), because it is amazing!

And then we packed up two big bowl fulls into Ziploc freezer bags (yes, we counted the ladles out so that the portion sizes were exactly what we would need for a dinner).

If there is one tip I can recommend for freezing soup, it’s to lie the soup flat in the freezer.  That way, it’s relatively thin, and you can throw it in a sink of hot water and defrost it in less than 10 minutes.  So even though it’s frozen, it’s still a super fast meal!

Here’s another photo of my lentil soup.  Seriously, yummy!

My freezer is now jam packed with super healthy soups for all those nights that I just don’t have the energy to come up with a creative and healthy meal!  It took about 4 hours to get it all done, but the effort was worth it – now there will be 12 days that I can just sit back, relax and enjoy a healthy meal with next to no effort!

Source : onelittleproject.com
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