re: Family budget question re: groceries/food/consumables

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just put all the ingredients in a ziploc bag, put them in the freezer, defrost them when you're ready to cook them and then cook them in slow-cooker?

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That is what you do. You do a minimal amount of prep to the ingredients, and put each meal into a gallon size zip lock freezer bag, and throw in the freezer. We move from freezer to fridge 24 hours before we cook it. When ready to cook, dumb contents of bag into crock pot and turn on.

You do need to be careful. We have a programable crock pot, that will cook for so many hours and then put on "warm". On a couple of the ones that only take 4 hours, we thought we could drop it in before, work, set for 4 hrs, and then have it stay warm until we got home from work. A couple of times, it ended up overcooking. So the ones that have lower cooking times, keep those when you won't be gone for that long.