About a month ago, my friend invited me over to her house to prep a ton of freezer meals.

And by “a ton,” I mean 20.

She had signed up to be a Wildtree distributor and so we got together to try two of their kits, which together made 20 meals.

The night before we got together, I went grocery shopping for the meat I needed for all 20 of these recipes. The recipes ranged from things like fajitas (two kinds), flank steak, pork chops (which I subbed out… not a fan of pork), tons of chicken recipes, fish, etc.

I felt like a freak with my meat cart, rollin’ around Kroger. My bill came to $156 and some change which boiled down to about $7.80/meal for meat. Not too shabby, considering the meals serve 4-6, which meant I could probably get two servings out of each meal making the cost really only about $3.90/meal (for meat only).

There were some miscellaneous costs in there (that I subtracted out of the total above) – freezer bags (two boxes), honey, a can of tomatoes and some vegetables. My friend provided some of the vegetables and I brought the rest. There weren’t a ton, though. Mostly it was peppers and onions for fajitas, and zucchinis.

So how do you prep the meals?

Well, I’m glad you asked.

I didn’t snap any pics of this process because I was handling raw meat for pretty much 3 hours straight, but the idea is you have these pieces of paper you cut up and each paper specifies what the recipe calls for. Then you just assemble the ingredients as specified by the paper in a freezer bag.

Wildtree provides the recipes and all seasonings and oils used. They have special blends of seasonings just for their recipes, as well as specially flavored oils (like a grapeseed oil that’s garlic flavored… yum!!!!).

The meal above is the flank steak. So I put that steak in a freezer bag with the oil and seasonings. The veggies went into a separate freezer bag. Then both of those bags, together, went into a third freezer bag. And inside that bag I put the paper with the recipe on it so I could remember what the heck was in the bag as well as know how to prepare it when we were ready to eat it.

It was one of the first recipes we tried and I have to say, I was really impressed.

The recipes have you put a lot of seasonings on the meat – or what seemed like a lot to me – but after having eaten about half of what I prepared, I know why… because you freeze it and you want the flavor to be maintained. None of the recipes we’ve had have been overpowering in flavor.

One thing I’m taking away from this experience is that next time I will probably further divide up some meals that I know we won’t eat the full serving of. Like recipes that calls for 2 lbs of chicken breasts or something. We aren’t going to eat 2 lbs of chicken breasts in one meal.

Another thing I’m taking away? Freezer meals are really great. I definitely plan on either doing this again with Wildtree, or just putting together freezer meals on my own. For just three hours of prep time I ended up with 20 meals, so the time spent was completely worth it for the convenience of having a ready to grab meal straight out of the freezer. It’s definitely cut down on the number of times we say “let’s just eat out!” since all I really need to throw together is a side dish. Not to mention, it’s cut down on weekly grocery spending because there is at least 1 or 2 dinners I don’t have to buy a main dish for since I’ve already got it in my freezer.

Have you ever tried freezer meals, or Wildtree? Please share if you have – especially if you have a favorite freezer meal recipe.