Bulk Freezer Cooking and Glass Food Storage

We are big on cooking in bulk and then creating freezer meals with the rest. I figure, if we are going to go spend the time cooking and cleaning up the kitchen afterward, we might as well feed ourselves as many meals as possible from that effort. Because meals last so long in the freezer, we can get a versatile stash of meals built up and rotate through them so our palates don’t get bored.

We've experimented with once-a-month-cooking (OAMC) from cookbooks and blogs. We’ve prepared food in bulk at Let's Dish (which we really enjoy and makes a fun date night but is a splurge for us cost-wise). Ultimately, we've discovered that cooking and freezing our tried-and-true normal recipes works best for us. Some of our favorites include white chicken chili, hummus, sweet and spicy pork, French dip, and cranberry carrots.

While zipper plastic bags and foil pans are options for storing meals in the freezer, we avoid disposable products. Plus, I don't like heating food in plastic. Given that, glass seemed like our best bet. We decided to go with Pyrex because it is safe for freezer and oven and the lids are BPA-free.

Pyrex is not cheap, so we built our stash slowly. Several years ago, I stalked the advertisements for Black Friday for the sets that we wanted. I am not a tidy-house person, but I do love a tidy cabinet, so we decided to pick several sizes for our Pyrex and just get those so they could be organized easily.

Rectangles in three sizes on the left
Rounds in four sizes on the right
Lids by shape and size in the middle

Our families love to use wish lists for gift-giving, so I added the exact sets we wanted to my Christmas list and let the family know that duplicates were great. That started things off. Over time, I continued to ask for Pyrex sets for gift-giving times plus I check for them on clearance shelves and each year we look for them on Black Friday and get more.

Pyrex also now offers water-tight lids, which is great for bringing defrosted soup to work for lunch. Pyrex does make glass lids, but these merely sit on the container and do not seal. Here are Pyrex’s food storage containers.