Four Weeks To Fill Your Freezer: 4 Chicken Meals In 30 Minutes

Trader Joe's carries organic free range chicken legs for $1.99 per pound. That's a very good price for free range meat and helps to balance out our grocery budget while still eating better quality meat at least some of the time. When we go to TJ's, I've been buying several packs of these to last a month or more.

Last weekend, I bought 4 packages of chicken legs so today I set to work getting them made into freezer meals! Approximately 30 minutes later, I had these 4 meals prepared:

• BBQ Chicken. Place chicken pieces in freezer bag. Pour your favorite BBQ sauce  in the bag, mush around to coat chicken and seal. Grill or bake when ready to serve. If baking, I'll probably add extra sauce at that time. We like Bulls Eye BBQ sauce. No high fructose corn syrup!
• Israeli Spice Chicken.  This is seriously our favorite chicken! Drizzle olive oil on chicken pieces, rub Israeli Spice Blend all over and pop in a freezer bag. Grill, bake or cook in skillet on stove top when ready to serve. Tip: Keep a batch or two of the seasoning blend made up for quick fixes like this! 
• Sweet & Sour Chicken (recipe below). Ok, so this one took a few minutes longer to prepare. But it's not hard and I had all the ingredients on hand, including a smidgen of brown sugar that just needed to be used up already!  I used 2 packages of the chicken legs to make a whole recipe of Sweet & Sour Chicken and then divided it into 2 casserole dishes-- 1 for tonight's dinner and one to freeze for later. 

Sweet & Sour Chicken 
Serves 6. 

This recipe is from my mom and is a family favorite! This is also really good made with pork chops.


1/4 cup water
2 T. cornstarch
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup vinegar
1 cup pineapple juice( reserve juice from pineapple chunks)
1 T. soy sauce
3/4 cup green pepper, cut in thin strips
1/4 cup onion, thinly sliced
1 (20 oz.) can pineapple chunks, drained
1 chicken, cut up or about 3-4 pounds of your choice of chicken pieces
Oil, for browning chicken

Combine water and cornstarch; add salt, brown sugar, vinegar, pineapple juice and soy sauce. Cook on low to medium heat until thickened, stirring frequently. Add green pepper, onion and pineapple chunks.

Brown chicken in oil; place in greased baking dish and cover with sauce.

Cover and bake at 325 degrees for around 1 hour or until tender. Serve over rice!

To freeze, prepare dish and freeze before baking, wrapping well. Remove from freezer and thaw overnight in fridge and then bake.


** This post is part of Money Saving Mom's 4 Weeks To Fill Your Freezer Challenge!