Back to School Easy Meals: Slow Cooker Freezer Meals #kraftrecipemakers

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Collective Bias®  Social Fabric® Community.  This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias and their client. All opinions are my own

Easy Meals for Back to School using Kraft Recipe Makers. 

Back to school is coming up soon!  Some of you are probably already back to school, but we have about 2 weeks of summer left.

However, I’m already thinking ahead.

During the school year, time is a precious commodity.

Between drop offs, pick ups, extracurricular activities, homework and all the other busyness that occupy our time once the first bell of the year rings…it’s easy to let seemingly less important tasks (like dinner!) slide.

This year though, I plan to be prepared! Eating out (although one of my FAVORITE things to do) is costly and honestly we can rarely justify the expense. It’s so much cheaper to eat at home and it’s generally healthier as well (except when I make stuff like this, or this, or this…).

Have you heard of Freezer Cooking? I have posted about it a few times (most notably, my freezer friendly breakfast burritos!) and I know it’s something that a lot of y’all have shown interest in.

The great thing about freezer cooking is that you can prep all of your meals at one time, and the time  you have to spend cooking on weeknights is drastically cut in half (down to basically just “heat” time).

Perfect for busy school nights!

Freezer cooking generally involves a lot of “pre” cooking though…and that’s kind of a chore in and of itself.

Recently I was in Walmart though, and I saw these Kraft Recipe Makers. They have different varieties and some of them are “skillet” meals, some are “oven” meals and some are “slow cooker” meals.

The Kraft Recipe Makers include 2 cooking sauces and a few recipe suggestions (although you can do whatever you want with them! ). My family loves spaghetti and pasta dishes, so I chose the Chicken Cacciatore.

The Chicken Cacciatore has a bottle of Lemon Oregano sauce and a pou

ch of Tomato and Italian Herb Sauce. There are a few recipes on the box, but I was most interested in the Chicken Cacciatore recipe on the back of the box.

Omitting a few ingredients I knew the kids wouldn’t like, I grabbed a freezer bag and wrote down the name of the meal and how long it needed to cook (as well as what I should serve it with. In this case, pasta).  Then I threw all the ingredients into the freezer bag.

Here’s the recipe I used:

• 4 boneless skinless frozen chicken breasts
• 1 Kraft Recipe Makers Chicken Cacciatore kit
• 1 sliced onion

I sealed it up and threw it in the deep freeze!

Now, when school starts, all I have to do is throw the contents of the freezer bag into the slow cooker in the morning…and Voila! A tasty and complete, homecooked meal served to my family for almost no work at all. I just have to boil the pasta that evening and dinner is DONE!

You can find Kraft Recipe Makers in your grocery store’s pasta aisle (most likely, that’s where I found mine).

UPDATE: We ended up making this tonight! I was watching an extra kiddo today and I knew I wasn’t going to have time to make dinner. So I threw this bag in the crockpot and voila! Instant dinner.

It was AMAZING!

Find out  more about Kraft Recipe Makers here on their website and also be sure you follow Kraft on Facebook!

If you want to learn more details about my shopping trip, check out my album on Google +!

Disclaimer: I am a member of the Collective Bias®  Social Fabric® Community.  This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias and their client.