Consider the following questions:

• Would you like to simplify your life?

• Does dinnertime have you stressed because you never know what to cook?

• Would you like to find a way to save money on groceries?

• Do you never seem to have enough hours in the day?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then freezer cooking is for you. By using the recipes in this cookbook to prepare freezer meals, you and your family benefit in numerous, sometimes surprising, ways.

Spend Less Time in the Kitchen

People lead busy lives, and therefore time is a precious commodity. By investing a small amount of time in freezer cooking, you reap great benefits. For example, it takes just as much time to make three batches of spaghetti sauce as does to make one. By simply tripling your recipe, you save cooking time for future dinners. Think of freezer cooking as banking time.

Since you (theoretically) have more time on the weekends, you can spend time making freezer meals. Then, when busy weeknights roll around and you are short on time, you're able to pull a meal out of the freezer and provide your family with a meal in minutes. You have just withdrawn time from that investment you made over the weekend.

Saves Money

When faced with a busy day and little or no time to prepare dinner, the fastest solution is to eat out. This might mean ordering pizza, swinging through a fast food drive-thru, or dinner in a restaurant. Regardless of how you eat out, every option available is more expensive than fixing a home-cooked meal.

A middle-of-the-road approach is to purchase convenience food at the grocery store. This might be pre-cooked and packaged food, or full meals from the deli. While this solution isn't as expensive as eating out, it is still more expensive than cooking at home.

The best solution is to heat up a prepared meal from your freezer. By planning ahead, you'll save a lot of money by not eating out because you have no other options.

Simplifies Dinnertime and Helps Alleviate Stress

Imagine this scenario: it is late afternoon, you've had a busy day, and all you want to do is sit on the couch, take your shoes off, and lose yourself in a good book. But that can't happen because you forgot to take meat out of the freezer to defrost. If only you had a frozen meal already prepared, you could pop it into the oven.

Then you remember last week when you doubled your lasagna recipe and froze half. Because lasagna is a freezer-to-oven meal, you don't have to defrost it first. With renewed energy, you put the frozen casserole in the oven. Dinner has been taken care of and you can now enjoy your book!

Brings Families Together

When you practice freezer cooking, you give yourself the opportunity to serve a home-cooked dinner to your family each night. Nightly family gatherings at the dinner table become a time for family members to talk about their day. Family members feel comfortable sharing with one another when they are able to have regular conversations. This may be the only time during the day everyone is together.

Meal Planning Made Easy

What's for dinner? Chances are you've heard those words a few times in your life because just about everyone likes to know what's for dinner. Including you! Freezer cooking makes meal planning a breeze.

The easiest way to plan your meals is to print off a monthly calendar. Next, make a list of the meals in your freezer. Assign a meal to each day and write it on the calendar. Hang your calendar on the refrigerator so that every-one knows, at a glance, what is for dinner each night.

Planning your meals in advance offers another benefit. Because many of the freezer meals need to be defrosted before cooking, you know what to remove from the freezer and put into the refrigerator so the meal will have a full 24 hours to defrost in the refrigerator.