Crock pot freezer meals

[Jenne29]

Looking for ideas to make crock pot freezer meals during my whole30 experience. Are there any foods that I would NOT want to freeze before cooking? Any ideas or recipes would be greatly appreciated!

[ladyshanny]

I don't personally find that potatoes come out very nice after freezing. Coconut milk tends to separate in a weird way after freezing also.

[Jihanna]

Potatoes need to be prepped a bit before they'll freeze well.
https://pickyourown.org/freezing_potatoes.htm <- this article gives a good simple run-down on how to do it. There are other methods (like 5 minute soak in a bunch of water with a little lemon juice, then rinse and boil 5 minutes, then rinse/cool and freeze), but simple is quite often better in terms of trying to keep up with prep-work... especially if the potatoes are within a dish, rather than standing alone (I'll usually do the soak-rinse-boil method if I'm freezing them to make quick-cook potatoes for breakfast frying, for example, but I go with the simpler method if I'm freezing a bag of stew ingredients that will get tossed together in a crock).

I only tried canned veggies in freezer meals a couple of times, but found that fresh or frozen veggies always fared better except in the case of things like diced/crushed tomatoes (the canned version of those never left me feeling that something was lacking).

For anything requiring "added liquid", I always made a note on the bag to add it at cook time. That would be anything like "add 4 cups water" or broth, or even the coconut milk (or whatever). It not only helps prevent strange separation issues like @ladyshanny noted, but it also keeps the actual bags a little smaller so I'm able to fit more in my freezer space. I tend to keep that kind of stuff on hand all the time, too, so it's very unlikely that I'd be out of it when cook time arrived (so I don't usually put stickies on those things).

I could add other notes for things like beans, rice, noodles..... but those shouldn't be in there right now, anyway, so I'll skip it!