Tweet ThisWhen you need to put a quick and easy dinner together on a busy weekend, nothing comes to the rescue quicker than frozen foods. Thanks to new and improved technology, food preservation techniques such as flash freezing ensures that frozen vegetables and fruits are just as healthy (if not healthier) as their fresh counterparts. The best part of cooking with frozen foods is that if you stock your freezer with our recommended essentials, you can quickly and easily build a full meal around them in no time at all. All of these suggestions are healthy, reasonably inexpensive and are designed to add some much needed veggies to your daily diet!
Quick Meals: Cooked Beans, Rice, or Grains
When you cook beans, rice, or grains, be sure to make extra and freeze in an airtight container or freezer bag. When you’re in a rush, these meal staples are ready to go! Simply reheat and you have a delicious side dish or the foundation for a full meal. This is a great way to serve something healthy without resorting to instant mixes that contain all sorts of added sodium, preservatives, and artificial ingredients.
Quick Meals: Homemade Broth
Keeping several servings of homemade broth or stock in your freezer means that soups, stews, and pastas can come together in minutes. Making your own stock also allows you to pick the ingredients you want to use and skip the ones you don’t! Whether it’s a low-sodium stock, a vegetarian stock, or a stock made with your holiday turkey leftovers, you’re in control about what goes on the dinner table.
Quick Meals: Breads and Tortillas
It’s a snap to make a quick and easy wrap or sandwich when you have a variety of tortillas and bread in your freezer. You can easily make burritos, quesadillas, or toasted bread for a panzanella salad within minutes – simply warm in the microwave, toast or grill.
Quick Meals: Chili, Soup, and Stews
The next time you’re making a stew, soup, or chili, make extra or freeze the leftovers. You can easily enhance and increase the number of servings by mixing in your favorite pasta, rice, or grain before serving – turning a lunch-time vegetable soup into a hearty dinner course.
Quick Meals: Vegetables
It goes without saying that here at Tommy’s Superfoods, we have plenty of frozen vegetables in our freezer! Individual favorites include broccoli, corn, edamame, green beans, and peas as they can easily be tossed into a soup, fried rice or noodle dish. Our flash frozen vegetable medleys are also easy favorites in that you can quickly heat and eat or use them as an ingredient in a wide variety of recipes (see our recipes page for ideas).
Quick Meals: Protein
It’s also a great idea to have a variety of quick and easy protein stored in your freezer. Whether this is individual servings of chicken, pre-cooked shrimp, sausages, or your favorite plant-based vegetarian substitutes, you can add them to your pasta, soup or stir fry for an extra boost of flavor without additional preparation time.
Ideas for Quick Meals Using Frozen Foods
Chicken, Broccoli, and Edamame Stir Fry
You can easily substitute shrimp or tofu in place of chicken, and while broccoli is a stir-fry staple, you can also use other mixed veggies such as green beans, cauliflower and carrots.
Spinach Tomato Pasta Soup
Use a bag of frozen spinach or frozen mixed greens to give a boost to ordinary tomato soup. Add to a pasta like orzo or rice to make it extra hearty.
“Your Way” Fried Rice
You can easily whip together a “Your Way” fried rice using almost any combination of rice, veggies and protein found in your freezer. Shrimp fried rice with peas? Chicken fried rice with broccoli and carrots? Get creative and get cooking!
Colorful Quinoa
Make quinoa extra special (and extra healthy) by mixing in a bag of frozen vegetables! You can serve this hot as a side dish or chilled as a salad.
Green Mac And Cheese
Put a dose of something green in your leftover macaroni and cheese. Broccoli? Peas? Mixed greens? Adding in a little chicken or vegetarian sausage can easily turn this side dish into a full meal.
Quick Meals? We’ve Got You Covered
At Tommy’s, we believe that frozen vegetables play an important role in following a healthy diet, and that’s why we make the freshest, Non-GMO Project verified vegetable medleys every day. If you’re looking for recipe suggestions, visit our blog to get inspired! There, you’ll find dozens of suggestions for delicious meals and creative ways to use our flash-frozen vegetable blends. Once you try a few, let us know what you think by posting in the comments or sharing with us on social media. Bon appetit!
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