Freezer Cooking

For quite some time, I have been interested in freezer cooking aka one a month cooking etc.
This is where you stock up on one day, then spend an afternoon in a marathon cooking session preparing meals that you freeze in individual meal portions. Then all you have to do for the next 15 or 30 days (depending on how many you prepared) is take the meal out of the freezer the night before, or that morning and place it in the fridge to thaw. This method has been around a while--I have cookbooks from 10 years ago--and is a time saver for busy families. I have never actually cooked this way, but have really wanted to for a long time. Unfortunately we have never had a freezer to keep all these meals--the fridge freezer is just too small for this amount of frozen foods. I had decided that we were going to get a freezer to put downstairs so I have been considering the options and looking at the prices. I knew that the standard small car sized freezer would be too big for our family of 5 (now 4 since oldest has moved out) and would be an electricity drain if we didn't keep it filled, so I was thinking either the smallest or the next size up would suffice. I did find a 7 cubic foot freezer at Sam's--this looks like the best option. At $190, it won't bust the budget either. Now I have to find a way to get it to the house. Time to hit up friends...If the van was not at the mechanic's, we'd haul it home in that...but alas...

So now I am digging out the freezer cookbooks and fixing single family meal sized portions of recipes to find the ones my family will eat so that we can make larger portions to freeze. I am hoping that having a freezer stocked with meals already prepared, and having a freezer to keep frozen veggies and fruit in large portions, will allow me to "shop big-shop once". Every time I go into a store to pick up "a couple things for dinner tonight", I end up coming out with $100 worth of non related stuff. Hopefully this will help in the budget and consumption department and pay for itself.