Please note: MyFreezEasy gave us a free MyFreezEasy.com Freezer Meal Plan Membership for the purposes of this review. I told them all about our situation and how brutally honest I would have to be, but they gave it to us anyway. They’re either super brave, or they’re super confident about their subscription. Specifically, we are using the Premium Annual Membership. Also, this contains affiliate links (see my note at the bottom about becoming an affiliate after I reviewed the product and loved it).
If you’re a totally normal person, you might prefer to watch the video on the bottom of the FAQ Page or read what other reviewers have to say by clicking on this banner:
First, a brief description:
MyFreezEasy is a menu planning subscription service that offers meal plans designed to be frozen for later.
Was that brief enough for you?
Now, some details:
There are a variety of different meal plan options, as you can see on this self-explanatory graphic below…which I will not explain:
The premium plan allows you to swap out meals, essentially building your own plan according to your needs. Of course, if you’re like me, and you subscribe to a meal plan because you don’t want to have to build your own plan, the many options above encompass quite a few needs and preferences. And the meal plans themselves offer gluten-free and dairy-free options to further meet your needs.
There are also a number of printables…like these:
- printable labels with directions on how to prep those beauties you just tucked into your freezer.
- shopping lists arranged per recipe and per store section.
- instructions for freezing the meal
- instructions for making the meal right away (so you can make one and freeze one–you do need to eat on freezer cooking day after all)
- prep instructions
- assembly instructions by the recipe or everything at once
There is also a video for each of the meal plans.
Time for our limitations:
We have the following issues which make using a meal plan made by anybody but us difficult at best:
- We have a daughter with Crohn’s disease who is on a restricted diet, and no, that doesn’t just mean dairy-free or gluten-free, and no you don’t know what we’re going through just because you’re lactose intolerance or your cat has ulcerative colitis. (Did I just sound off? Sorry.)
- We are a family of 10. We eat more food than a family of four. You’re welcome for sharing that obviousness.
- We live in a travel trailer and have roughly 250 square feet.
- We cook with a single burner and have limited use of ovens and other modern conveniences.
- We live on a music missionary’s salary. (Just so you know, music missionaries don’t get a salary–we live off the donations of those who listen to our music and CD purchases.)
- Our freezer isn’t much taller than my head.
- We don’t really have good printer access.
- We don’t have good internet access.
- We have an eratic schedule and time constraints.
Want to know how MyFreezeEasy meals measured up?
Let’s tackle each issue one by one.
1. Restricted diet.
See that Clean Eating Plan? We used it. In September, it was great! Hannah can’t eat potatoes, so I cooked those separately, but otherwise we could all eat every meal exactly as written. Those of you who have to cook a variety of foods for a variety of conditions are in tears of joy with me right now, aren’t you?
In October, I was super excited to check out the Clean Eating plan, but alas, the spinach burgers had bread crumbs in–two cups! That ain’t clean eatin’ in our book, so I had to swap that out. Another recipe used taco seasoning and yet another used vinaigrette dressing. Because I don’t have any of those things on hand and can’t easily find them, I have to look up another recipe or (as I do) make something up. I was bummed to have to resort to that again.
That said, it wasn’t a huge deal, since I’m used to it. I still would have so much preferred they used real, clean ingredients instead of blends and bottles. With the premium membership, of course, you can swap out, but I don’t want to do that. I want to open, shop, prep, and cook. Probably not an issue for most of you. So, five stars in September, four in October.
2. Lots of mouths to feed.
The plans are adjustable. Feed as many or as few people as you want. I used the plans as written for four people and simply fed both bags of food to my hordes, with a few extra veggies, taters, or meat pieces.
3. Space.
Prepping really didn’t take up that much space. I had my chopper set up at the table and I worked at the counter in my “red zone.” (My red zone is where I work with raw meat. I set out a red cutting board and everyone knows the cooties will be flying in that space. All raw meat action happens on that cutting board. When I’m finished, I disinfect whatever I used.) It worked great.
What kind of chopper do I use, you ask? This kind:
An eight-year-old with a good knife and an even better attitude. Works for me! If you have a power chopper, it’s probably faster, but less fun.
4. Limited cooking appliances.
We did not cook all the meals exactly as we were instructed. If you’ve been living like us, however, and someone says roast this or grill that or bury this in the ground and unearth it three months later, you are accustomed to adapting. We popped things in the pressure cooker instead of a crock pot or oven and threw everything else in a pot o nthe burner. It worked.
Would it have been better roasted, for example, probably. Was it bad not roasted? Not at all.
5. Budget.
Here’s where the rubber meets the road and why I have never before told you guys to follow an already prescribed meal plan instead of making your own. I buy food that’s on sale and build my menu according to sales and what I already have on hand. Buying the food for the September meal plan was more expensive than my approach. Fact. For October, however, I switched things up a little and substituted meats and other ingredients based on sales. So, whereas the menu called for ground chicken, I found a good deal on ground beef, and whereas another recipe called for chicken breasts, I found manager’s special beef steaks for less. So, I swapped out.
Plus, MyFreezEasy offers three plans based on whatever’s on sale–the chicken, beef, and pork plans. That right there is going to save you a lot of money, since you probably have many or most of the other ingredients in your pantry already–there’s nothing out of the ordinary on these plans, no squid eyeball ink.
6. Freezer space.
I told you my freezer isn’t much taller than my head. See:
Okay, so that picture is from the outside of the freezer. The inside is much, much smaller. I didn’t show you the inside, because I’m embarrassed by the sheer quantity of frozen chocolate in there. Mmmmm…chocolate. (As an aside, this is Hannah’s homemade chocolate–so good! No sugar. Yum!) It also contains frozen veggies and fruit, which takes up pretty much all the space. So, with the chocolate and produce, there isn’t a ton of room for freezer meals.
That is a problem that’s hard to work around. Fortunately, because we used two bags as one meal instead of two, we were able to store some in the freezer and some in the fridge (why does that word have a “d” in it?). We ate the fridge meals first.
Also, lucky us, our refrigerator freezes things during some times of the year, so, like lettuce becomes frozen lettuce sludge in twelve hours. That comes in handy when storing freezer meals in the fridge.
Finally, the meals in the bags take up less space than the ingredients in their separate packaging. If you get on the stick and prep the meals right away, you don’t need room to store all that meat, and that provides more room in the fridge and freezer.
7. Printer
We didn’t print. It still worked fine. Between my Sharpie marker and my sharp memory, it was just fine. (I don’t have a sharp memory. That was a leeeeetle joke. A very leeeetle joke.)
8. Internet access.
Again, this is as sketchy as my memory, so watching the videos was not always possible. Who cares! I did it without the videos. No problem!
9. Time
We are busy. We never know when we’ll be called on to be somewhere that isn’t “home” and how long arriving at our next destination will really take, since Google doesn’t know everything. Still, it took only an hour to bag these meals, and a few minutes to throw them in the pots. No biggie!
Having the shopping list ready made shopping a breeze.
Now the big question:
How was the food?
If you’re not already cooking for your family, they are going to be blown away. If you are, you might find a few meals that will be bumped into family favorites or a regular rotation–it really depends on the family preferences and the meals.
My family enjoyed all the meals (even the lentil stew I accidentally made with unlabeled split-peas, since neither my marker nor my mind were on duty the day I repackaged those). Okay, so my hubby doesn’t eat lentils, but the rest of us were good! There is one from the first month that I will be making again, and we haven’t eaten the second month’s stash yet.
My one gripe:
As you know, my one gripe is the three processed ingredients in the Clean Eating plan. If you have a source for safe processed ingredients, you’re good, but in my experience those are more expensive, so we make them ourselves. Having the single ingredients listed instead of, say, vinaigrette or taco seasoning, would make this gripe vanish like Hannah’s chocolate!
Still, five stars!
You know something–this link right here is an affiliate link to join MyFreezEasy. You know something else–I didn’t hunt down an affiliate link until after I had published this post. In other words, I like it, I want to promote it, so I found an affiliate link for it, not the other way around where people promote it whether they like it or not.
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