Fill Your Freezer {Single Serve Soups}
I am definitely well on my way into setting my freezers (yes, 2 of them) up for fall. This weekend I spent a quick 1.5 hours making a few grab and go lunches, and on Saturday afternoon, a couple friends came over and we stocked up all three of our freezers with ready to go soups. Yes, you can freeze soup in glass mason jars if you follow these steps.
I typically don’t do group meal prepping, but after this experience, I am totally doing it again.
The best thing about a group prep session is that you end up with more variety. Instead of 10 servings of the same 3 soups, you can have 3 servings of 5 types of soups – much better.
To set up for our soup prep day, I set up an ingredient matrix so that we could lay out everything we needed for each recipe. I use this as my grocery list and make a matrix like this anytime I do a big cook. Click here for the printable version – Fill Your Freezer Soups Matrix PDF.
Then, we each tackled parts of the list. In hind sight, I think it is probably easier for one person to do the big shop and then just split the bill.
We decided to have four soups going at once – with 3 people managing all of it! To do this, we set up 3 stations with each person managing that station.
Station 1 – Person 1 at the stove top managing 2 recipes in 2 pots.
Station 2 – Person 2 managing 2 pressure cookers on the countertop.
Station 3 – Person 3 chopping, getting yelled at, and running ingredients to the other 2 stations.
We chose to try this using pressure cookers because doing 4 soups on the stove top at once with multiple people would be a gong show. I was also intrigued by the 4 minute cook times for soups.
NOTE: You do not need a pressure cooker to do any of the recipes we did. You would have to do less soups at a time, and adjust the cook times longer (20-30 minutes per soup).
I will say that I didn’t notice a huge difference in the total start finish time for the stove top vs pressure cooker soups. With all of the liquid and ingredients in the pressure cookers, it took quite a bit of time for them to come to pressure.
The benefit of setting up our cook this way was that we didn’t have all of us at the stove, and we could do 4 recipes at one time.
I am including the 5 recipes from other great food blogs that we cooked and turned out well and taste amazing!
Chorizo, Chicken and Kale Soup
The only change we made here was instead of peeling, seeding and chopping 3 pounds of tomatoes, we used 2 large cans of diced tomatoes (draining the liquid).
Spiced Red Lentil, Tomato, and Kale Soup
Easy Chicken & Sprouted Rice Stew
If you want to grab a couple of friends and do this too:
- Print each recipe using the links in the soup names above.
- Print the Fill Your Freezer Soups Matrix PDF
- Find a couple of friends and get cooking!
So, there you have it, how three girls turned a whole bunch of healthy ingredients into a freezer full of single serve frozen soups.
Hi!! well i just read this and had a great laugh!! lol that is how i imagine my cook would go.. lol
i wanted to know , I have never tired Chirizo Sausage , can you give me a comparison ? and if i wanted to use something else, what would you recommend ?
Thank you so much!!
I am so excited to get cooking!!
Hi Christina! Chorizo is Portuguese so think paprika and chilli aromas.its not a nice spice to it. I can’t really compare it to anything but in recipes you can sub in any sausage and be ok! Have fun cooking!
They look delicious. May I ask where you got the ball freezer cups with the screw on lids? I have a set I bought a while ago and can only find the rubber tops.
I have been looking everywhere.
Hi Sherry, I get mine from Walmart.
Thank you. I checked our local walmart but they only have the rubber lids not the plastic screw on. will try online
I would like to add to the comments about pressure cooker soup vs. stove top. I have done both, and I have been AMAZED at the taste difference with the instapot! The pressure cooking for soup must do something to infuse the vegetables that stove top does not do. I don’t make stovetop soup anymore and it’s because the taste of pressure cooking soup cannot be matched!
Hi, great meal plan. I was wondering where you get the jars with the green lids? Also can you put mason jars in the freezer? Thanks!
Hi Shelby,
I get the lids at Walmart! They are with the canning materials. Yes, you can freeze mason jars. Just make sure you leave headspace to allow it to expand when it freezes, and that the contents are not hot at all.