Are you a vegan who is feeling left out of the freezer meal prep trend? Then you’re the main audience of The Make Ahead Vegan Cookbook: 125 Freezer-Friendly Recipes.
Many freezer meal recipes rely on lots of meat and dairy to hold up well in the freezer and cook into something delicious in the crockpot or slow cooker, but this freezer meal cookbook shows that there are ways to make healthy, delicious food that still fits a vegan diet.
Our take? There are a lot of great tips in this book to get you started with freezer meal prep, along with some ideas for freezing as many things as possible, from individual ingredients to party appetizers.
If you really want to focus on flexible, vegan-friendly meals, we recommend trying out the free class on vegan freezer meals at Freezer Fit. Once you see how easy it is to prepare the ingredients for several meals at once – rather than simply freezing leftovers – you’ll always have a healthy, fresh, vegan-friendly meal on hand.
Who Is This Freezer Meal Cookbook For?
Clearly, this book is written for vegans or those who cook for vegans. Vegan is usually defined as someone who doesn’t eat any products coming from animals – so that means eggs and dairy along with meat.
More specifically, this book is full of freezer meal recipes and freezer meal prep ideas for the relative beginner vegan cook. It relies on some prepackaged ingredients – like wonton wrappers or vegan ground “meat” – along with from-scratch preparation. So it’s a good place to start if you’re new to the world of vegan cooking and want some shortcuts included in the freezer meal recipes.
This cookbook has some good information for people who just want to learn how to freeze vegetables for the freezer safely. This is great for anyone who wants to take advantage of cheaper seasonal produce sales, not just vegans.
This is also a cookbook that mostly uses the big batch cooking method. While freezing instructions are given for each recipe, all the cooking is designed to be done at once, and then the leftovers are frozen to thaw and eat at a later time.
Who Is This Cookbook NOT For?
If you’re primarily looking for a solution to dinner, along with a lot of freezer meal recipes for main dishes or one-pot meals, this probably won’t help you that much – though there are a few solid options for dinner recipes.
Many of the recipes in the cookbook are for appetizers and desserts. While these are great options if you’re throwing a party and want to include some vegan options, it’s not going to provide you week’s worth of meals ahead of time.
This is also not for people who want to use exclusively whole foods or “from scratch” cooking methods. As noted above, the recipes assume you’re okay with purchasing some processed vegan ingredients to use.
The Make Ahead Vegan Cookbook in a Nutshell
This book is full of freezer meal prep ideas. It starts with the basics of freezer meal prep and freezing safety, and includes helpful charts on how long different items can be frozen, along with freezer meal prep containers and labeling ideas. It also gives freezer meal tips for preparing and freezing individual ingredients to use later – everything from berries to vegetables.
The freezer meal prep recipes in this book are a mixture of appetizers, desserts, and some main dishes and sides. Each recipe comes with instructions on how to freeze and thaw properly and how long it can last in the freezer.
The recipes in here are classified as “vegan comfort food.” Most of the dishes will seem pretty familiar to most palettes – like mini egg rolls or green bean casserole. They’re just made to suit a vegan diet. That makes it more approachable than many vegan cookbooks, which tend to have more exotic, hard-to-find ingredients.
Our Verdict: The Make Ahead Vegan Cookbook Review
This is a good beginner freezer meal prep cookbook with vegan cooks in mind. The recipes are fairly simple, with some prepackaged ingredients to get you started.
If you’re looking for a wider variety of naturally vegan dinner recipes, or a meal prep approach that lets you plan for multiple dinners at once, we recommend that vegans who want to save money go in for a FreezerFit subscription. For just $97, you get lifetime access to literally hundreds of recipes, along with an extensive library of cooking tutorials and freezer cooking tips.
If you want to see what FreezerFit has up its sleeve specifically for vegans, check it out here.
