My Favorite Way to Save Money & Time

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This post was sponsored by the FoodSaver® Brand through their partnership with POPSUGAR Select. While I was compensated to write a post about the FoodSaver® Vacuum Sealer System, all opinions are my own.

I don’t know about y’all, but one thing I really enjoy is a great infomercial. Really truly, I love them and have been known to skip regularly scheduled programming in favor of watching infomercials for products that I find fascinating. I tell you this because one of those products that I’ve watched again and again is the commercial for the FoodSaver® Vacuum Sealing System. I have been fascinated by how it works, and have thought time and again that YES! it really can/could save me money!

As a busy mom on a budget, eating well and keeping my family satiated can be hard. REALLY HARD. Much of it is meal planning, which I love because planning makes me feel like I’m on top of my game. The execution though? This is where the problem lies. There is not always a consistent time where I can sit down and prep food for the week, and when there is I either don’t have the equipment (i.e. my plastic containers are all used or dirty) or I don’t have food that saves well (I’m looking at you, avocados…). I’ll either end up throwing food away, straying from the budgeted meal plan, or hurriedly prepping dinner with the baby on my hip and shouting out letters and numbers for my preschooler to learn.

Chaotic, right?
But then something cool happened – I finally got my FoodSaver® Vacuum Sealing System and life turned around a little bit. While it didn’t solve my time problems, it has allowed me to prep food for days in advance when I do have the time to do so. I’m able to save money by buying in bulk and by saving the foods that tend to go bad very quickly.

Here are some of my favorite ways to use the FoodSaver® Vacuum Sealing System:

I love making slow cooker dump meals, where you assemble everything in a bag and then just dump the food into the slow cooker to cook. Great for busy weeks!
Chopping veggies for roasting. This is something that works great for eating well even on busy days. I can toss some chicken on the grill and have veggies roasting for dinner in 20 minutes flat!
Buying bulk and then saving the excess. I buy chicken breasts in bulk, trim them, and then freeze the extras in smaller bags so that I can just pull a couple out to thaw when we have chicken.
The same trick works great for ground meats too!
I use the heat sealing option to keep chips and cereal fresh in their bags.
Another bulk suggestion: cheese! Really anything that’s not a soft cheese works great.
Marinating meat is super easy when you can just pour the marinade in and then heat seal the bag shut. No spills = happy Heather.
I love making bags of different sizes – it helps that I can truly make a package for anything I’m cooking.
The space saving is great too! I love that I can chop veggies and store them all in half the space that I used before. As a food blogger it is helpful to have an organized fridge!

And you guys? These are all just things I’ve done in the past couple of weeks. I can’t wait to keep trying new things to rock my FoodSaver® System and see it work for us more. It really is amazing how much one machine can do, how much fun it is to actually prep food now, and how much easier it can make that end-of-the-day witching hour with two little ones. No more trying to cook while everyone is screaming – nope, that’s a thing of the past!