AIP-Friendly Freezer Cooking: Cooking Ahead for the Autoimmune Paleo Diet (2024)

An AIP-Friendly Freezer Cooking Plan

In the last couple months, I’ve transitioned to an Autoimmune Paleo (AIP) diet. I feel a lot better, but it’s a pain in the neck. There is so much that’s forbidden on this diet…and what makes it hardest for me is that almost all of the sauces and seasonings I would typically use are off-limits. So when I most need food — it’s hardest to get it!

I’ve finally managed to pull together nine meals’ worth of freezable options that are AIP-friendly — and not all nearly identical. There are several benefits to this plan:

• All of these are freezer-to-crockpot (or, sometimes, optionally the oven) meals that don’t require anything but assembly up front. That means that for those of us struggling with energy, we can get nine meals ready with a minimum of physical effort.
• It’s a whole plan! That means for those who have people who are willing to help, but don’t know how, you could hand this off and someone else could prepare the meals for you.
• These are all pretty “normal” foods, so they’ll work for feeding the whole family (even if the family isn’t AIP), for sharing with company, or for delivering to a friend who has had a baby or surgery, is ill, etc.

If you want to really bless a chronically ill friend, make up all these meals and stock her freezer! You just might make her month. (Check for any unusual food allergies first, but this should definitely cover most of them. The AIP diet is inherently free of all the major allergens.)

If you want a whole month’s worth of meals, you could triple these, but I recommend not tripling anything you haven’t tried once yet. You’d hate to triple something and then find out you hate it. 😉

200 Gallon Size 10-9/16×11Crock-Pot SCV700SS 7-Quart Oval Manual Slow Cooker, Stainless SteelSharpie Permanent Marker, Fine Point, Black, Pack of 3

What I Did

I gathered the recipes I’ll list in a moment and made them up over the weekend. We have not eaten these yet. I’ll check in again when we have, but I wanted to go ahead and share now because if you’re stuck struggling to figure out what to eat, you might not want to wait a month! The one I’m least confident of is the chicken stew. I completely replaced the seasoning, so I’m not 100% sure the seasonings will be good/enough. If you try it (or any of these) please come back and leave us a comment and let us know what you thought! [Update: We have since eaten all of these, most of them multiple times. One or two are not family favorites, although all were fine — just some more to our personal preferences than others — and most of them have been pretty popular. The stew was actually a favorite, overall, although my family isn’t crazy about the parsnips so they prefer I just leave them out.]

The recipes I found to use/adapt were:

• Lemon-Garlic Dump Chicken (omit pepper)
• Lemon Marinade Dump Chicken
• Teriyaki Dump Chicken (sub coconut aminos for the soy sauce & coconut sugar for brown sugar — is wine okay?)
  (All of the above came from here, but I can’t figure out where they truly originated. The page she links to is no longer there, but all the same recipes are at about a zillion different websites, so I’m not sure who copied whom.)
• Greek-Inspired Slow Cooker Chicken (omit pepper)
• Rustic Chicken Slow Cooker Stew (sub arrowroot for cornstarch, and coconut milk for milk; parsnips or turnips for potatoes – can freeze; sub seasoned salt & elim. pepper)
• Slow Cooker Beef & Broccoli (sub coconut aminos & sugar for the soy sauce & brown sugar)
• Slow Cooker Hot Roast Beef Sandwich (This will not be the same: omit gravy, pepperoncinis, and black pepper. Serve others’ on bread w/ cheese, and mine on bed of lettuce or over cooked root veggies.)
• Balsamic Glazed Drumsticks (sub coconut aminos for tamari/soy sauce)
• Braised Crockpot Balsamic Steak (sub coconut aminos for worc. sauce; also, skip the pasta & sauce)

A Few Notes

I made the adaptations shown above, which are necessary to making the recipes AIP-legal. However, I also made a few other substitutions, either because I didn’t have/couldn’t find something, or to make the recipes a little more consistent since I was making them all together. The PDF I’ll share in a moment includes the updated recipes.

A few of these contain honey or coconut/palm sugar. If you’re super-strict or FODMAP, you’ll need to use your judgment on these. Both of these sweeteners are considered acceptable for the Autoimmune Paleo diet in general, though, on occasion. Since they’re small amounts used as just a part of the overall flavoring of whole recipes here, I think they should be fine for most of us.

I made all of the recipes shown here with just one bottle of coconut aminos. If you’re doubling or tripling, you’ll want more.

The plan includes an option for additional chicken and ground beef that’s cooked and prepped for the freezer, just to have on hand. I did this at the same time as I prepared the meals, because the rest of my family needs them for the rest of the month’s meals. If you don’t need them, just skip them. (They’re clearly marked.)

Each recipe should comfortably serve 4-6.

The Process

Of course, you’ll first want to shop (or have someone else shop for you). Then I like to take things one type of meat at a time. You can either prep your veggies all ahead of time (I’ve separated that part in the printable instructions in case you want to do that), or you can prep them as you get to the recipes that need them. (There’s not that much veggie prep.)

For each one, you’ll want to label your freezer bags, then line them up on your workspace. Fold the top down. (If you fold it down really well, you won’t have to worry much about getting raw meat yuckies anywhere, because you can hold onto the top of the bag and still be holding the inside.) And kind of “flatten out” the bottom of the bag. You should be able to get them to stand up.

Then divvy the meat up among the bags as appropriate. (I love doing it this way because then all the icky raw meat mess is confined to the one day. I can wash up really well after this “divvying up” step each time and then take out the trash and all the yuckiness is out of the kitchen!)

Add the remaining ingredients to the bags.

Then seal the bags up really well and shake them around to mix everything. (If you prefer, you could put all the liquid/seasoning ingredients in a bowl and mix them up, then pour them over the meat — and veggies, where appropriate — but I like doing it this way because it doesn’t dirty any extra dishes.)

Lay them more-or-less flat to freeze. Because I don’t have a flat space available in my freezer right now, I stacked mine on a baking sheet. Once the meals are frozen solid I can remove the baking sheet, and the bags will be able to either lie flat or stand up on end in the freezer.

Then move on to the next meat type and repeat the process. Except for the part where I had to do half my grocery shopping mid-process (didn’t plan far enough in advance), this only took a couple of hours, and that includes browning and bagging 5 lbs. of ground beef and cooking an extra 6 lbs. of chicken breasts to cut up and freeze.

The Plan

Get a downloadable PDF of the whole plan.

[mailmunch-form id=”757861″]

(If you notice any goofs, please let me know!) It includes the adapted/updated recipes, a shopping list, and prep instructions. I suggest labeling each bag with not only the name of the recipe and the date, but also the cooking instructions so you don’t have to pull the recipes back out on cooking day. You may need additional items for serving alongside some of these. For instance, many are meat dishes that don’t include veggies, so extra vegetables to steam may be necessary at serving time.

And if you need a different picture to Pin/share, here are a few more options:

Get the downloadable cooking plan as PDF.