The last few weeks my husband and I have been dabbling in make-ahead wrapped foods.  I bought a pack of burrito tortillas at the local warehouse club and threw caution to the wind.  I got out my Instant Pot and cooked up some chicken breasts in barbecue sauce.  I shredded the chicken then wrapped it up in the tortillas with some cheese.  It made 9 wraps that I wrapped individually in aluminum foil and put in the freezer.  A week later I took four of them on a camping trip, heated them up on our grill (still wrapped in the foil) and had a really easy (delicious) meal!

My husband decided to tackle the rest of the tortillas last Friday and make some burritos.  He’s a better cook than I am so he made his own refried beans, rice, and seasoned ground chicken to stuff them with (along with cheese, of course!).  Amazingly, what he prepared used exactly the remaining 7 tortillas from the jumbo pack I bought.  And then we had even more already prepared food that just needed to be heated up.

Now here is where my ultimate frugal side comes into play.  This weekend we went to a pair of drive-in concerts and stayed in a hotel (because I had enough hotel reward points for a free room).  And we didn’t want to eat in restaurants because of the pandemic.  But we had burritos and chicken wraps ready to go.  So one of the things I packed for the weekend was my slow cooker.  I know…who takes their slow cooker on a hotel vacation?!?!  I do.  It’s perfect for heating up those foil wrapped burritos and chicken wraps and toasting up the tortilla a little bit in the process.  We saved the cost of eating out.  We ate food that wasn’t fried.  We didn’t have to risk Covid to eat in a restaurant.  It was the perfect choice for us at this particular time in life.

Sometimes you stumble into a good idea that’s worth keeping around.  I’ve never taken my slow cooker on a hotel outing before.  But I probably will again someday.  And I’ve never made wraps or burritos just to put in the freezer for the future.  But I likely will again…very soon!  It’s terribly convenient on those days when you don’t want to cook to just reach into the freezer and have something home cooked that just needs to be heated.  Times are weird right now…but weird times can teach us things that are useful going forward!