May cooking day

     Hello again everyone. If you are still reading this blog, THANK YOU! I hope you are getting some good tips and ideas to get you going making freezer meals for your family. I am addicted to this now, because most days it takes me less than 10 minutes to get dinner going for the day! How great is that? Also when I have surgery in July, I will have at least 6 weeks worth of food in my freezer, ready to go, since I won't be able to cook for a while. That peace of mind is the best part!

DISCLAIMER: I try my best to make healthy meals for my family. We are meat and potatoes people, so you will see a lot of that in this blog. I am not a fan a frozen vegetables, so most of the meals are just the entree for the meal. Usually I pair the meals with a salad, steamed veggie, or (my favorite) I roast broccoli, asparagus or green beans in the oven with salt, garlic, and olive oil. Cooking the veggies separate, gives a fresh element to the dishes, where I think putting them in the crock pot or casserole can make them all taste the same and lose their texture. I also use a good amount of the "cream of chemical" soups. Hubby and I both grew up with them, and he really likes them. You can, of course, make your own to use in the recipes. I just haven't gotten that ambitious yet. 

Step 1: Prepare your area.

I like to do this before shopping. Clean the kitchen, make sure the sink and dishwasher are empty. Most importantly, make sure you have plenty of space in your fridge for the groceries, and your freezer for the finished product. I like to freeze the meals in my upright freezer (attached to the fridge), then move it all to the chest freezer for more permanent storage. The air circulates better in my regular freezer so the food freezes faster. The faster it freezes, the less freezer burn you will get.

Step 2: Planning

I have a little binder I am using to plan out my shopping and cooking. I want to make the most of my limited budget, so I am very careful about planning it all out. If not, it is too easy to go crazy and spend a fortune! 


Planning tips: 

• Shop your pantry first. What I mean by that is, look through everything you have and try to plan your recipes around what you already have in the house.

• Only cook meals with proteins that are on sale. My biggest expense in groceries is the meat department. When doing once a month cooking, you will use large amounts of meat and it adds up FAST. I browse all my local ads, clip coupons, and ad-match, to get the best deals possible on all the items I will be using to cook.  For example, if tomato sauce is on a really good sale, I'll make several bags of spaghetti sauce, and a few casseroles, or soups that use it.

• LISTS! I am a list maker in general. I couldn't survive without my lists. In this case though, you will need to make thorough lists if you want it to go smoothly and quickly. First make a master list of the meals you will be making. You will go back to this often.

•  I make a list of foods that I will be using (whether I need to buy them or have them on hand). Then I go through my recipes and make hash marks for how many of that item I need. Say I have 5 recipes that use onions, I mark how many onions for each recipe, so I know how many I need total. I then go through the pantry/fridge again and take off however many of each thing I already have.

• Next I list every single thing I will do on cooking day in the order I would like to accomplish it. It makes the most sense to me, to chop all the onions together then separate into bags, then all the peppers, brown all the ground beef together, etc. 

• Label all your bags in the planning stage. I like to use sharpie, but you can use tape, or labels if you like. This will save you a ton of time on cooking day. Write the thawing/cooking instructions on each bag. Trust me, if you think you will remember 2 months from now when you cook the meal, you won't. This is also helpful if family members will be cooking the meal, or if you give a meal away to a friend after having a baby, surgery, or emergency. Freezer meals make great gifts, because people can cook them whenever they are needed, instead of eating them right away.

Step 3: Shopping

This step should be quick and easy if you have planned well. I use a grocery list app on my phone that organizes all my items in order of isles the items are located in. If you aren't using something like this, just make sure you group the items on your list, so you aren't running all over the store.

 I usually shop 2-3 stores to get all the deals I can. Walmart and Target do ad-match so I always use that to my advantage. Saves a lot of time and money. 

Shopping tip: Buy all your meats in bulk whenever possible. The savings are huge. You can portion things out and freeze whatever you don't need for your next cooking session. I bought a 40 lb. box of chicken last month for $1.59lb. Usually it goes on sale in the small packages for around $2.99lb. There was some trimming and prep work involved, but so worth the savings. 

This last round was beef and pork chops. I bought a huge pack of pork chops for $1 less a pound than the ones in the smaller packages. The beef all came from one giant roast, instead of buying fajita slices, stew meat, etc. Those individual packages were anywhere from $3.99 lb-$6.99lb. I bought my giant roast for $2.79lb. Again HUGE savings.

 If you are cooking your meats in the crock pot, you will never notice the difference using a cheaper cut of meat. 

Step 4: Cooking! The fun part....

First, make sure you have everything you need. 

I suggest:

• A big stock pot for boiling large amounts of food. (blanching potatoes and boiling for mashed potatoes)
• 1-2 sets of measuring cups and spoons
• a variety of sizes of mixing bowls, and at least 1 really large one. (usually I try to mix everything I can in the bags, so I don't have to dirty bowls, but you will need bowls to hold prepped ingredients.
• a cutting board for meats and one for veggies. (ALWAYS wash your cutting board well between meats)
• plenty of kitchen towels, and 1 large towel for drying blanched potatoes. 
• a variety of sizes of skillets/pots. For the most part I try to add as many things as possible to the bags uncooked. It preserves the flavor and texture especially of meats. Ground meats are easier to portion if cooked first, and don't lose much quality if pre-cooked.
• MUSIC! Get your ipod, phone or whatever music you want. It will make your cooking day fly by and be a lot more fun!
• An empty sink and dishwasher. A lot of blogs I've read say to save all the cleaning to the end (and possibly have someone else do it ;) ). I disagree. I prefer to clean as I go. Once I get enough dishes to load the dishwasher, I take a break and do it. This way, by the time I am finished, it is clean and ready for the 2nd load. Just makes more sense to me. 

Prep:

Cut all your veggies and set aside. This is best to do first because veggies can sit out at room temp for a while without causing problems.

 I usually brown the ground meats while I am prepping veggies. Once browned it all goes into the fridge or freezer on a large cookie sheet to cool quickly.

Then I do my potatoes. Potatoes are tricky to freeze. If you put regular russet potatoes in the freezer, they will turn black and mushy. Red and Yukon gold potatoes do much better and usually can be frozen without blanching first. I use those when I can, but russet are about 1/2 the price. So I go ahead and blanch them. It takes me about 30-45 min longer on cooking day to do this, but it doesn't bother me. I like knowing they aren't going to turn black. 

I cut them up, blanch in batches for 2-3 min, then submerge in ice water until cooled. I then move them to a towel to dry. They can stay on the towel for hours and never turn brown! It is a nice bonus to blanching them first! If you use red potatoes, and don't blanch them, just put them in a big pot of cold water to keep them from turning brown before you can get them in the freezer. 

Next start with one meat at a time and cut/portion it out. 

See all the meat in their own neat little baggies? Now I add all the ingredients to the bags to finish them up, push all the air out, seal and freeze flat! 

Just a few more tips and I will list the recipes I used. 

I make "kits" with things that can't be mixed while in the freezer. One example is my Olive Garden knock off Zuppa Toscana. Some of the ingredients can't go into the crock pot until the end of cooking. so I put everything in separate bags then all together in one large bag to make a kit. I do the same with my Crock Pot Orange Chicken, since the meat is coated in flour and I don't want it mixing with the sauce, until it goes in the crock pot. 

I am a big fan of using foil casserole dishes. If you don't want to use them, you can freeze your casserole in a plastic wrap and foil lined dish. Once frozen pop it out of the dish. Wrap well, then stack in the freezer. Then you can put it back in the dish to thaw and bake. I think it is worth the $ .50 for a foil pan to just freeze, then throw away. Easy clean up! 

I put my food in the pan, cover with plastic wrap (pushing as much air out as possible), then cover with foil. It is easier to label your foil tops before putting them on the pan. If you are ambitious you can do this on your planning day as well, while you are labeling the bags.

If you have read this far, and are still interested, stay tuned! My next post will have a list of what I made along with "recipes" for each meal.

 I use the word recipe loosely, because I am not one to follow an exact recipe. I get an idea of ingredients used, and adapt it to what I think will taste good. I hate to measure. 

 I have rambled on and on, like a crazy lady, so leave me a comment or shoot me an email  brandi_webb@hotmail.com  if you have any questions.