Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Freezer Cooking: Doing What I Can

If you've been reading here any length of time, you know how much I love freezer cooking! There's just not much better than having the freezer full of food ready to eat!

Lately, I haven't been able to block out a day or even a morning or afternoon to devote solely to freezer cooking, although I would like to do that soon. And Saturdays are usually booked.

So instead of doing a freezer cooking session, I do the next best thing--Doing what I can.

If I'm cooking rice, I'll bake two pans instead of one and freeze the extras in 2-cup portions. This makes sense since I'm using the oven anyways; might as well fill it up!

Occasionally, I'll double whatever we're having for supper and freeze half. Although, I do like having leftovers for lunch the next day, too!

A large pot of soup is more than one meal for the two of us, so I'll freeze a quart jar or two for later.

I like to cook extra meat and freeze it for later!

I chop extra celery and keep it in a freezer bag.

I bought a 5 pound block of cheese at Sam's Club a few weeks ago. We prefer buying blocks of cheese and shredding it ourselves for taste and better melting. Pre-shredded cheese almost always has extra additives too that we prefer to avoid. And blocks of cheese are usually less expensive. Anyways, sometimes I'll shred a big block and freeze it all. But I haven't had time for that lately so I've been trying to shred an extra cup or two to freeze in 1 cup portions every time I get some out to shred for a meal.

Doing what I can and doing a little at a time saves me time in the long run!

3 comments:

~katie~ said...

Thanks for these tips Mary Ann! I went on a freezer cooking rampage before the delivery of our third child, and I really haven't been freezing meals much since. I think these tips ~ doing a little here and a little there ~ could really be feasible for me! Going to bookmark this post!

Kaneko said...

Thanks for the tips!
I had a full bag of chopped my fresh garden parsley... (amongst other things of course!)power went off over Christmas and I lost the lot! I was not sure if I could trust that parsley anymore... so annoying!!!

Debbie J said...

Love your freezer cooking methods! These are the things I like to do. I did some weekend freezer cooking last fall and we have used most of it, so I need to start doing some double meals and freeze the second one. I don't want to spend a whole day or morning freezer cooking.