Turkey and black beans and tomatoes on rice, topped with cheese, for dinner yesterday. It was very good, and I’m going to put the leftovers on nachos for lunch.
Guests tonight- I might have to grocery shop a bit because we’re out of fresh veg and I’d like to have a salad.
Dinner last night was a small package of boneless chicken breast (dated 4/2010!! but it’d been in the back of the freezer and was perfectly safe), with a bottle of teriyaki sauce poured over it (also just a couple months past its sell-by date but still safe), some frozen chopped green pepper that Typo Knig pulled out of the freezer (when I asked him to get a real one at the grocery store), and a can of pineapple chunks, then covered and baked. Served with rice, and it was cheap and filling.
A bit too salty but overall fairly edible, we’ve done things like this in the past with barbecue sauce or teriyaki sauce. I won’t use frozen green peppers again, at least not such old ones; I don’t even remember why we bought the package but the bits looked fairly awful. I’d use a different brand of teriyaki sauce next time though.
We’d actually decided to try to use up old stuff even before this thread, but it’s good to have the inspiration.
I’m taking this as “use up existing stuff, just get what you need to complete the recipe” so with that ham, go out and get a pound of the 15-bean mix and make soup with it. That reminds me, I have the ham we had on New Year’s, and all there is now is the bone with a few bits of meat stuck to it, so I need to get the beans tonight and soupify it.
I think for dinner tonight we’ll have cheese ravioli that’s in the freezer, with pesto cream sauce and salad. Still need to get the things for salad, but that’s okay.
I’m having a hard time deciding between papergirl’s Hash brown casserole suggestion and Mama Zappa’s 7-bean soup. Though since I have a cold I should probably go with the soup.
Any uses (besides the obvious) for those cheapo dinner rolls you can get for next to nothing after a holiday? The kids like them just heated and brushed with butter, but it’s possible that I have…oh, let us say several packages of them.
Not sure what I’m making next…kids will be gone for tonight and the weekend. I’m considering defrosting a steak. Chicken and turkey are getting kind of tiresome. (That doesn’t usually happen–I generally don’t cook red meat at all. But every now and then…)
Oh! My friends gave me a leftover ham shank with a bit of meat still on it, and about 2 quarts of ham broth. I think I’ll put some beans on to soak, and cook/divide/freeze them for later.
I’m baking the easiest yeast bread ever today as well. Good stuff.
Got eggs and milk?
Bread pudding!! Especially if you have something like dried or candied fruit or chocolate chips to toss in. Great as dessert or even as breakfast (bread, eggs, milk, what’s not to love?).
Or, bread pudding’s half-brother, French toast.
We’re doing the same thing. I have a lot of raw vegetables still (just the teensiest bit brown) that I’m using up. A lot of dishes that call for celery and carrots. Tomorrow night with the pork chops I’m going to steam the cauliflower along with some frozen broccoli stems—whenever I get some fresh I hate to throw them out. I think it’ll taste okay with some leftover cheese melted on top.
papergirl, I read in a thread a while back that you can freeze milk. Learned something new.
Jennyrosity I don’t care for the potatoes that have been frozen, either. But if you’ve got a place that’s fairly cool, dry and dark they should last a long time as is. People used to keep them in the “rootcellar” (usually a dry spot in the basement while I was growing up) to last the winter. I love potatoes. This is my take on them from when we used to dig them up:
The Four Kinds of Potatoes
The little ones are “new” potatoes and are great cooked all afternoon in a pot of snap beans. (Green beans.)
The big ones are for baking.
The regular size ones are your everyday potatoes. Use for boiling, slice up to fry etc.
And then there’s tonight’s potatoes. The ones you accidently cut in half with the shovel.
Just check them to make sure none are damp (if they are, just seperate them and let them dry—otherwise they’ll rot the whole bunch.) And then check them every once in a while and first use the ones that look a little shrively or the eyes are sprouting. If you want you could let some of those continue to sprout and cut out the eyes as “seed” potatoes and plant them in the spring.
I probably just told you more about potatoes than you ever wanted to know, but I enjoyed it. 
I felt morning sick, so we ordered pizza, but after I pick up some fresh vegetables it’ll be pesto ravioli tonight, fried rice with turkey tomorrow, risotto with ham or turkey on Sunday.
If you have a lot of freezer-burned chicken, you can at least simmer the holy hell out of it and make stock/broth.
Right. Stocked up on veg. Meatball subs with frozen meatballs and roasted broccoli for dinner.
I have chicken breasts that I thawed in the fridge overnight, had something come up and not be able to cook them the following day (and then Christmas was happening and I wasn’t going to make food for a while), so I re-froze them on the advice of a friend who said that if they were only ever in the fridge, it should be safe to re-freeze them as long as I cook everything to death. Second opinions on the matter, and advice on a recipe I can use to cook the chicken breasts to death?
I would imagine they’d be OK, though I don’t think I’d let 'em thaw and sit around for a day or two this time around.
However long they had before freezing, and all the time after the first freezing, counts toward expiration however. So if they were 3 days away from expiration when you froze them, and you had them in the fridge for 3 days before refreeszing, you do NOT want to waste any time.
You can toss 'em in boiling water, maybe with celery/onion/other seasonings, and boil them up for a while then cut them up for use in casseroles; the water won’t be useful for soup stock since I assume this is boneless and there’s not much flavor to be had.
You can toss them in a baking dish and cover them with some kind of sauce, cover with foil to keep them drying out, and bake for an hour or more You can even start that while they’re frozen, I’d just put the oven on a little lower for the first half hour, then pull the dish out, use a fork to separate the individual pieces, and return to the oven for another hour-ish. Since it’s covered and in sauce, it won’t dry out.
Our favorites for option 2 are barbecue sauce (thinned a little with some apple juice) or teriyaki sauce (also thinned if needed - pineapple juice is good especially if you toss pineapple chunks in as well). Serve with rice and a veg and you’re fed for a day or two.
I might have missed this suggestion, but leftover ham is pretty good in a nice split pea soup.
Ooooh - I have a great turkey pot pie recipe (from Epicurious, look for Turkey Potpie with Cheddar Biscuit Crust). I’d bet that would work well: use the turkey (and/or ham), follow the filling instructions approximately (substituting veg as desired, especially if you have stuff to use up in the freezer).
You could even make up the filling and measure out the topping ingredients into zip-loc bags, put the individual zip-locs all in one large zip-loc, and throw them into the freezer as an almost-ready prepared meal. I do that with strawberries and rhubarb every May - I have one bag with the strawberry/rhubarb/sugar mixture, one with all the dry ingredients, one with the chunk of butter, and if I have the buttermilk on hand, one with that also.
For something like the pot pie, freezing it like that isn’t quite the same as using it up right now, but it turns it into something that’ll make life quite a bit easier in a few months!
Then a few months later, I have a scrumptious dish with just 5 minutes of work (not counting thawing time).
This reminds me… we have at least one such “kit” still in the freezer.
After discovering a pound of great northern beans in the cupboard I decided to use the ham in my old stand-by navy bean soup. (don’t tell anyone I used great northern instead of navy!)
Chop the ham
Chop an onion
Peel and chop several carrots
Bay leaf
Pound of dry navy beans (soak overnight if you have the foresight to do so)
All in the crockpot, fill with water or chicken broth to about 4 inches from the rim. Cover and cook on Low for around 8 hours.
Salt & pepper to taste.
It just hit me today that I have the makings for vegan succotash. Crockpot til mushy sweet peppers, onions, and creole or cajun seasoning. Then add whatever types of beans you have, more onions and peppers, more seasonings if needed, and corn and tomatoes if you like. Sometimes I uses hominy, but I think I’m out. Serve over rice. Good, filling, cheap! I guess you could add meat but I don’t know what kind I’d want–sausage, maybe? I have some brats that are just sitting there looking at me…
Here’s a list of things I’m going to try to use up, after a pantry-cleaning session today. It’s stuff I either bought for a specific recipe and never made, or didn’t need as many as I got, or just plain have too much of.
In no particular order:
Water chestnuts, one can
Jellied cranberry sauce, one can
croutons, seasoned, one bag
Packaged bread crumbs, plain and seasoned
Rice blend (has some other grains as well)
Instant rice
Assorted canned beans
Wheat berries
Rolled oats (a LOT of them)
Raisins, ditto
Spaghetti
Lasagna
Strawberry pie filling
Any creative suggestions? I’m happy to buy additional stuff to fill out recipes, since these are all 'supporting players’vs. something to center a meal around. Some eggs and milk will let me turn some of that rice into pushing and a panettone into french toast, for example.
Strawberry-cranberry crumble, with the oats, strawberries, and cranberry sauce? Sounds like it would be good.
Today is spaghetti, tomorrow will probably be turkey and sour cream on noodles or rice.
This is all great advice. I tend to cook vegetable soups with no potatoes as well, or if I really want potatoes but don’t care about the chunks I’ll thicken with cooked and blended potatoes. I have also frozen mashed potatoes in the past and as long as you include enough fat (butter, cheese, sour cream) they seem to reheat nicely. The other option I use on occasion is to freeze seasoned stock and meat in larger containers and just add vegetables the day before. It does take they “Hey lets nuke this” convenience out of it but the improved taste is worth it.
With cream soups the key is to let them defrost in the fridge before heating. They don’t go from the freezer to the table well.
We’ve been doing pretty well at clearing things out, but I did have to throw away some brussel sprouts 
There was hope for a short period as my husband agreed to try them again but even bacon and mushrooms couldn’t save them for him and I couldn’t make it through the entire bag myself. Ah well, at least asparagus is now on his list of acceptable vegetables.