I stupidly put a 3 lb pack of frozen boneless chicken breasts into the freezer without separating them out and freezing them separately.
I’ve got an excellent chicken and rice casserole recipe that I can use to cook the chicken breasts with. However, I’d probably end up making about 5-6 generous servings and there is no way I could eat all of this in a couple of days. I live alone so I’m cooking for just me.
Is it safe to freeze the casserole in plastic serving size containers after I’ve made it? I really do not want to get food poisoning.
If it’s poisonous to refreeze meat cooked in a recipe, I should have been dead decades ago. Thaw your chicken in the fridge as you would normally do, then freeze your portions after the casserole has cooled a bit.
This is the way I make my lunches for the week all of the time. I cook large portions of two or three different recipes on the weekend, and then freeze individual portions. I like the little gladware containers. They’re cheap and freeze and microwave well.
It’s fine as long as you observe proper thawing/freezing guidelines. What repeated thaw/freeze cycles do, besides give bacteria the opportunity to resume growth (like on any raw meat), is to degrade the texture of the meat somewhat. This is due to ice crystals forming in the cells of the meat and rupturing cell walls. Since you’re chopping it up in casseroles, this is less crucial than if you were serving chicken breasts whole.
Every Sunday night I take meat out of the freezer. Monday morning, when it’s thawed, I cook stuff for the week - meatloaf, or meatballs, pot roast, hamburgers, even sausage, hot dogs, slices of ham and bacon. I cook rice and make mashed potato patties, English muffin pizzas, or sliced chicken and gravy. I spend half the day cooking meals for the week, and when the food is cooled, it goes into little containers or baggies and then frozen, to be brought forth upon demand and nuked. (Why? Because I don’t want to have to cook an entree every evening, anywhere between 6 and 9. People here either are or aren’t hungry when they get home so no use cooking a big meal and insisting they sit down and eat at 7 on the dot.) So far we are alive and well after 27 years of this. The food gets eaten up during the week, it doesn’t stay in there getting freezer burned for months on end.
I personally find that freezer burn can actually make leftovers better. Microwaved stuff always seems to retain more moisture than other cooking methods. In fact, I once found that freezer burnt hamburgers taste better coming from the microwave.