I’m living alone, and I like to cook but during week days I don’t have as much time and energy to spend on cooking. I freeze things like pasta sauces and stews (and I’m going to try freezing curry bases) but I’m curious about other things I can try. Drying? Smoking? Salting? Canning? Freezing separately cooked meats and vegetables perhaps? Sometimes you can get a big cuts of meat or large bags of veggies and I just know I won’t be able to eat it fast enough before it spoils.
I’m especially looking for things that can be stored for more than a week and/or used in a variety of dishes, since I prefer not to eat the same thing for days in a row They don’t have to be finished dishes; but preferably shouldn’t take more than 20 - 30 minutes to finish; adding some chopped veggies / meat and boiling (or heating) potatoes/rice/pasta is fine.
Oh, and I don’t have a microwave. Is it worth investing in one?
How do you live without a microwave? Just think of the leftovers! Everyone knows that anything worth making is made best in a huge quantity! (Lasagna, chili, spag sauce.)
I have baggies and I do freeze sauces etc. Heating a full dinner can be hard to do without a microwave, but sauces etc can easily be heated in something called a “pan”. And I re-heat my lasagna in the oven, with a splash of water, covered in aluminium foil - though I must admit a microwave would probably be faster and easier.
I let my lasagna get cold in the fridge, then cut it into service-size chunks. I wrap the chunks with really good plastic-wrap, then with foil. Unwrap, zap for a few minutes, voila!
can you freeze scrambled eggs? I grabbed a food saver vacuum packer thing recently and I was thinking about making up some eggs potatoes and whatever else in a big batch and freezing up ready made breakfasts.
and seriously get a microwave.
I dont even own a tv and consider that to be strange (the part where you dont have a microwave that is)
Ice cube trays. I like to make lots of pesto in the fall when I can get fresh basil, and I spoon it into the trays. When frozen I transfer the cubes into freezer bags; you can then remove as much as you need when the recipe calls for it. This can also work for lots of thing prepared in large quantities, such as stock.
Spaghetti sauce. I start from semi-scratch (canned tomatoes, not fresh), and I make four batches at a time, freezing three. This is especially effective when summer humidity comes around and you don’t want a simmering pot on the stove for a few hours.
Yeah, but by the time they thawed, you could have made them up fresh. Or did you mean freezing uncooked scrambled eggs? They can be frozen as well.
I freeze leftover roast meat – beef, pork, and chicken. It can be turned into meat salad for sandwiches (ground up with mayo, pickles, onions) or used in casseroles, or sloppy joes, tacos, burritos.
I’d appreciate hints on freezing soups and stews. Mine are always mushy after reheating. I could can them, but it’s a waste of time and energy to can just one or two quarts.
This is one of those money savings tips that poor people can’t afford. I got a Northern Industrial 0.8 Hp meat grinder for Christmas (this one) . It has made my life exponentially better.
I use it primarily to make high quality sausage for a third of what it would cost in the store, but I also use it to grind whole beef rounds or pork shoulders for recipes. The coarsest grind is perfect for making chili, small enough to cook up without having to wait all day, but large enough to give you recognizable pieces of meat. Chili made with a 50/50 mix of coarsely ground beef and pork is perfect, and I can produce it for much less than quality butcher shop ground meat and even less than that grocery store stuff that’s 25% fat.
I make a breakfast thats a mess, eggs taters, veggies, meat, and spices, all mixed up in a pan and then you can top with salsa or something if you want.
its easy to make eggs but making the mess is more time consuming, with all the chopping and that, plus the potatoes take a long time to cook compared to everything else. that and I have the biggest skillet ever created to cook it all in. (seriously the thing will easily sit on 2 separate burners on one stove)
so thats what I am trying to freeze.
as for soups and stews in the freezer, you usually end up with some mush just due to the freezer which is always going to damage cooked veggies to some extent. my chicken and beef stews are pretty basic and come out perfectly edible after months in the freezer but they arent quite as good as fresh. I did just get a vacuum sealer for food and I havent really had a chance to find out how good it is yet over the long run but for now it seems great.
I do pork shoulder or other cheap pork cuts in the crockpot, shred them, and freeze in individual portions. Sandwiches, tacos, add to mac’n’cheese if the pork was smoked. You can do the same thing with chicken. And ground beef, fried up with some salt and pepper, is another good add-in.
Cheese sauce (white sauce with cheddar or whatever) freezes very well, and it’s a nice thing to throw stuff into (chicken and veg) or top things with (cauliflower, broccoli, baked potatoes). We use it for cheap fondue, and that with some bread and carrot sticks and/or ham and/or roasted peppers makes a good dinner.
I do a large pot of caramelized onions every couple of months, blitz them in the food processor, and freeze in ice cube trays. My husband hates and fears onion pieces, and they make a nice flavour-deepener.
Potatoes in soups and stews tend to freeze mushy. What other soup components give you trouble, AnuntiPam?
As for mushy soup: the soup I usually freeze is already mushed (mixed), like potato+leek soup, and those freeze pretty well. Stews that are mostly meat and not too much veggies (like chili) usually work fairly well, too. For both: I leave out anything that needs to be added fresh at the end (like chopped cilantro or cream) before freezing.
I can probably afford one, but I’m still annoyed at myself for not buying a classic iron hand-cranked meat grinder at the local discount store (only 12 euros!) before it closed. Then I found out cheap ones are actually hard to find.
Cool. Though I usually make chili with fairly large chunks of beef with a small amount of shredded bacon. Do you just freeze the sausages or do you do you dry / smoke them? Also: where do you get the sausage casings, and what kind of seasoning are good?
I should try doing that (i.e. cooking whole cuts and only chopping them up afterwards).
Oh and Critical1: I have a full gas furnace with an oven and grill which means I can basically make anything fresh from scratch. The only reason I’m considering a microwave is that it probably makes it easier to re-heat complete dishes that would otherwise be hard not to burn or turn into mush.
I’m going to have to try that. I have my counts a minute great-great-great grandfather’s old meat grinder. Heavy old iron thing with a clamp. Never used it though.
I’ve always wanted to tackle Once A Month Cooking, but never quite gotten the nerve for it. I do make double batches of just about everything and freeze one for another night.
Even a simple pasta and sauce is faster from frozen. I took a book from the recent sauce fad in frozen food: instead of mixing my pasta and sauce and freezing it as a block, I put the sauce on a cookie sheet, spread into a layer about 3/8" thick and freeze it. Pasta on another cookie sheet. Tap the frozen sauce and it shatters into pieces (sometimes I cut it with a pizza cutter). Throw the shards in a freezer bag, pasta in the same bag, and voila! - bag of homemade frozen dinner. The spread out frozen dollops and pasta don’t make a huge, slow to defrost, cube in your freezer. You can pour them, frozen, into about a tablespoon of hot water in a skillet and heat 'til bubbly. Plus, the pasta stays firmer. Heats in about 10-15 minutes, instead of the 20 minutes to boil water and 12 to cook the pasta. Takes about 5 minutes to lay out three batches that each feed four.
How do you keep the sauce from spilling everywhere while freezing? When I make pasta sauce and spread it that thin I probably have enough sauce to cover the freezer (and I have a large freezer - at least for a non-rural Dutch guy: about half a pig’s worth of volume)
Just do. I have lots of cookie sheets, and if I stack them on top of each other (put chopsticks across the corners so you can stack them without touching) in my deep freeze, I can do about 6-8 cookie sheets worth o’ stuff at once. Each cookie sheet holds 4 servings (or one family dinner) worth of sauce for my needs. It talks longer to explain than to do, really.
Oh, and by “cookie sheets”, I mean the kind with the edge all around, not the rimless kind.
All of them – all the veggies. And beans and pasta. I suppose I should undercook if I’m going to freeze and reheat, but then I’d have to fix something else for supper.
Ah right. I thought a cookie sheet was a what we in the Netherlands call “baking paper” - I can’t find a good translation - which is a non-stick heat proof papery type sheet used mostly for preventing things to stick together, not to hold anything in one place. I see what you mean now - that would work.
They don’t have to be finished dishes; but preferably shouldn’t take more than 20 - 30 minutes to finish; adding some chopped veggies / meat and boiling (or heating) potatoes/rice/pasta is fine.
And I re-heat my lasagna in the oven, with a splash of water, covered in aluminium foil - though I must admit a microwave would probably be faster and easier.