Category Archives: Cooking

Massive freezer cooking session – day 1

Today was day 1 of my massive freezer cooking session. I’m making 2 months worth of freezer meals for Dad and Daughter Person while I’m traveling for work for 5 weeks.
On the menu:

Today’s task was to get all of the ingredients.  I made a trip to Costco ($512 even), Wal-Mart ($143.32) and Whole Foods ($173.43) – there was quite a bit of wine purchased at Whole Foods and Costco (about $150 between the two of them), as well as some stocking up because they had coupons (like garbage bags and tooth paste) – so the totals were not all the food.  I’d like to figure out the cost of each serving if I get the chance, so stay tuned for that information.

You can see below the back of my RAV4 after my trip to Costco:

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And the fridge after it was stuffed. This is a 26 ft^3 fridge, so it’s no small fridge. Every drawer is stuffed with costco purchases.

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This is the refried beans that will become part of the bean burritos (dried pinto beans are much cheaper than the canned variety and we didn’t fry them, so we removed a lot of fat from them; although given the work, we might opt for the canned next time)

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We also made pumpkin muffins for Daughter Person’s breakfast. She likes muffins, so we thought this would be good. I had to get out the hand mixer, which I’ve used once in the last four years (today) because the batter for the pumpkin muffins needed to use the *big* mixing bowl. Gave us 3 1/2 dozen muffins though.

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Finally, we made butternut squash lasagna – one large 9×13 dish (hard to make lasagna noodles smaller than they are).

During all of this, I made the chicken with tarragon vinegar sauce for dinner (and leftovers tomorrow and the next night).

Tomorrow, I need to take the burritos and put them in freezer bags, print the labels for everything we did today, and start on the next set of prep work. I hate halving chicken breasts, so Dad is going to do that part for me when he gets home tomorrow night. I’m going to put together the fish dishes, and probably the side dishes. Lots and lots of potatoes to peel and onions to chop tomorrow!

Massive Freezer cooking session planned

I’m planning on being out of town for pretty much most of September and October.  Some of that I’ll be overseas in Switzerland, but some I’ll be in the states.  I’m taking off the week after Labor Day to just chill and plan all of our meals for September and October.  I’ve never actually meal planned more than a week, so this will be entertaining.  I’ll be planning over Labor Day weekend, and shopping at Costco that Tuesday, then cooking Tuesday evening into Wednesday.  Leaving Dad with two months worth of food for him and Daughter Person.  I’m a little disappointed that I won’t be able to enjoy some of the fruits of my labor, but that means I’ll also be cooking things that I wouldn’t normally eat so that Dad has more variety.

I’m looking forward to the challenge, and as soon as I’ve got things planned out, I’ll be posting here to share details.

Freezer cooking

I’ve done once a month cooking before (you cook a whole month’s worth of food at once), and I’m just not a huge fan – I don’t really like casseroles (not even lasagna), and unfortunately, a good portion of the recipes for the freezer are casseroles.  After Daughter Person was born, we went to Dinner Done with my mom’s group, and I learned that freezer food could be good!  We had always bought large amounts of meat at Costco and put it in the freezer – but we always had to thaw and then fix something.  With the Dinner Done style meals, we would just have to remember to thaw something – or force thaw it in the sink.

We started pretty simply with marinades that we liked added to the meat before we froze it.  Weight Watchers has a great Korean-style flank steak recipe that we like, so we tried that, and some lemon pepper marinade.  They turned out pretty well.  So we got adventurous.  I went and bought Fix, Freeze, Feast from Amazon, and we tried a bunch of recipes near the beginning of July.  The book is organized well for folks like us who shop at Costco and buy big packages of things.  We only tried 6 recipes: Garlic Mashed Potatoes, Rice Pilaf, 4Bs flank steak, Caribbean Pork, Sweet-Asian Chicken, and Tequila-Lime Chicken.  All are excellent!  We make a trip to Costco about every other month, so the next experimenting will be in September, but we have enough food in our freezer to last until then.

Instead of cooking your food before you put it in the freezer, you just prepare it, then cook it when you thaw it – and most of the cooking instructions have been “grill”, because we’re not interested in heating up the house with the oven.  No worrying about what spices we have, or what to do with the hunk of meat, just thaw the night before (usually sufficient) and grill.  The food tastes fresh – not like leftovers, and it’s quick.  The disadvantage is that you have to have somewhere in your fridge to store all of the meat you bring home from Costco before you prep it all.  What we did was buy a bag of ice and put the meat in a cooler until we were ready for it – but our new fridge is massive and I think we’ll be able to use it next time.
Are we saving money with it?  Most definitely yes.  We’re not ordering out as much – and we’re even eating in on the weekends (at least for dinner).  The meat is the same price whether we prepare it before putting it in the freezer or afterwards, and we’re saving a little bit by buying the Costco sized potatoes, veggies, etc for the prep.  But the big savings are in time and knowing we have a meal ready.