Sunday, February 17, 2013

Adventures in freezer cooking

Oh, ladies and gentlemen, I am tired.  So tired.  I just spent five hours chopping, dicing, portioning, tagging, and bagging vegetables and meals.  I piled way too much on my plate, so to speak.  Yes, I punned. ;)

Firstly, let me just say, chopping 10 lbs of onions in one go-'round was maybe not my best idea.  Do I have chopped onions in reserve now in my freezer to use at a later date?  You betcha.  And that will be nice.  But folks, my eyes are not thanking me right now.  They are still a little burn-y from all the onion fumes.  I was running the knife under cold water after each onion, and running each slice of onion under cold water before chopping it, and it still burned like lemon juice in a paper cut.

Secondly, I also chopped and bagged 4 bunches of celery and a quart-sized freezer bag of bell peppers.  I don't know about all of you, but peppers and celery do not stay fresh in my fridge very long.  So at least this way, I am not throwing away money by tossing spoiled produce.

Thirdly, if you decide to embark upon a freezer cooking session, I have a serious piece of two-pronged advice to give you.  Go big, and build a stash, or be modest and spend some time doing other things with your day.  Five hours is a long time to spend in the kitchen grouping ingredients for your recipes.  But now I have 14 meals (plus tonight's dinner is also in the crockpot) and a couple bags of chopped veggies to go, too.  At this point, I figure I can spend an hour a couple times later on this week and add three more recipes (that's six more meals) to my freezer arsenal.  At this rate, if I do one freezer-cooking session a week, I can always have some freezer meals on hand, and that is something that will be super nice for those days when life interferes.

Below, you can find the pages where I drew my recipes (or in some cases, my inspiration).  I will blog about each recipe as I thaw it, cook it, and we consume it, so you can look forward to those upcoming posts.  Some of the pages have multiple recipes on them, and I didn't make all of them, but if they interest you, you do your thing!

http://kristisrecipebox.blogspot.com/2011/09/crockpot-pork-chops.html
http://www.ringaroundtherosies.net/2012/02/freezer-cooking.html
http://www.laaloosh.com/2012/07/09/crock-pot-beer-chicken-recipe/
http://ldsliving.com/story/68979-easy-slow-cooker-recipes

Have you ever done any freezer cooking?  Are you interested in it?  What did you cook?  Did you like it or would you change the recipe the next time?  Do you have any advice for others who might want to freezer-cook?  What is your favorite freezer meal?

P.S. I will be blogging about tonight's dinner tomorrow (probably), so if you have chicken, beer, and garlic, and are looking for a meal idea, check back tomorrow (probably)!

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