Freezer Cooking: Ground Beef Meals

One thing that has been working really well for me over the past 2 years or so is freezer cooking.  It all started when my sisters-in-law and my husband's cousin gifted me some frozen meals after my daughter was born.  How wonderful it was to have meals prepped and ready to cook in the freezer!  Who knew this would be the beginning of a way of life for me.

Since then, I've experimented with my freezer quite a bit.  I've gone through the stage of shoving food in various stages of preparation in my freezer, only to forget about it or have no convenient use for it.  This includes garden produce, meat, you name it, I've haphazardly tried to freeze it for "later."  The only thing is, if later never comes, you've wasted your time and the food you lost in the freezer!

Motherhood has made me much more efficient in so many ways.  Two of them have been utilizing my freezer space and getting a good meal on the table, quickly.  I now try to have a plan in mind with everything I freeze.  If I freeze garden produce, it is typically for a particular use.  For example, one year I froze bags of pepper strips for the heck of it, and there they were a year later, crusty with ice and unused.  Now last year, I stocked up at the farmers market and froze bags of diced red and green peppers I knew I would use as a pizza topping for our frequent homemade pizza nights, in chili and in my favorite beef barley soup recipe.  And I have done just that.  It makes all the difference in the world when you freeze food for a purpose.  Even better, I have not bought an expensive winter pepper all year.

These days, one of my strategies has been freezing food in ready-to-go packages, to minimize day-of food preparation.  Recently, I experimented with freezing cooked, unpeeled, diced potatoes using this method to use as a side dish with other freezer meals I've prepared, like marinated meat.  Throw the thawed meat on the grill, the frozen potatoes in a skillet with some onions, and butter/oil, make a salad or other vegetable and you have a delicious, nutritious meal without much fuss. 

Freezer cooking has become my favorite way to cook in this season of my life.  Over the weekend, I took some of my frozen potatoes a step further and made several packages for the freezer of diced cooked potatoes, cooked broccoli and cooked breakfast sausage, to be used for an easy week-night dinner or brunch of egg casserole - just add eggs and milk, pour into a casserole dish and pop it in the oven.  I was making this dish for us to have for brunch on Sunday anyway, so instead of making 1, why not make 4?

As you can see, I'm a big fan of doing messy or laborious preparation once and enjoying it many times over the following couple months.  The funny thing is, I love to cook!  Just not every meal, every day.

My plan for this coming weekend is a bunch of ground beef main dishes or parts of meals.  Maybe it's my pregnancy talking, but the chicken in the freezer isn't doing it for me right now and beef sounds great!  Who knows what will sound good next week.  Either way, I like to have a variety of choices available to me in the freezer, and I find it most efficient to choose one main ingredient - in this case, ground beef - and make lots of variations on that.  After a few cooking escapades like this, before you know it, you've got a selection of meals with beef, pork, chicken, beans, vegetarian or whatever other main ingredients you like to eat.

Here's what I'm thinking for this weekend.  Ground round at our high-end grocery store is on sale, and I like to start with good ingredients; cheaper is not always better.  You usually get what you pay for.  Normally I would go for ground sirloin because it is leaner, but since I'll be making a combination of uncooked burger-type meals as well as cooked ground beef meals, ground round should work just fine.

         ::  (4 lbs) uncooked hamburger patties - 4 packages of 1 pound each.
         ::  (6 lbs) uncooked oven hamburgers (ground beef mixed with BBQ sauce, to be baked in the oven) - 4 packages of 1.5 pound each. 
         ::  (6 lbs) cooked meatballs (to add to spaghetti sauce) - 8 packages of 3/4 pound per package
         ::  (3 lbs) cooked ground beef (to add to spaghetti sauce) - 6 packages of 0.5 pound each
         ::  (4 lbs) cooked taco meat (using the homemade taco seasoning recipe from Make-A-Mix) - 4 packages of 1 pound each
         ::  (9 lbs) cooked sloppy joe filling (fabulous recipe from Don't Panic Dinner's in the Freezer) - 6 packages of 1.5 pound each

So that works out to be 32 lbs of ground beef.  Watch out, here comes the crazy lady buying 32 lbs of meat.  The quizzical looks from behind the meat counter will be worth it.  It will be WONDERFUL to have these meals in the freezer, ready to go.  Added bonus:  my "starting to become picky" toddler likes all of these foods!

Making Mixes: Bread, Corn Bread, Banana Oatmeal Waffles

We're finally catching up with life around here.  The stomach flu made its way around our whole house, and it was slow going to feel motivated to do much in the kitchen.  I think I'm back though! 

On Monday I was able to grind a bunch of flour and prep ingredients for 6 loaves of homemade bread, which I store in the freezer in freezer boxes.  When I want to make bread, as I do once or twice a week, I just get my flour out of the freezer, add the wet ingredients to my bread machine pan, add the flour and yeast, and start up the bread machine.  It takes all of 5 minutes or less to do this.  I have the bread machine make the dough, and I put the dough in a pan, let it rise, and bake it in the oven.  It is SO easy and delicious.  Not to mention 2/3 whole wheat, yet soft and tender, which is even better in my book.

This time I was feeling motivated to make a couple other types of mixes to have on hand.  I found a corn bread recipe I like, in the Better Homes and Gardens (the red and white checkered one) cookbook of all places.  I ground some popcorn into cornmeal - yes, that's the best corn commercially available for making your own cornmeal) and mixed up 4 batches of corn bread mix.

As I do for the bread, I put all of the dry ingredients for cornbread in the freezer boxes.  I didn't take a picture, but I also wrote instructions on the container lids:  what wet ingredients to add, plus baking instructions.  This recipe is for a 9X9 pan of corn bread, or 12 muffins or 24-26 corn sticks.  I plan to keep these freezer boxes designated for cornbread, so I thought it would be easier to write on the lids instead of fishing out the cookbook.  It's all about convenience!

The third mix I made was for banana oatmeal waffles.  Mind you, I am NOT a waffle maker or pancake maker at all.  That is my husband's arena.  However, my sister-in-law makes these banana oatmeal waffles and they are SO good, like banana bread.  We've been making extra pancakes on the weekend and freezing them for quick week-day breakfasts, and I knew these waffles would be great for that too.  Not to mention nutritious and something different.

So, into the boxes went the dry ingredients for banana oatmeal waffles.  I also went out on a limb, writing instructions on the lids again, assuming this recipe would be a keeper.  Now I feel a bit more prepared with my bread prepped and a couple other baking treats ready to go also.  I love knowing exactly what goes into my food and avoiding all of the extraneous additives and ingredients in boxed mixes.

Have any good mixes that you like to whip up?  Please share!  My next mix to devise is whole wheat pancakes... see you later, Aunt Jemima.

6 Months of Garlic

One thing I love doing is cooking.  One thing I don't have is a lot of uninterrupted time, what with chasing around an active 1 year old.  Anything I can do to save myself time in the kitchen, while still preparing delicious, healthy meals for our family... I'm all over it.

Last night I prepped enough minced garlic to last us a good six months.  I don't really know how long it will last, but a LONG time.  I started with a huge 3 lb container of peeled garlic from Costco, which cost all of $5.  Not much, if you ask me.  I trimmed off the hard end of each clove, and popped them in my food processor.

I chopped up the garlic until it was minced.  Then I dumped it out onto a cookie sheet lined with wax paper.  Using a spatula, and then another piece of wax paper on top, I pressed the garlic into a nice thin layer on the cookie sheet.

Once the garlic was pressed down, I took my handy pizza cutter and cut horizontally and vertically to get little squares, about 1 teaspoon each.

I covered that up with wax paper and froze both trays overnight.  In the morning, I broke up the pieces and put them in zip-lock bags to go back into the freezer.  Now, when I need garlic, I don't have to take the time to crack open a clove, have the skin stick to my fingers as I hurriedly try to mince it, inevitably ending up with too-big chunks.  I just open my freezer, take out a square - or more - and throw it in my pan or pot.  One thing I love about this, is that I end up using a lot more garlic this way, and I LOVE garlic!  No mess, my favorite.

You could also do this with hot peppers, diced onions, or other high-maintenence veggies, though I have never tried it on this scale.

Eat well and happy cooking!

More Cooking Ahead - Bread and Pork Roasts

Today I finally got to the grain-grinding and bread prep. portion of my "freezer cooking" adventure.  I like to grind enough flour for at least 6 loaves of bread and then measure out the whole wheat and white flour into boxes for the freezer.  Then, I just have to throw the wet ingredients into the bread machine along with the box of flour and yeast, and away we go. 

For some reason, just having the flour already measured out makes the task of making bread so much less daunting!  I am really not a baker, actually.  That's why I have the bread machine do my dirty work and I just take the lovely dough, bake it in the oven and call it my own homemade bread.  Boy is it good!  Especially with freshly ground flour, oh my goodness.

I also experimented with grinding popcorn into cornmeal today.  I haven't made anything with it, but I did pop it in my freezer to keep it fresh until I do use it.  I'm thinking of making some corn muffins.  How cool is freshly ground cornmeal??  I'm looking for a good cornbread/corn muffin recipe that I can use to make homemade mixes from.  I would prefer more of a savory taste than sweet, and not too much milk/sour cream, etc since my husband tries to stay away from large amounts of dairy.  Now that I'm grinding cornmeal, I will probably be experimenting with corn bread recipes in the weeks to come.  If you have a great recipe, please share! 

The one other quickie freezer meal-making I did was a few pork loin roasts.  The huge ones were on sale at our high-end grocery store, so I bought one and split it into three big roasts, about 3 lbs each.  They worked out to be less than $5 each, which is pretty good considering each will provide at least 6 meals but probably more for us.  I seasoned one of the roasts with a new dijon marinade, and the others I left plain.  I've got a maple glazed pork roast recipe I've done a couple times that is fabulous.  Hopefully this will give us a little variety from the 35 lbs of chicken I just added to our freezer two days ago!

Freezer Cooking Day: The Results

The results are in... I ended up making 10 meals of marinated chicken breasts using 7 different sauces.  Plus, I have 5 plain chicken breasts that are trimmed and ready for whatever I might need them for.   I was going to do 10 plain ones, but who am I kidding... which are more likely to be eaten?  The ones that are seasoned and ready to cook!

When you break it down by cost, you'll see what a savings it really is to do this type of cooking where possible.  I had all the ingredients on hand besides the chicken.  Even if I had used the recipes I had originally intended from my cookbooks, I already had all of the ingredients anyway, so the only thing I had to buy is the chicken.  For approximately 35 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, I spent $51.93.  I got 11 meals from the 35 pounds.  As I said in my earlier post, the breasts are HUGE, so I cut them in half.  Each bag got 4 breasts, cut in half, so 8 pieces of chicken, at $4.73 per meal.  If we say that each meal is, on average about 6 servings, that works out to be about $0.79 per serving.  Not bad, and definitely cheaper than take-out.  The best part is, the work is done!

All in all, it took me about an hour and a half to clean the chicken, add the marinades, put the bags in the freezer and clean up.  It took me less time than I thought, but I had to wait until after Little Moo's bedtime, since she did not grant me with much of a nap today!  No one wants to be up to her elbows in chicken guts with a one-year-old running around.

The other part of my cooking in advance plan that I didn't accomplish was bread prep.  When I grind flour, I do enough for 6 loaves of bread, and measure out the whole wheat and white flour into freezer boxes for the freezer.  Doing this step ahead of time saves me a couple minutes when I'm making bread, which is so helpful!   Every few minutes helps.  Tomorrow is another day......

Freezer Cooking Day: The Plan

Today and tomorrow, Crystal from MoneySavingMom and FishMama from LifeAsMom are hosting a freezer cooking day, where they prepare a bunch of meals to freeze for another day.  They have started doing this once a month to make life easier at dinner time.  I have done versions of this in the past, usually on a smaller scale based on what ingredients I have on hand and what meat/protein I can find at great prices.  I like to do this bit by bit so that I don't have to take the whole day to cook.  When chicken is on sale, I buy enough for 4-6 meals, prepare them and freeze.  The same goes for pork.  When those huge loins are on sale, I have one or two sliced into chops and roast, season or marinate, and into the freezer they go for another day.  By preparing a handful of extra meals here and there, before you know it, you have a freezer full of meals to choose from.  Better yet, they have all been bought on sale and the cheapest prices I can get!  Then, when I'm ready to eat them, I just thaw and bake/grill/put in the crockpot. 

Before I decided to participate in this Freezer Cooking Day, I had already noticed that my local high-end grocery store was having a sale on chicken breasts for $1.49/lb, which is pretty good in this area, especially for good quality meat.  I had planned to take advantage of this deal this week anyway, so it was a nice coincidence that a couple of my favorite bloggers are doing freezer cooking today also!

This morning I picked out the recipes I was planning on making, from Fix Freeze Feast and Don't Panic, Dinner's in the Freezer (info is listed to the right), my two current favorite freezer cooking books.  Then as I was looking through my refrigerator and pantry, I changed my gameplan.  I decided to move along a bunch of condiments that I am sick of looking at.  Instead of trying some new recipes this time, why not marinate a bunch of chicken breasts in sauces I already have?  How's that for frugal...

So here's what I'm planning: 

::  35 pounds of skinless, boneless chicken breasts, trimmed and divided into 3 pound portions.  The breasts are usually huge, so I cut them in half the fat way, so I end up with a triangular piece and a sort of semi-circle shaped piece.  Each portion of 3 lbs goes into a gallon-sized zip-lock bag.  Before adding the chicken to the bag, I label with a permanent marker what is in the bag and cooking instructions.  I am purposely buying more chicken than I need to account for trimming.  Any extra chicken will be frozen on cookie sheets and put in a zip-lock bag for later.

::  7 different marinades/sauces:  two different BBQ sauces, mole sauce, curry sauce, sweet and smoky Indian marinade, raspberry salsa, and a sesame teriyaki sauce.

::  The marinade gets poured into the zip-lock bag, and I squish around the chicken and sauce until the chicken is coated.  Depending on how much time I have and how creative I am feeling, I may add some pizazz to the bags like extra onions, garlic or other herbs and spices.

::  As for cooking, some are for the crock pot, and some are for grilling or baking.  The BBQ sauces with chicken will go in the crock pot for healthy and delicious pulled chicken, similar to pulled pork but much easier!  Same goes for the mole sauce, which will probably be served with tortillas for tacos or burritos.  The others will probably be grilled or baked. 

So it's that easy!  The hardest part is cleaning up the chicken, which takes me awhile since I'm picky.  If you wanted to do this even MORE quickly, you could buy the bags of indivdually frozen chicken breasts, count them out into your zip-lock bags, add your marinades and pop them in the freezer.  In literally minutes, you could have many main dish meals in your freezer, ready to go.  While the meat is cooking, make a quick salad and/or other vegetable and you have a healthy, cheap meal.

Do you do any freezer cooking?  Tell us about it in the comments section!