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!

Enough Spaghetti Sauce for the Year

Over the weekend we canned our last batch of tomato sauce of the season. My goal this year was 4 batches and wahoo, we're done!! It is a lot of work, but a few busy summer weekends pays off all year long with our luscious red gold from a jar. Rich, tomatoey, a touch of spice... there's nothing like it. I love knowing each and every ingredient that goes into this favorite quick, easy meal of ours. The smell you encounter every time you walk in the house from outside while the sauce is coooking is absolutely heavenly.

Seasoned Tomato Sauce, adapted from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving

yield: about 14 pints or 7 quarts

30 pounds tomatoes

4 cups chopped onions

8 cloves garlic, minced

1/3 cup olive oil

1 1/3 tablespoons oregano

4 bay leaves

2/3 tablespoon black pepper

1 tablespoon sugar

1/6 cup salt

1 1/3 teaspoons crushed red pepper

bottled lemon juice for canning

Canning our favorite spaghetti sauce is quite an event and takes all day... sometimes even into the next day if I take too long to get started. My recipe starts off with a 20 quart stock pot filled with washed, cored and quartered tomatoes. Plum tomatoes are the best since they tend to have the most solid/least liquid but any will work. I have made batches with any and every tomato I can find to get up to the 30 pounds, including cherry tomatoes.

I squeeze the tomatoes as I add them to the pot, bringing out the juices so that tomatoes can start to cook without burning to the bottom of the pan. I cook these until they are nice and soft.

Once the tomatoes soften, I run them all through the vegetable strainer that attaches to my KitchenAid mixer. This removes the seeds and skin, which go into the compost.

The tomato juice goes into a 16 quart stock pot with the rest of the ingredients, and then you cook, cook...

and cook it some more.

It takes many hours to cook the sauce down to a consistency I like for spaghetti sauce, and it is worth the time and effort to get it to be nice and thick. I usually cook it down by half - so basically I end up with 7-8 quarts when I start out with about 16 quarts. Add 2 T lemon juice to quarts or 1 T lemon juice to pints, and process quarts in a water bath canner for 40 minutes, pints for 35 minutes. The entire process takes 8-10 hours. Enjoy all year.