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!

Surprise, a Productive Fall Weekend!

This weekend, my husband and I had a chance to catch up around the house.  For him, that meant spending two full days collecting the millions of leaves that have fallen on our yard and getting them mulched with the mower and into the compost pile.  For me, that meant a few things:  putting our vegetable garden to bed for the winter, doing some cooking ahead and... playing with my new Nutrimill grain mill!  I love when it happens this way - I didn't really plan to get all of this done, so the fact that I did was a huge bonus!

Here's what I was able to do:

          ::  Put our vegetable garden to bed for the first time in the 5 years I have lived in this house.  It always seems to get really cold really fast, and the fall ends up being such a busy time for some reason.  I always have the best of intentions, but I have never actually pulled up all of the old plants and organized the beds for next year... until now!  Not only did I clean out the dead plants, but I gave each bed a thick blanket of mulched leaves and grass clippings, that will hopefully block out some of the weeds in the spring and also add nutrients and organic matter to the soil.  We didn't have a stellar year in the vegetable garden, and I just didn't spend the time out there like I usually do, so I'm hoping my little bit of extra garden love this fall will translate into a more productive season next year.  It certainly can't hurt!

         ::  Cooked now so we can eat later without a lot of fuss.  I love cooking from scratch and eating healthfully and frugally, but there are only so many hours in the day, so I try to be efficient about it.  On Sunday, I made a big pot of of brown rice and black beans for the freezer, a small pot of chili for lunches this week, some sausage/potato/bean soup, a loaf of bread, and since the oven was on for the bread, I threw in some potatoes to bake to eat with the chili this week.

The rice and beans are something I do regularly.  For the rice, I make a big pot, and then portion it out in approx 2/3-3/4 cup servings in plastic sandwich bags, freeze, and then pull out any time we have a meal that goes with rice.  Since brown rice takes a good 45 minutes to make, I don't have to worry about planning too far ahead for the rice when I have portions ready in the freezer.  To eat, we just put the frozen rice (without the bag) on a plate and microwave 2 minutes.  Not only is it a time-saver, having rice portioned out saves our waistlines too.  We know we can always heat up another bag if we want more rice, but we never really feel like it once we finish our first helping.  On the other hand, if we had a big pot of rice... we probably would eat more.

For the beans, I randomly chose an amount of 4 cups of dried black beans from my recent bulk purchase you can read about here.  I soaked them in water overnight, and then put them in a crockpot with a bunch of water.  I cooked them on high for a good 8 hours or so - it took a long time to heat up.  Once the beans were tender, I let them cool a bit, and then portioned them out without the liquid into 1 cup bags for the freezer.  Now, when I'm making soup or burritos or some other recipe that calls for canned black beans, I just go to my freezer instead.  I ended up with 10-11 cups of cooked beans from 4 cups dry.  This way is cheap, took almost no work on my part, and the beans don't have all the added salt or packaging that canned beans have.  No work and a great final product?  I'm all over it.

        ::  Last but not least, my grain mill and food grade buckets with gamma seals arrived!  It was a pretty busy week so I didn't have a chance to store my bulk purchases or try out my grain mill until Sunday.  I cleaned out the buckets and seals during the week, and then let them dry for a few days to make sure all of the lid parts were completely dry before storing my beans, oats and wheat.  The gamma seals on the 5 gallon buckets are supposed to keep the critters and moisture out.  We'll see!

As for my Nutrimill grain mill, it is wonderful, I love it!!!  I used hard white wheat from my recent bulk purchase and made some finely ground flour.  It was so easy.  Then, I made a loaf of bread with my current favorite recipe.  It was INCREDIBLE.  Seriously, I could have just kept on eating it until the whole loaf was gone.  It turned out lighter and fluffier than my bread usually is when I use store-bought whole wheat flour.  I'm never going back!  I knew I would love my new grain mill, and I have not been disappointed.

I'm always looking for more ideas to save time in the kitchen without sacrificing quality or $$. What kinds of time- or money-saving cooking projects do you do?