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General Cooking (rec.food.cooking) For general food and cooking discussion. Foods of all kinds, food procurement, cooking methods and techniques, eating, etc. |
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Best way to freeze meals?
Dee Randall wrote: > Perhaps what you are trying to do - do I understand it correctly - you want > to make a whole meal and then defrost the whole meal for your lunch. What I am doing is making a triple batch of something, say broccolie beef. I then package it up in several containers and freeze them. I don't have a lot of time to eat at work, so I don't really eat that much at once. A 14 oz container will give me 2 meals easily. I have used some of those in the past, but the lids weren't staying on. I found some nice conatainers that were hold up better in the freezer, but they are larger, and hold 3 servings for me. So, after making my hige batch. I dish it up into 7 or 8 of these containers and then I freeze them. I was having a frost problem, but it sounds like that doesn't degrade the food, so I may just keep doing it this way. If I do decide to freeze and wrap it differently, then I would prefer to go ahead and do a smaller package so that I actually have 1 serving size instead of 2 or 3. That would let me do more variety and not got bored with the same lunch 3 days in a row. The biggest reason that I have bought lunches at work is because I don't have time to cook real meals. I share a house, and I am a night owl. I don't get home from work until 11pm. After dinner, I am energetic, but one family member sleeps in the living room (she has pain if she tries to sleep in bed), so if I cook late at night, I have to be really quiet. No talking, no tv, no radio, and very quiet with the clanking of pans. It's much easier to cook on my days off during the afternoon and evening. I don't have to worry about waking anybody up. |
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Best way to freeze meals?
I freeze a lot of bread products, and even to my persnickety senses they seem to freeze very well. I freeze purchased loaf breads because otherwise they often go moldy before my small family has used up a whole bag, and I don't want to waste money or food. A second reason though is because I can then have a *variety* of breads available (e.g., whole wheat, flaxseed, cinnamon bread, even Texas Toast, bakable sourdough rounds, and any leftover bread from my bread machine... plus rolls for sandwiches, bagels of various flavors, English muffins, etc, and I used to freeze Danishes though I don't eat those now :-( ). I consider breads to be just another staple I always like to have on hand since they're so easy to keep. Some of those breads I can buy separately at the deli self-serve, so I tend to keep them all in one or two ziptop bags (I pre-slice them if nec.), but the others are just kept in their orig. packaging. Since I have a small family and also like to keep prices down when possible, buying bread at Costco saves a lot but the brand I like comes only in double-loaf packaging, so freezing really helps there. But there are also many people who can't get out easily, and having frozen breads and other frozen foods help them a lot (e.g., seniors --esp. those who must depend on others to get to a grocery, those with physical problems or with health issues that make getting out difficult, those who live in rural areas, not to mention people with full-time jobs-plus-heavy-family-obligations, etc, etc.). As for other foods, I also freeze things (like fresh fruit at height of season or sometimes fresh-picked, esp. berries) in single pieces on baking trays as mentioned, then bag them together in ziptops. In the case of fruit, I can then use the various types to make different flavors of smoothie every night in my homemade yogurt and I really like having the choice. If I have soup, stew, purees, or various other things that will flatten, I like to make them stackable so they'll take up less room in the freezer. For those, I fill ziptops, then lay them on a baking tray flat to freeze; after they're frozen, I can stack them or put them side by side like books. I even freeze portions of leftover food like refried beans or sauce/gravy. The refried beans are great for making just one burrito for lunch, and the sauce is good for time-saving too since I won't have to re-make it for a later meal or snack. Since these things have been frozen thin, I can just break off one portion or whatever I need. BTW, here's another way to make an almost perfect vacuum with ziptop bags... this was suggested by PöRRö for both avoiding freezer burn and "marinading" old/hard polymer clay in Diluent to soften it. This would work well for doing lots of bagging, and in the case of polymer clay avoids having to suck in any plasticizer vapors (with a straw): ..."put your clay (or food) into the ziploc bag and close almost half of it. Find a little bigger container than your bag, and fill that with water. Put the bag under the water (the air-hole should not go under water), and let the water force the air out of the bag. Close the bag, then take it out of the water... dry with towel. Works great." Diane B. |
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