Whatever you call it, the premise is the same. You invest some time & materials in cooking or preparing a large quantity of food at once. You stick it in your freezer, and when you are pressed for time, you can pull something out of the freezer and pop it in the oven or slow cooker and have a quick and easy dinner on the table with minimal effort on your part.
Over the past month, we've been through every extra casserole and every frozen dinner I had in my freezer. Over the past couple of days, I've been working on some serious investment cooking for my freezer.
Last week, I went through my recipes for freezer cooking and casseroles. I put together a shopping list of items needed. Saturday I went grocery shopping. Sunday, I engaged in the chopping and slicing and dicing.
Monday after work, I picked up 40 pounds of chicken. That's right - 40 pounds. Everything was in one box, and it was divided into 10 pound quantities.
Once I got home, I had to move fast.
10 pounds went into the slow cooker for 8 hours. This chicken is destined to be shredded and then packed into 2 cup quantities and put into the freezer to be tossed into recipes or salads at a later date.
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| I love my slow cooker! |
The second 10 pounds, I froze in vacuum sealed packages - each package contained 1 chicken breast, and was frozen raw so that I can toss it into recipes at a later date.
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| Vacuum sealed and ready to freeze. |
The last 20 pounds, I divided into slow cooker freezer meals. Terriyaki Chicken, Cilantro Lime Chicken and Lemon Chicken were tossed into gallon size zipper bags. This is where all of Sundays' prep came in. The carrots, onions, bell peppers, etc. were already sliced. It was a simple matter to measure and toss ingredients into the bags. I'm not going to post the recipes here. You can do a quick Google search for any of these recipes and come back with hundreds of recipes.
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| Terriyaki Chicken kits, ready to go in the freezer. |
Since I was working with raw chicken, time was of the essence. I did not want to leave the chicken out and have some sort of fearsome bacteria move into the chicken, but I also didn't have enough space in my refrigerator to hold this much chicken.
8 hours later, the chicken in the slow cooker was finished. It was after 9:00 when I finished, and I was tired. I put the chicken into a large 13 x 9 inch pan that has a lid. It was here that I discovered a nifty little trick - chicken, still hot from the cooker shredded effortlessly with a wooden spoon. I'd like to tell you it was some great insight that lead me to this discovery. But no. I was attempting to shove the last of the chicken into the pan so that the lid would fit when I discovered how nicely that chicken fell apart under the spoon. I added several cups of the chicken broth from the slow cooker to the tray of chicken. My hope was to keep the chicken moist until I have time to deal with it.
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I crammed the lid on the chicken, stuffed it into the fridge and went to bed. When I got home from work today, I set 2 cups of shredded chicken aside for tonight's dinner. I made that into pulled BBQ chicken.
The rest of the chicken, I measured out into 2 cup portions in freezer bags and froze them for later. I'm looking at more pulled chicken, chicken tacos, and chicken for soup and casseroles.
So, I now have 10 portions of cooked chicken. 10 portions of frozen raw chicken, and 10 frozen slow cooker meals.
One evenings worth of work, and I have some serious peace of mind.
A worthwhile investment of my time.
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