Deep-freezer Foods

Years ago I bought a book called Once-a-Month Cooking by Mimi Wilson & Mary Beth Lagerborg (I think it is out of print but still available used) and I would plan a big 2 day shopping/cooking session and fully stock the freezer. Then I would use all those foods before I planned another one. That way I didn't have things buried in the bottom for years.

I started with just the recipes in the book and then added other recipes. It worked best to develop a spreadsheet of ingredients and quantities so that I could make shopping lists easier.

Here are some foods that don't freeze well: Raw eggs in the shell (out of the shell is fine) or hard boiled eggs
Raw potatoes and boiled white potatoes
Commercial cottage cheese (although I have frozen egg dishes that have cottage cheese mixed in and it is fine)
Gelatin
Instant rice
Custard or meringue

Otherwise the sky is the limit. I freeze a combo of marinated meats, casseroles, soups/chiles, calzones, etc. I divide everything into what we would eat at one meal (plus maybe more in case we want leftovers for the next day's lunch). Don't freeze in bigger containers because you don't want to ever refreeze something that has been thawed. For things that will be reheated in a pot or in the microwave, I just package it in zipper sealable bags or in vacuum pack food bags (if you have a vacuum sealer for food). You can also use straight sided jars that are filled only part way to account for expansion when it freezes. If it is a casserole that will go in the oven to bake then I place it in the pan in which it will get baked (Pyrex, metal, or buy disposable aluminum pans, the 8"x8" ones work well for our portions). Seal the pans with 2 layers of aluminum foil. For calzones or other individually portioned item, I place in a small zippered bag and then group all those bags in a bigger gallon size. That way they don't stick together before they freeze.

Basic process:
Decide the recipes to be done
Make a shopping list
Make a task list (what order you will chop, mix, and assemble the various ingredients and meals). Try to group all the egg dishes near each other or all the browned hamburger recipes near each other in the order.
Shop
Chop, grate, brown anything that is used in more than one dish so that you can just scoop and assemble (get as much chopping, grating, etc done ahead), store prepped in small washable containers until ready to assemble dishes.
Assemble dishes, label as soon as sealed and let them cool if needed before placing in the freezer. Winter is a great time to do this in MN because you can set them outside to start freezing before overwhelming your freezer.

If you want a couple tried and true recipes I use, feel free to send me a private message and let me know if you have favorite types of food.

I don't have a ton of recipes to share, but I will say this:

If you have a chest freezer, it's crucial to keep a tally of what items are where in the freezer--otherwise, you'll end up with some things stuck at the bottom for 3 years. (Ask me how I know, LOL!). When our small chest freezer died, we went with an upright, and it has been so much better for disorganized me....

I used to do OAMC cooking before I had my son but now, I mostly just double the recipe and freeze one. For example, if I'm making lasagna, I'll make 2 pans of it, cook one for dinner, and partially cook the second & then freeze the 2nd pan. Or, if I'm making burritos, I double the recipe for the filling and freeze half (it can be used to fill enchiadas, mexican lasagna, etc., as well as burritos). Same thing with meatloaf, etc. While probably not as economical as OAMC, it is less time consuming.

I really did like OAMC cooking when I did it. The feeling of having a couple of weeks worth of good food in the freezer was comforting.

You can make most of your regular recipes into freezer recipes. Just read up on the tips before you do - for example, there are certain things that don't freeze well, and once you know what items don't freeze well (i.e.: sour cream separates, etc.), you can just adjust your recipes as you see fit.

I've also had good luck with the OAMC recipes on allrecipes.com & recipezaar.com. By choosing 4 star or higher rated recipes and reading the reviews, you can find new things to try. Just search "freezer" or "oamc" in the search box.

If you can get help from the kids, if they are up an age to help, that is great. Or, if not, bribe someone with a home cooked meal to get them to watch your kids for a few hours so that you can work uninterrupted.

I make tons of stuff and freeze it ahead. I hate to clean, so it works great because I can make a large batch of something and then have meals for a while. I usually brown 10 or so pounds of ground pork, ground beef or sausage at a time and then divide it up. I get most of my recipes from allreceipes.com, but most of them aren't specifically "freezer recipes".

Most things freeze pretty well, the main thing is how you wrap them. Some of my favorites are spaghetti pie, goulash, ham balls, meat balls, meat loaf, taco casserole, cheesy chicken enchiladas, BBQ pork, BBQ beef. I go to our local dollar store and buy the disposable foil pans. I have also heard of people going to a second hand store and buying extra baking dishes. Whatever makes the best sense for you. You can freeze stuff in both metal and glass pans, but you have to be careful about how quickly you change the temperature of a glass pan. Make sure once your food is in them to wrap them good with foil. Don't leave any part exposed, that is how moisture escapes and you get dry freezer burned food.

I work during the day, so for instance, this morning, I took a frozen solid spaghetti pie out of the freezer, left the foil on and put it in the oven. I set the time bake on our oven to turn on at 300 degrees at 4pm. At 6pm when I got home it was warmed through, and then I added some cheese on top and turned up the heat to 425 for the last 25 minutes or so. I had hot delicious spaghetti pie and the only thing I had to make was some garlic bread and open some applesauce to have with it. I LOVE IT!

I also have made taco meat or spaghetti sauce with the meat already browned and in it ahead of time. Then you just have to defrost it in the microwave and boil some noodles. I usually just store that in a leftover cottage cheese container or something like that. You don't need any special containers. I think zipper bags would work also.

When certain meats are on sale (chicken, pork chops) I usually buy a lot and then cook them and cut them up in to cubes and freeze portions in freezer zipper bags, then if I want to add some meat to something I just defrost it in the microwave and add it to the meal.

I make alot of breads when they are in season (zucchini) or if we don't get through a whole bunch of banana's before they turn I make bread. Once it is cooled, I wrap the loaves in plastic wrap and then in foil and toss in the freezer. When it is time to eat I just set it on the counter to thaw. The main thing with breads is to leave them wrapped so the moisture doesn't escape as it comes back to temperature.

Sorry for being so wordy. I am just a BIG fan of OAMC (once a month cooking) :-)

We shop sales and stock the freezer with what we find. For a while, our freezer was filled with bagels, bread, and cheese because it was all on sale. (A really great sale... $1 for a pound of cheese!) We also freeze meat, either raw or cooked, and tend to find a lot of uses for it. But pretty much everything that is in the freezer was on sale, and I bought a bunch of it so that we could save money in the long run.

I've also taken tops off tomatoes and put those in whole (great for making homemade tomato soup!), topped off strawberries, blueberries, etc and used them for smoothies or baking, or made two of what I was preparing for supper and put one in the freezer for later.

Good luck!

Here's my favorite freezer recipe.

BBQ Pork Sandwiches

Boneless pork shoulder roast 4lbs
2 medium onions thinly sliced
1 C chopped Onion
1 1/2 C water
1 bottle BBQ sauce

Place 1/2 thinly sliced onions on bottom of crock pot. Add roast, water and remaining sliced onions. Cover and cook 8-10 hours on low or 4-5 on high.

Remove roast and chop meat coarsely, removing any excess fat. Drain liquid from crock pot. Put pork back in crock pot. Add BBQ sauce and chopped onions. Cook another 4-6 hours on low stirring occasionally.

To Freeze: Get good Freezer Bags and separate meat into meal sizes. We can get at least two meals out of this recipe - maybe three.

To Serve: Put in the fridge at least 24 hours in advance. Reheat in microwave or on stove top. Serve on buns (Which I also keep in the freezer)

Side note Bread freezes very well. I buy several loafs at a time and just pull one out when we need a new one. We also freeze bagels, and homemade pancakes/waffles to pop in the toaster for breakfast. And like I mentioned above hamburger buns.

I agree with most everyone that tons of things can be frozen. I purchased a vacuum sealer to keep the meat from getting freezer burn if we don't use it soon enough. I grow green peppers in the summer, I slice then and freeze them in snack size ziplocs and use them in all sorts of dishes all year long.

I also make my own pasta sauce. I make it in the crock pot and we have it for dinner one night. Whatever is let that night I put into the 1/2 cup glad containers. We use that with frozen ravioli for a quick dinner or lunch. One container is good for one person. Here is the recipe I use (I do wait till meat is on sale to do this):
1 to 1.5 lb grnd beef (browned/drained); 30 oz tomato sauce; 29 oz can diced tomatoes, undrained; 12 oz tomato paste; 8 oz sliced fresh mushrooms; 1.5 cup chopped onion; 1 cup water; 3/4 cup chopped green pepper; 2 Tbsp brown sugar; 2 tsp dried basil; 1 tsp dried oregano; 1/4 tsp salt; 1/4 tsp black pepper; 1/8 tsp ground red pepper; 2 garlic cloves, minced; 1 beef flavored bouillon cube.
Combine in crock pot and cook on high 1 hour then low 6-7 hours.

Oh, the joys of a deep freeze! What we do...first, we buy our meat by the animal, which, even though it's local and organic, is a LOT cheaper than buying at the grocery store. Obviously, the initial outlay is more, but it is both better in cost and in quality. This gives us a HUGE head start, because it gives us roasts (I'm not a big fan of "fancy" crock pot cooking--no precooking for me!--so in the morning I dump a frozen roast in on low with about 2 cups of water, and add carrots and potatoes about 2 hours before we eat and call it good.), which we can then use for sandwiches and pulled pork/beef. We also get bacon and pork sausage, which we use when we have breakfast for dinner--another easy meal.

Second...I would say the two things I make in bulk and then freeze are lasagna (I buy sausage on sale and freeze it, then buy ricotta on sale and make it...but you can make lasagna cheaper, too, with cottage cheese and ground beef.) and meatballs, both Swedish and Italian. We are expecting our third this December, and have a bunch of Christmas guests coming, so my husband and kids spent last Sunday making about 8#'s of meatballs. We make them, cook them up, and freeze them in a plastic ziploc.

We live up on the Range, so I buy porketta roasts when they're on sale--looks like you're in Cloquet; that might be an option for you if you like it. :)

We picked 26 pounds of strawberries this summer and bought 60 pounds of peaches at the Youth for Christ sale this September. If you google "USDA food processing" you will find a website that is a .gov and tells you all about safe food handling and how to process various fruits and veggies and meats, including freezing. With strawberries, we just cut off the stems and washed them and added a little sugar. We also made massive amounts of freezer jam (I also can--did jams and sauces and such--but that's not freezer), which is a LOT cheaper than store bought. The peaches required a LOT of sugar to freeze, since I guess they discolor. I bought Ball freezer containers from the grocery store, since they stack and are meant to withstand deep freeze temps. But we now have peaches and strawberries. My inlaws farm in South Dakota, and they freezer packed 20 quarts of corn--you also could get it super-cheap in August, cook it up like you do corn on the cob, and then use a sharp knife to cut it from the ear. We freeze it in quart containers, and that's just a little more than our family of four really good eaters can eat in one sitting. We also freeze (and can) tomatoes. I froze tomatoes this year because ours ripened over a long period of time, and I wanted to can them. We also froze diced cherry tomatoes, which I use in place of buying canned diced tomatoes in recipes. I have another 20 quarts of tomatoes frozen, in addition to my canning. We just clean them, make sure to use good tomatoes, and pop them into a freezer bag. The last thing we freeze is apples--my inlaws have an orchard, so they use an apple peeler/slicer/corer to cut them up, and then soak the apples in salt water (again, check the USDA's website) and pop them in the bag right away--they tend to discolor fast and then they don't look very good.

Finally...we use our freezer to stock up on sale items, bread in particular.

We buy the cheap chub of HB meat at Wal-Mart and cook it, some with onions, some with Taco seasoning, some plain. You can do 2-3 at a time so you only have 1 clean up, just use a bigger pan.

When I cook it I always drain it very well, in a few cases (Taco meat) I lightly rinse it to get more grease off.

I put it in the quart size freezer bags. I use 2 boxes of HB Helper per qt. size freezer bag or 1 taco seasoning packet, I don't like strong taco flavor. Since we live on HB meat mostly I use it up in a month or two.

I buy the 10 lb. bag of frozen leg quarters from Wal-Mart for about $5. I boil them in a large stock pot, this is a messy deal but worth the effort.
I take the meat out, keep the water boiling or near boiling, and crack each piece of meat open to help it cool faster. I de-bone it and put the meat into freezer bags and then put the bones and skin back in the water to cook a bit more.

I prepare a large pot or heat proof bowl by placing a large hand towel or large piece of cheesecloth over the top. I strain the broth into a clean pan and throw the bones and skin parts away. I let the broth cool and then skim off the fat and any debris that needs to be removed. I fill Qt. or Gallon size freezer bags with the broth, make very sure they are closed tightly, and lay them down in the freezer on a solid flat surface. This helps it freeze through quickly and it makes it easier to remove from the bag to reheat.

When it comes time to make chicken and dumplings or chicken and noodles I pull out a bag of broth, a bag of chicken, and the frozen Reesers noodles. I use biscuits for dumplings. I pop the broth into the pan and heat on low, I add the chicken when there is enough fluid melted, then when it's hot I add the noodles or dumplings and cook according to my tastes with spices and other additions. I don't add any other foods like veggies or stuff to these dishes but if I did it would be with the meat.

For tacos, I pre-heat the oven, pop the meat into a microwave bowl, get the taco shells or tortilla's ready, gather all the other stuff and then cook taco shells and heat the meat, stirring after each minute or so.