Corn Chowder

           (Defrosting on the counter!)

I love this recipe. It's a Rachael Ray; I can't remember if it came from one of her books or a magazine, because I make it so much I've got it memorized. 

It does not freeze well if you put the cream/half and half in before freezing. It gets separated, and although it doesn't taste bad, it looks gross. So I make it up to that step, divide in half and freeze, then add the cream at the end!  I write how much cream each serving will need on the container before freezing so I don't forget!

I serve this with rolls, biscuits, or corn muffins. It's great with a cheese quesadilla too! You could also add a salad if you wanted. It's be great with a southwest style salad with those addictive tortilla strips....

The thing I love about this recipe is that it can be tweaked easily. You can add more bacon, or omit it. You can use fresh or frozen corn. You can add potatoes, or even cooked chicken or crab meat! 

This is VERY easily doubled or tripled!  It serves four, as is.

Ingredients:

6 slices of bacon, chopped

2 Tablespoons butter

1 onion, chopped

2-4 cloves of garlic, minced

1 tablespoon fresh chopped thyme, OR 1tsp dried

1 bay leaf

Hot sauce

1 bag of frozen corn, or about 4 ears of fresh corn

2 Tablespoons flour

4 cups chicken broth or stock

1 cup cream or half and half

Cook bacon in a large pot or dutch oven until crispy and done. Scoop it out with a slotted spoon onto a plate lined with a paper towel. Pour out most of the grease, leaving a little, without cleaning the pot. Melt butter in same pan.  Add onion and garlic, cooking over medium heat until onions are translucent.  Add thyme, a few dashes of hot sauce (or more if you like it spicy!), and the bay leaf.  Cook one minute, or until fragrant.  

Add corn to pot.  If it's frozen, cook about 5 minutes until it's defrosted.  If it's fresh, cook 1-2 minutes.

Sprinkle flour into the pot and cook 1 minute.  Add chicken broth.  Season with salt and pepper to taste.  (The cream will make it slightly less salty when you add it!)

{If you are going to add potatoes, here is where you would add about 2 raw diced potatoes.  Or, you can wait until after it's frozen and you're defrosting it, and add them then.  Potatoes can get pretty mushy when frozen in a soup!  Either way, you'd need to cook them about 10 minutes, or until soft.}

Cook the soup about 10-15 minutes.  

If you're freezing it, cool it completely and divide into two containers before freezing.  I use plastic tupperware for this, but you could also use bags.  To defrost, I leave it on the counter for about an hour until I can just pop it out of the container, then put in a pot on medium low heat until it's hot.

If you're not freezing, or after you've heated it up, add the cream or half and half.  Do NOT let it boil!  Just simmer for a few minutes and serve!

{If you're adding chicken, put about 1 cup chopped cooked chicken in after you've added the cream, and heat thoroughly.}

          (After the cream is added!) 

Pizza!

I used one of the frozen pizza doughs tonight to make barbecue chicken pizza. I had two cups of frozen, cooked chicken that I hadn't used for the chicken spaghetti I made, so I broke off a good sized hunk of that and put the rest back in the freezer to be used for something else.

I used the Pioneer Woman's pizza dough recipe, which is SUPER easy and really good. I froze the dough (I made three) tightly wrapped in plastic wrap, and today around 2pm, I unwrapped one and thawed it on the counter for about 3 hours. There was even one little frozen bit in the middle, but it thawed out as soon as I started stretching the dough out over the pan. 

I put on the pizza, in this order: 

Bottled BBQ sauce

Mozzarella cheese, shredded

Cooked chicken, thawed

Raw chopped red onions

Chopped fresh cilantro

Bake in a 475° oven for 12-15 minutes! I served it with a green salad.

Glazed Carrots

I love, love, LOVE this recipe. I could seriously eat 2lbs of these carrots, and I really don't like cooked carrots...unless they're cooked this way. I bought a huge bag of baby carrots and tripled the recipe to freeze in portions.

I have seen recipes where the carrots are cooked in the glaze instead of boiled beforehand, and I really can't tell a difference. There are millions of glazed carrot recipes out there--with ginger, cilantro, whiskey instead wine...they're all yummy. 

What's not yummy is plain boiled carrots. Blech.

Ingredients:

1lb baby carrots, or sliced carrots.

2 Tablespoons butter

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 Tablespoons -1/4 cup white wine or orange juice 

Salt and pepper

Boil carrots in enough water to cover them for 5 minutes. Drain. In a skillet, melt butter. Whisk in sugar, until it stars to lighten in color. Add wine, and reduce. The mixture should look syrupy, but not liquidy. If its too thick, add a little more wine. Add carrots back to skillet to coat. 

When carrots are cool, divide into freezer bags. Distribute glaze evenly between bags.

Reheat on stovetop or in microwave. You can add some chives at the end if you've got 'em! 

Country Fried Steak

Okay. This was one of the biggest messes I've ever made in the kitchen. I love country fried steak with a fiery passion that cannot be extinguished...unless I have to bread and flash freeze 8 or 10 lbs of it. So you'd better love it like I do if you're going to make it. 

I actually would suggest making this on a separate day from your other meals, because if you've got steak juice/flour glue all over your hands, and then all of a sudden something needs to be stirred...yeah. That's not pretty. 

I don't measure anything in this recipe. I just kept mixing more flour with seasoning salt, and adding more buttermilk to the pan as I went so I wouldn't waste it. 

Ingredients:

Cube steak, cut into 2-3 inch manageable strips. 

Flour

Seasoning salt (I used Lawrys, but I've also used Chef Paul's "Magic" or just garlic salt before.)

Salt and pepper

Buttermilk

Cooking oil (for when you actually cook it later on)

You're going to flash freeze these, so get some cookie sheets ready. 

Salt and pepper all the steak strips. Put about 2 cups of flour, mixed with a teaspoon of seasoning salt into a shallow pan. Put about 1 cup buttermilk in another pan. Dip your strips into the buttermilk, then the flour, then the buttermilk, then the flour again. You could do I third time if you want! Lay them, not touching, on the cookie sheets. Freeze overnight, pry them off, and portion them into freezer bags. 

To cook, defrost nearly all the way. Heat a large skillet or Dutch oven with about an inch of oil to about 350°. Drop a few grains of flour in to see if it sizzles and is hot enough. Fry steak till brown on both sides, turning once. 

Chicken Fajitas

(This is what they look like frozen, but getting ready to defrost in the pan.)

This recipe can easily be doubled or tripled.  Since it's cooked, you could use bottled lime juice with similar results.  

Ingredients:

1/2 cup lime juice
1/3 cup olive oil
3/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
1 tablespoon cilantro
1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)
4-5 lbs raw chicken breasts
2-3 green peppers
2-3 onions
Tortillas
Fajita condiments:  cheese, sour cream, salsa, cilantro, etc.

Directions:  
Mix together all ingredients except chicken and vegetables.  Put marinade with chicken pieces in a large ziploc bag, and put in refrigerator for 2-3 hours.  Cook chicken breasts thoroughly in a skillet.  (If you want, you can cut the chicken into strips before cooking and it will go faster!)

Cut chicken into strips, and when cool, put in a gallon sized ziploc bag.  In a separate, smaller bag, put a mix of raw green peppers and onions, then put that bag in the chicken bag.  Close the whole thing up and freeze.  

To cook:  Put the contents of both bags in a skillet and heat on medium. By the time the chicken is heated, the peppers and onions will be done.  Serve on tortillas with any other condiments you want!

Flash Frozen Potatoes

Make homemade flash frozen potatoes, that you can use for mashed potatoes, in other recipes, or even seasoned and roasted potatoes.

Ingredients:
Large bag of potatoes--yukon golds work the best for freezing, followed by reds or russets.  
Salt

Preparation:
Cut up the potatoes into chunks; it's up to you if you want to peel them--I don't.  Put on a large pot of water to boil, when it's ready, put in the potatoes with a good amount of salt (at least 1 Tablespoon for 5 lbs) and cook them about 5 minutes.  You want them heated through, but not totally cooked.

When done, drain, and lay out in a single layer on two cookie sheets.  Let cool completely, then put in freezer overnight or until frozen solid.  Then put into bags.  

Planning Your Cooking

Since I didn't start this blog until after I'd finished everything, I don't have any pictures of what I did as I did it, but I can tell you, my kitchen was a mess for three days, and that was WITH cleaning as I went along.  I used almost a whole bottle of dishwasher detergent.  The floor was so greasy it was like a skating rink. 

I'm going to go ahead and tell you, if you're not a multi-tasker, this could get difficult.  I am good at having things all going at the same time, but I HAVE to have a written plan.   You want to try to have as many things going at the same time as you can, so that you can get more done, more quickly.

The equipment you'll need will vary, based on your recipes, but here's what I used this time:

• Two cast iron dutch ovens with lids
• Several cast iron skillets in different sizes
• Electric skillet
• Crock pot
• General pots and pans
• Knives, ladle, wooden spoons, etc.

This is my basic "Order of Operations."  (See, math teachers?  I used something you taught...sort of...)

1.  Prep all the meat.  Rinse, slice, dice, whatever.
2.  Chop up all the veggies you'll need.  Make sure you separate them all out so that you don't get confused.  
3.  Start a crock-pot recipe.
4.  Get something started in the oven.
5.  Put 1-2 recipes on the stovetop.
6.  Once that's all started and cooking on its own, do something on the counter.
7.  As soon as something is done in one place, get something else going while it's cooling down.
8.  Repeat.

Here's what this looked like for my recipes:

Day One:
1. Cut one pack of chicken into strips for fajitas. Put in bags to marinate for a couple of hours. Thin slice the other pack and pound till even thickness.  Rinse pork chops and boston butt.  Pick apart rotisserie chicken for chicken spaghetti.
2.  Chop 1,937,938,472,398,472,384 onions and garlic cloves.  No, really, that's how many. ;-)  Chop green peppers for spaghetti sauce and chicken spaghetti.  Slice onions and green peppers for fajitas.  Chop carrots and turnips for beef stew.  Chop apples for pork chops.
3.  Put Dr. Pepper Pork in crock pot.
4. Cook tilapia filets for fish cakes.  As soon as that's done, cook corn bread for stuffing.
5.  Cook hamburger meat in two batches on stove top.  Bag one batch, and use the rest for spaghetti sauce.  Make spaghetti sauce.
6.  As soon as corn bread is done, make stuffing and bake in muffin tins.
7.  While spaghetti sauce cooks, brown chicken for BBQ chicken and assemble.  Put in oven.
8.  Make beef stew on stovetop.
9.  While all of that is cooking, do countertop stuff--make souvlaki marinade, put together fish cakes, make pizza dough.
10.  When spaghetti sauce is done, use that burner to make chicken fajitas.  
11.  Brown pork in electric skillet, make apple pork chops.
12.  As soon as everything is cooled down, put in bags/containers and freeze.  Refrigerate pork/pork juice seperately to get rid of fat on top the next morning.

Day Two:  
1.  Deal with pork.  Shred, put in bags with sauce.
2.  Make all three soups on stovetop.  
3.  Put sweet potatoes in the oven and bake.
3.  Assemble and freeze pecan chicken.
4.  Assemble chicken spaghetti.
5.  As soon as one of the soups is done, make glazed carrots.
6.  When the next is done, cook cubed white potatoes.
7.  Assemble country fried steak strips.  The biggest mess and hassle in existence, PS.
8.  When sweet potatoes are cool, skin and mash.
9.  Put everything that's left over in bags/containers and freeze.

Day Three:
1.  Anything that's flash frozen (fish cakes, steak strips, potatoes, etc.) put in bags.
2.  Finish up anything you didn't finish the first two days.
2.  Pour a glass of wine and lie down.

Getting Started

The trick to successful freezer cooking is to 1) have a general idea about what will freeze,  what will not, and what containers you'll need, 2) have an idea about what kinds of recipes your family likes, even if you've not cooked it before, and 3) have a detailed plan.  A plan for cooking, freezer space, and menus.

General Freezing and Storing

You can search Google for "foods that freeze well,"  or "freezer cooking,"  and come up with thousands of recipes and ideas for cooking.  Here are a few things that don't freeze well, that we eat on a regular basis.  Dishes that are more "fancy" you wouldn't want to freeze anyway, because you'd want it fresh.  No one is freezer cooking filet mignon and cheese souffle!

Don't try to freeze: 

• Anything with sour cream, which unfortunately includes the most delicious food on earth, hash brown casserole.  It will curdle. :(
• Cooked eggs by themselves. (If it's in a baked good, it's fine!)  They just do weird things.  
• Soups that have dairy (half and half, cream, or milk) added at the end, but some soups (like broccoli cheese) where the milk has been cooked a while do fine. 
• Veggies that have not been blanched (except onions and green peppers!)

You also want to have a plan for what kind of freezer containers you'll use.  I put about 90% of what I cook in Ziploc freezer bags (do NOT get the cheap kind!) and the rest goes in those little disposable foil pans, or tupperware containers.  I freeze my chicken stock in glass jars with plenty of head space so they won't break.  

I have a big freezer in our garage, so I put everything in there; however, I could totally fit all that food inside if I organized it in a different way, and cleaned out the inside freezer.  If you have just a little space, you might want to only cook for a month, instead of longer.

There are two of us, plus Emerson, so I portion everything into two servings per bag/container, unless it's something Emerson will eat, in which case I put a little more. If you have a larger family, you're going to want to make your portions (and containers) larger, and you might want to double recipes if you want more servings.  

Learn how to flash freeze.  It will save your life.  The basic process is this:  Prepare or cook the food, then lay the pieces out on a cookie sheet.  Freeze all day or overnight, then put in bags.  THIS is a good website for more detailed directions.

I just bought loads of frozen veggies from Sams, but if you wanted to get bunches of green beans, broccoli, etc. fresh, and blanch and freeze everything, you can learn how from the Ball Blue Book or Google.  I learned how to do all that as a kid (thanks, Mama!) but it's a giant hassle.  For real.

Recipes

What did I do before the internet?  That is all I have to say about recipe-hunting.

I posted my menu of food, and you may read it and say "My family won't eat any of that."  So don't cook it.  Cook what YOU will eat!  I don't spend copious amounts of time looking for recipes.  If I find something I'm interested in, I either print it, or save it to the home screen on my phone, and then I can go back to it later.  (Or forget about it for two years, and while cleaning out my recipe book say "Oh yeah.  Those pork cutlets with balsamic blackberry sauce looked really good.  I should make those...")

I also get magazines that have good recipes.  Southern Living.  Cooks Illustrated.  Martha Stewart Living.

I also check blogs for good recipes.  The Pioneer Woman is a good one, and Kelly's Korner often does a Friday link-up with certain kinds of foods (freezer meals, soups, main dishes, etc.)

You do need to have a general idea of how many servings you're going to get out of a recipe, so you know if you want to double or triple it.  If you're a family of four, and it serves four, that's not a good freezer meal unless you make more.    

Planning

The next thing you'll want to do, after collecting a bunch of recipes and figuring out how many meals you'll have (you can do 30, 60, even 90, but most stuff will taste "off" after about 3 months.) is start planning your grocery trip. 

Go through each recipe, and scan it for things you don't have on hand and make a list.  I organized my list by store (Sams Club, Ingles, ABC Store, Fresh Market, etc.) and then by type of food.  So my Sams List looked like this:

Sams:

Meat:
Chicken Thighs (at least 12)
Chicken breasts (2)
Pork chops (6-8)
Hamburger (8-10 lbs.)
Stew meat

Frozen:
Salmon 
Tilapia
Shrimp
Green Beans
Corn

Produce:
Potatoes
Onions
Green Peppers
Garlic
Carrots 

Other:  
Olive Oil
Peppercorns

I would then go over recipes AGAIN.  I always *think* I have something, but I don't.  Or I completely forget to write it down....you do not want to have to make a quick trip out when you've got three pots on the stove and two in the oven!

Next post will be how to organize cooking so you'll get the most use out of your pots and pans, stove, counter, crock-pot, and your time!

August-September

(The Completed Freezer!)

I have done once-a-month cooking a couple of times; usually at the beginning of a school year. I have seen several websites that plan menus for the month, and some of them literally rely on 4-5 different meals.  That means you're eating the same thing every week!

What's gone wrong in the past for me is:

1.  Too many of the same dinners.
2.  No side dishes in the freezer, so I'm scrounging to find stuff at the last minute. 
3.  Not making a weekly menu, so I just get whatever out of the freezer, right before I cook it,  and have no plan.

So this time, I decided to do things differently:

1.  Make more of a variety of meals. (This is how I ended up doing 60 days instead of 30; I wrote down lots of dishes and decided to make them all!)  I made old stand-bys, but I included several dinners that we've never had!
2.  Include some meals that are "starters," so that each week is different.
2.  Make sides, and go to Sams Club and buy huge bags of frozen green beans, corn, etc.
3.  Make a menu that includes dinner, sides, and what I would need that week from the store (salad, shredded cheese, etc.) and STICK TO IT!!

Here's what I made for dinners, and where I got the recipe (unless I made it up, haha!) You will notice a reliance on the Pioneer Woman.  She is my hero.  Other recipes are posted at the top!  

Entrees:

Chicken Fajitas 
Fish Cakes
Country Fried Steak
Chicken Spaghetti
Beef Stew - I usually make a different stew, but this was a good change.  
Spicy Dr. Pepper Pork
Lamb Souvlaki Chops
Pecan Chicken
Apple Pork Chops
Whiskey Peach BBQ Chicken Thighs
Zuppa Tuscana Soup - this soup is amazing.  Make it now. 
Corn Chowder
Broccoli Cheese Soup

"Starter" Meals:

Cooked Hamburger Meat
Raw Chicken Cutlets
Salmon 
Spaghetti Sauce
Pizza Dough
Uncooked frozen shrimp

Sides:

Mashed sweet potatoes
Cubed cooked white potatoes
Glazed Carrots
Green Beans (purchased)
Broccoli (purchased)
Dinner Rolls (purchased)
Corn (purchased)
Stuffing cooked in muffin tins

I also have things in the pantry, like couscous, grits, rice, etc.  Clearly, you need "staples" like salt and pepper, basic seasonings, onions, garlic, olive oil, butter, etc.  

I'm going to include recipes on this blog, but I encourage you to come up with your own plan and menu, based on what your family likes.

So there's the basic plan.  The next few posts, I'll cover recipes, and what my plan was for making everything!