Cooking for the Freezer..

Purplekylie22

Cottage Pie, Chilli, Chicken Chasseur, Currys, Soup, Toad in the hole (make up the batter add the sausages then freeze in a foil tray if you have any to spare then cook from frozen)
What do you like eating?

bluebird

I bulk cook meals and freeze them. Meals such as chicken curry,spag bol the sauce only,shepherds pie,and mash spud all freeze well.I use the mash spuds during the week for quick meals and it saves wasting spuds as i found the bigger the bag the quicker they sprouted so i started making mash and freezing it.Buy the foil containers in supermarkets for messy foods like curry, use plastic containers for foods that won't stain.

Laura007

Hi All,

Im looking for your expertise really, I work long hours monday to Friday and i know i eat more convenience foodthen i should but this weekend im looking to turn it all round and spend all of tomorrow in the kitchen making various things to freeze.
So far on my list i have:

Lasagna (although i would like a tried and tested receipe for both the red and white sauces if anyone can help with that?!:D)
Chilli potato wedges
Garlic Mash
Chilli Mash
Soup (various)

What else do you make when batch cooking?! Or could you recommend any dishes?

Thank you in advance for your help :T:T:T:T:T
Laura x

tiff

I have been looking at blogs about this as I'm looking for a freezer and would like to batch cook when it arrives to fill it up. Americans use the term once a month cooking or OAMC so you could try searching for that.

These are a few of the blogs I've found

http://www.aturtleslifeforme.com/search/label/freezer%20cooking

http://www.tammysrecipes.com/node/3848

http://lifeasmom.com/category/good-eats/oamc

nicoc

Instead of making the lasagne fully prepared up (or in addition to it actually) you could make up plenty of batches of bolognaise type mince. So mince with fried onions, herbs, garlic, tom puree, few caroots grated in, mushrooms shopped in etc and then freeze them. When you take them out you can then make them into various mince based dishes, so for example defrost a batch, shove in a pan with some kidney beans and chiili powder/flakes and voila chilli or cook some up and have with spaghetti. Another one with some beef stock/gravy and topped with mash potato would then make cottage pie?

That might be a dreadful idea!

I guess other things could be stews, a basic tomato sauce for pasta, curries?

Sure someone else will be along shortly with much better advice!

BitterAndTwisted

If you're buying minced beef for the lasagna anyway you could consider making bolognaise sauce for pasta, chilli con carne and pastitsio (Greek macaroni pie). Macaroni cheese while you're making that white sauce for the lasagna and cauli cheese, too.

For the white sauce on top of the lasagna I just make an ordinary white sauce from a roux. For the tomato sauce, just the usual which is sweated-off onions/celery in olive oil and then tomato puree/tinned toms/passata plus herbs and seasoning. Add any other veg that you have to hand that needs using up. Grated carrots add flavour and bulk without being really obvious that they're in there.

I would advise against wearing yourself out cooking up a storm on the first weekend or you may become discouraged. You could decide to make a decent-sized batch of something each weekend depending on what you like and what's available at the keenest prices.

Don't forget to properly label all your containers! I can be fun having a freezer pot-luck dinner now and then but the novelty does wear off after a while, especially when you end up eating the same one thing night after night and it's only really an accompaniment in any case. *experience speaking here*

eleanor73

Laura007 wrote: »

Hi All,

Lasagne
Chilli potato wedges
Garlic Mash
Chilli Mash
Soup (various)

What else do you make when batch cooking?! Or could you recommend any dishes?

Laura x

I batch cook loads. Out of your list I probably only do Soup. I do have leftover portions of lasagne in the freezer but i wouldn't personally cook one up just for the freezer as I prefer it fresh.

My main dishes I do are: Chilli con carne, curries, stews, casseroles and pasta sauces (without the pasta!). I find that most of these improve with keeping/freezing rather than get worse.

Hope that helps.

FairyPrincessk

I've got to second Bitter and Twisted on the not wearing yourself out idea. I always try to stock up the freezer just before the beginning of term and while sometimes I might take one day and do several things, I usually find it more effective to just make an extra big batch of something on the weekend and put half in the freezer. I feel a bit guilty for this, but I buy a pack of disposable foil takeaway contains and do one set of those (usually enough for OH and I to have one meal a week like that during term time). I find that some nights the washing up can be as much of an issue as the cooking. These are also nice to have when we're about to go away or otherwise need to eat and not make a mess.

On ideas--I'd suggest you consider adding some chicken dishes to your freezer. Thinks like chicken/veg/leek whatever pie, chicken soup, or even cooked chicken that is pulled off the carcass frozen in a bag and ready to pop into something can be good. If I'm going to spend a saturday cooking this is usually why as I can also get the bones in the stock pot and freeze hm stock as well. I find the mince stuff I can just make each weekend as I go along until I have enough built up.

nuatha

Its easy to under estimate how much work can be involved in this at first. Approx 2 monthly I spend a weekend processing a sack of potatoes, a sack of onions and 3-4 kg of mince.
My usual routine is start on the Friday evening, and peel a sack (10kg) of onions, grate 2kg of carrots and blitz 2 heads of celery.
3.5 kg of the onions get blitzed in the food processor and are packed into small freezer tubs with the carrot and celery. This is Thriftlady's vegetable hash and forms the basis of most of my soups, stews etc. The rest of the onions are sliced, put in a couple of bowls clingfilmed and in the fridge overnight. If the weather is decent I then spend half an hour in the garden with the doors left open until I can see clearly again and the worst of the smell has gone (OH tends to be out those Fridays, wonder why)
Saturday morning I brown half the mince with some sliced onions and it goes into the slowcooker with some stock and is left to cook for several hours.
I tip a 56lb bag of potatoes onto the floor and sort them for shapes and sizes. There's a size/shape I find easiest to process into wedges. (The last sack yielded 14lb of these) more tubular ones get put to one side for making hotpots or dauphinoise (easiest to process with a mandolin) nice bakers get put to oneside, the rest will become mash.
Scrub the ones for wedges, then half and cut three wedges per side. These go into a pasta insert for a stock pan and are par boiled. (Pasta insert means I can drain, reload and back into the same water very quickly. Drained wedges are split between two roasting tins, sprinkled with sunflower oil and tossed through with a cajun spice mix (other mixes or herbs work well, just this is the current preference Chez Nuatha) and baked in a preheated oven (180c) for 10 mins. By which time the next lot should be par boiled. Repeat until all used. When cooled these go into freezer bags and are vac packed then frozen. Meanwhile I start peeling the spuds for mashing.
The baking potatoes are stored and the potatoes for processing with the mandolin are put away for a free evening or a later weekend.
When the first lot of mince is ready its decanted into a stock pan and the second half is done. I'll add grated carrot and red lentils to the cooked mince (I don't have a big enough slow cooker, to stretch it there) and it gets cooked for another half an hour. a third to half of the total mince will be used as is (mostly as cottage pies, topped with cold mash in a freezer container and frozen down) the rest will be turned into bolognese (add tomatoes, tomato puree, garlic and herbs) or chilli (tomatoes, garlic, kidney beans, spices and chocolate .
Boiling potatoes and making mash is usually Sunday mornings task. The water from par boiling repeated loads of wedges becomes the basis for a potato and leek soup. The afternoon is portioning stuff down, vac packing and freezing then cleanup. Supper is anything but potatoes or mince based - just can't face them by then.
This only works because I have a fairly large kitchen, a collection of large stock pans and a lot of fridge and freezer capacity.
The first time I tried this I swore never again - then read lots of OAMC blogs, picked people's brains and realised that limiting what I was doing to a few related recipes made life a lot easier.

If you make bolognese one weekend and bechamel sauces the next, take a bag of each out of the freezer to defrost the night before, you are only 40 minutes from a fresh lasagne or a spaghetti bolognese or a cauliflower cheese.

Good luck with it.

Laura007

You are all superstars...... thank you very much for all yuor help and advice!!! x