Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Tortillas don't freeze well - The Freezer Meal Adventure

Before my son James was born, I sat down and made 52 meals and froze them.
It was insane.
If you're thinking of undergoing such a task you might be interested in our process. If you're just interested in freezing meals, I'd skip down to the aftermath where I share a couple lessons learned, the most important of which is TORTILLAS DON'T FREEZE WELL.

Prepping:

So a lot of planning went into this.

First I picked out meals. Just searching Pinterest. I started looking for freezer meals specifically but then figured anything could be frozen so grabbed any recipe that seemed delicious.
Then I counted them up. 52 meals for 60 days. Waaaay too many! Most casseroles would take us a couple days to eat. Each soup recipe could feed an army. But, again, we were only here for 2 months and a normal stable family could afford some overflow into subsequent months.

VITAL PREP
The most important step was the shopping list. I made an excel document with column B as the grocery item. The following columns was a recipe each and I would type how many of a grocery item I needed. Then I would add up everything in column A. It wasn't the prettiest system in the world but I had a master shopping list. (Recipes vary on their use of quantity vs weight vs volume. This was a complication for sure!)

I printed off each recipe.
I separated out which recipes could have the chicken pre-cooked vs which ones had special seasonings or preparation.
Then I wrote in the margin the prep time vs the cook time for each item vs no cook. (So if something needed sauteed onions then mushrooms then add other soup ingredients then boil for 20 mins, I'd say it needed 10 minutes of prep before it could be left on its own) (No cook - Some casseroles required no cooking other than maybe chicken which could be precooked. Such items required no stove time which was nice.)
I separated out the soups.
And ordered everything by the amount of time they needed to cook.

Luckily, I had my mom, my sister, and my husband with me to help shop, so I tore the shopping list into thirds based on the type of food and gave out a list for produce, dry goods, and meat and dairy respectively. I flitted around helping each when they needed help deciphering, deducing, or deciding.
Three full grocery carts pulled into the checkout.
The groceries were $500. About $10 a recipe and *a lot* less per meal.

Cooking:

We started by cooking pounds and pounds of chicken. Most either needed to be cubed or shredded. My husband caught up on a lot of TV shredding chicken.
I had wanted to cut all the veggies before we started cooking so everything could just be grabbed and thrown in but that didn't turn out to be the most practical of decisions. And we cut as we went.

I picked a couple recipes that needed some time to simmer on the stove and got those underway while I turned to the recipes that were No Cook.
The goal was to finish as many recipes as possible both to keep up morale and to help clear the living room table of it's stock.

It took a while, and was much faster when my mother and sister were home helping, but all things considered, it went off without a hitch.


Aftermath:

As I stated, we made way too much food.
We should have bought smaller casserole dishes as each one supplied us with multiple meals and the constant reheating wasn't good for the quality.
They took FOREVER to unfreeze. We could lay them out the day before and they'd still be in the oven for hours. (Though we have reason to believe that oven wasn't the best.)
Soups were the best. They thawed much more quickly than the casseroles as they could be stirred and were very delicious.
Freezing flour tortillas in a casserole is a BAD IDEA! They degrade into mush. It's like eating raw dough. Don't do it. (Corn tortillas also degrade but it gives a tamale texture and doesn't trigger the gag reflex.) (Burritos are fine. It's the being submerged in wetness that kills them.)


It was so nice not to have to worry about cooking with a newborn. And living out in the country, not having to worry about making trips to the grocery store was also nice. It simplified life and I, a planner, loved the process!