There is a blog that I follow (mainly droul over) named ____________ (can't remember it for the life of me - I get an email when she updates her blog and she is probably taking some time off - I will fill in the blank when it comes to me. She takes three days and cooks most of her meals for the month). Okay, on with my point......
I have a good (okay - maybe great) stockpile of groceries, including meat in the freezer. The problem is that when I am in the mood for pulled pork, say around 4:00 in the afternoon, it is virtually impossible to take it from freezer to plate in two hours......or is it!?!?!?!
Here is a picture of them (ignore the Tony's pizzas in the background - I haven't found anyone to donate those to yet.)
Today's project is - you guessed it - pulled pork. It smells SOOO good cooking!!! I will also put those in jars and cover it with the juice. I think the juice helps with freezer burn.
Other foods that I have previously pre-cooked:
Hamburger meat: I got a great deal on the 80% hamburger meat, which we usually don't eat, but I cooked it, rinsed it, put it in ziploc bags and froze it. It makes for a quick baked pasta where you defrost the meat, add the sauce, cook the pasta. You have a meal in about 30 minutes. Also, you can add the cooked hamburger to Velveeta cheese and salsa for a quick snack. My SIL makes this GREAT dip called Pizza Dip. You could use it in that as well.
Chicken: When HT had their whole chickens on sale for .49, I stocked up. Instead of putting the whole chicken in the freezer, I cooked three chickens at a time in a big stockpot, deboned them and put the equivalent of one chicken in a ziplock bag, filled it with the juice, bagged it again - just in case - and froze them. I make a great chicken casserole and this makes it super easy. Plus, you could use it for home-made chicken and rice, chicken with pasta or chicken and dumplings. I also froze the extra chicken stock in jars. Throwing that away is like throwing $ down the drain!!!
One more thing......mashed potatoes.......you heard right. Last year, at our work Thanksgiving luncheon, someone from our group brought a small vat of mashed potatoes from K&W. We were cleaning up and it was time to go and no one wanted it. I brought it home and froze it in a ziplock bag. 6 months later, I thawed it, added a little butter and sour cream and you could not tell that it had been frozen. Whenever I have potatoes that I don't think we will be able to eat before they go bad, I cook them up and add minimal milk and butter to them, so that they are a little dry. I put them in ziplock bags and enjoy mashed potatoes later.
Where do I get my jars? Mainly, I save them. I have Mom pick them up for me when she goes to Thrift stores as well. There was a couple of weeks in a row that I kept mentioning to her that I needed more jars. She brought me a dozen wide mouth quart Ball jars with the lids still sealed in the box. WOW - What a find - I asked her where she got them from and she said K-Mart - THAT'S CHEATING!!!!!! But - her reward was my big smile (you would've thought someone gave me a million dollars ) and some of the stew and pork!!!
That's all I can think of for now.
Posts
1 comment:
Thanks for the tips. I didn't know how to save mashed potatoes. This will make my family happy, because we'll get to have them on days when I'm too darned tired to make them from scratch.
Post a Comment