The Imperfect Community

[Petulant Pixie]

In the next couple of weeks, I'm going to start stocking the freezer. I plan on making chili, spaghetti sauce and breakfast burritos. Anyone have anything else that freezes well? We're not (well, *I'm* not) big soup eaters here.

[prescott]

Lasagna (use the Barilla "no boil" noodles) and stuffed shells freeze well. But of course, then there's the baking time once you take it out of the freezer, didn't know if you were looking for "pop in the microwave" type stuff...

That's an awesome idea, we lived on takeout after the kids were born -- we're not "plan ahead" kind of people, lol. Of course with Graham we had an excuse.

[honeybee]

enchiladas! Either chicken or beef do well.

also for breakfast you can make french toast and freeze (let them cool off completely first!), then it can be reheated in the toaster.

[julymom]

How can you NOT be soup people? Soup is awesome!
I know meatloaf freezes well, as do meatballs. I don't eat beef or pork, so the fact that I'm telling you this is ironic.

[TheBean]

pizza...we are fans of frozen pizza. LOL

[Petulant Pixie]

Pizza. Yes, I imagine we will be having pizza delivered or doing frozen pizza a lot!

Enchiladas--just about a month ago dh and I made enchiladas, and we were so proud of ourselves, making the sauce (which was really easy) instead of using stuff from a can. They were wonderful, but the kids HATED them! We made a big ass pan, enough for two dinners and a couple of lunches and the kids just bitched and moaned and ended up eating peanut butter sandwiches instead. I don't know what's wrong with them, really. They didn't like the sauce, they said. It took years of offering chili to them a couple times a year for them to finally like it, so maybe we will make a pan of enchiladas to freeze and make them taste it.

Lasagna is a good idea. I just don't love lasagna. I do my sauce and put it on the refridgerated tortellini or ravioli instead. And that's easy.

JM--I don't know, I've just never loved soup. The kids are all right with it, they eat it. I mean, we'll EAT it, but for us, we don't appreciate the difference between home-made toiled over soup and the top-rung Campbells stuff. People have insisted that it's because we've never had good home-made soup and so they make it and I admit, yeah, it's good, but never good enough for me to go through the effort of making it myself.

The frozen french toast is an interesting idea. I will have to try that. I make incredible french toast (one secret is that I use Texas toast, and really let it soak in the batter. Another tip is to use a drop of vanilla in the batter. And finally, the syrup I use is two parts maple and one part light Karo (again with the vanilla flavoring) and warm it up before serving). I miss french toast. Sigh. 27 more days!

I found some chicken casserole thing to try, too. So, there will be a few things, and I imagine we'll actually COOK, too, we won't be totally dependent on the stuff in the freezer.

[Scout]

I was going to suggest meatloaf, too. I will sometimes make two, have one for dinner that night and freeze the other.

Another idea is to stock up on the fixings for quick, easy dinners. Get one of those big bags of individually-frozen bnls sknls chicken tenders that can be quickly thawed and cooked without a lot of planning, stock up on pantry staples like rice, pasta, canned tomatoes (we keep a ton of Rotel ), beans, etc. mac and cheese with tuna is a favorite at our house for very last-minute, quick dinners. We make awesome burritos by cooking bnls chicken, brown rice, Rotel, and black beans all together (also yummy in a bowl with a few tortilla chips, cheese, tomato, salsa, etc). Since I'm not good at planning, we eat a lot of quick, one-dish meals like this. And ok, here's my guilty secret staple meal that I have made since college but adapted to make it just slightly lower fat and cal: sausage macaroni. OMG, it's so good. I cook 2 boxes of a "Light" deluxe mac and cheese or shells and cheese, brown and crumble a tube of breakfast sausage (I get the Jimmy Dean 50% less fat sausage that is slightly less than a lb), and two cans of rotel. I think this started with me putting leftover taco meat into mac and cheese. Anyway, it's very easy (I boil the macaroni, dump it into a colander and use the same pot to brown the sausage, then dump everything else in). Also, stock the freezer with bags of frozen veggies since you won't be very able to shop for fresh, and then you can still get your veggies in.

[kathyjm]

We do a ton of freezer cooking (we make like 30 DIFFERENT meals and freeze them).

One of my fav's is chicken pot pie with dill biscuit topping (you just need to mix the biscuit dough the day of cooking). Calzones are fun for freezing too. Meatballs are cool because you can make like a triple batch and use them for different things, spaghetti, meat balls and sour cream, swedish meatballs, etc... Make a bunch of homemade pizza dough and you can freeze that too (after it rises), heck you can throw it in the bread machine while you're making the rest of your meals to freeze and divide it and freeze it. You can make stir fry meats (freeze them in marinade). You can freeze almost anything. One thing you can do to save time is make a tomatoe sauce that can be used several ways (spaghetti, lasagna, calzones, veal parmesan, etc..) Here's a list of things you CANT freeze. Go through your recipe box and decide what you can freeze and make it. If you want any recipes, let me know.

*raw salad veggies such as lettuce and tomatoes
*hard-boiled eggs
*potatoes, rice or pasta in liquid (you CAN freeze them if they aren't in liquid, for example we make a macaroni and ham casserole that freezes just fine). You can add them later when you're reheating a frozen dish.
*Instant rice
*Breaded and/or fried foods
*most sauces and gravies made with cornstarch, milk or sour cream

You can do desserts too!