Seven Steps of Freezer Cooking

Step 1 – Set Dates for Planning, Shopping and Cooking

If you don’t set the date, you will probably never get around to it.  The first time you plan (especially if you are cooking with a friend), it will seem to take forever.  Deciding on recipes, digging out your cookware, doing the math – it will seem to take forever.  But we guarantee that you will get quicker at it!  Put all three of these dates on your calendar and leave yourself plenty of time to get the work done.  We have heard from a few cooks who tried to plan, shop, and cook in a 24 hour time period. (Okay, we admit that we tried it once ourselves.)  Not a good idea.

Step 2 - Take Inventory

You will be spending a fistful of money when you shop for a month’s worth of entrees. Don’t make the mistake of buying things that you already have in the kitchen.  We take a simple inventory before each planning session and fill out a worksheet recording what we have, how much there is and what it’s worth.  Refrigerator and pantry space will be at a premium on cooking day so use up the milk, eggs, cereal and everything you can! 

Step 3 - Have Your Planning Session

You have three jobs to do when you plan for the big cooking day:

• Choose your recipes

• Tally your ingredients

• Make your shopping list

CHOOSE YOUR RECIPES – Many people get stuck here because they don’t know what will freeze and what won’t.  If this is you, the easiest thing to do is to start with recipes from our website or our Freezer Cooking Manual.  If you’re brave, go ahead and read the freezing rules and choose recipes that fit the guidelines.

• How many? - Remember, your time saving comes in making multiples of recipes.  We suggest for those wanting to do 30 entrees in one day, choose 8-10 recipes and make 3 of each.  Most new freezer cooks find that 30 entrees last them much more than a month.

• Start with Tried and True – This isn’t the time to experiment with what we have come to call “weirdo food”.  Freeze what the family is used to eating.  Sandwich fillings, baked chicken, meats in marinades, meatloaf, and lasagna are good for starters.

• Use the Crock Pot – We learned early on that a crock pot can be your best friend on cooking day. We try to do 2 entrees on each assembly day.  Meat sauces, roasts, sandwich fillings, soups, stews and chili are all good candidates for crock pot cooking.

• Do Component Cooking – Freezing commonly used ingredients like cooked ground beef and poultry in 2-3 cup portions can be great for impromptu cooking creativity.

• Choose a Few Versatile Recipes – Some of you are thinking that eating the same thing 3 times a month will get pretty boring. If that’s you, we recommend that you choose a few recipes that begin as one simple idea but can turn into several different meals.  For example, if you freeze boneless, skinless chicken breast in marinade, you can create a million great dinners from it. Of course, you can grill it.  You could also broil it, coat it with crumbs and bake it, or cut it into strips or chunks and stir fry it.  You could roll the stir-fried strips in a tortilla and call it a fajita or use them in a sandwich or salad.  You get the idea!  Starts out as one easy entrée but becomes lots of different dinners!

• Plan Healthy Options – One of the best things about freezer cooking is that you are basically cooking from scratch which makes it really easy to substitute the healthy options that are important to you. We’ve heard from people on every kind of diet who are successfully doing 30 Day Gourmet cooking.

 

TALLY YOUR INGREDIENTS – Many math-impaired cooks are tempted to quit right here (including Tara).  If the thought of mixed fractions and converting pounds to ounces is already giving you a headache, breathe easy.  When we started cooking this way, we thought that the easiest way to do this was to lay all the recipes out on the table and then add them up ingredient by ingredient.  All the salt, all the sugar, all the pork chops.  WRONG!  This method leads to sure disaster.  Here’s what we do now:

• Convert your Recipes to Quantity Cooking – We came up with a worksheet and began converting all of our recipes into a format that multiplies the ingredients for each entrée out from  1-6. All of the sample recipes on our site are set up this way. If you don’t know what we mean, check out our sample Parsley Parmesan Chicken Recipe.  This saves you the headache of multiplying those ingredients in your little head every time you cook.  And who remembers that 2 T. x 6 = 3/4C. anyway? Most of us would just measure out 12T. and wonder why that recipe took so long.

• Add ‘Em Up – We use an 11x17 tally sheet (it’s in the Freezer Cooking Manual) to tally up all of the ingredients.  We do it one recipe at a time.  After we have filled in the ingredients for each recipe, we tally up the columns, subtract what we have in inventory and we’re left with a total for each ingredient.  Many cooks have told us that our tally sheet is worth the price of the manual alone.  It really does organize the job for you.  Before we came up with this little gem, Nanci was making 2 or 3 extra trips to the store on cooking day for missing ingredients.  We don’t miss a thing now.

 

MAKE YOUR SHOPPING LIST – This is the easy part.  We just transfer the totals from the tally sheet to the shopping list (our worksheet is divided into categories).  Some people shop with just the tally sheet but Nanci usually goes to more than one store and she thinks it’s quicker to have a separate list for crossing bought items off.

• Write total pounds or ounces – Instead of writing six 28 oz. cans, write down 168 oz. It will make things easier in the store.  And take a calculator!

• Include miscellaneous items – Your cooking day will come to a screeching halt if you run out of dish soap or trash bags. Add these to the shopping list.

• Check the store ads before you plan – If saving money is important to you, check out the ads BEFORE you choose your recipes.  When you’re buying 30 pounds of ground beef or chicken breasts, that rock bottom price can save you a pile of money!

Step 4 – Go Shopping

Nanci does the shopping for our cooking duo and considers it a personal challenge to sniff out the best prices and deals.  We rarely spend more than $5 per entrée to feed our families of 5 and 6.  Not bad, eh?

Before you go clean out your refrigerator and freezer.  You will need as much room as possible for all of those groceries and you won’t feel like doing it after you drag all of that food into the kitchen!  Perishable ingredients should not be left at room temperature for more than 2 hours.

When you go leave yourself a day or two between shopping day and cooking day to do any prep work. If you shop the night before cooking day, it will feel like you are on your feet for about 3 days straight.

Shopping Tips:

• Buying in large quantities usually saves you money and time.  We purchase Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, soy sauce and cooking oil in 1 gallon containers at a restaurant supply store.  The leftovers can be stored for the next cooking day.

• Grocers will often waive the limits if they know what you’re doing and we LOVE to talk about what we’re doing.  Call them a few days ahead and ask if you can buy 30 pounds of the advertised ground beef at .99/lb.  Assure them that you’re not a restaurant.  We’ve rarely been turned down.

• Nanci’s latest kick is to do the price matching guarantees.  It saves going to more stores and the store that DOESN’T have the meat on sale usually has more of it available than the store advertising the sale. It’s been working great for us.  Check with an employee before you fill your cart.  The rules can be a little picky.

Step 5 – Do Your Prep Work

We try to think of this project as a “cooking week”.   Of course, it doesn’t take a whole week but there are things that you can do ahead of time that will make you cooking day go so much quicker.  No one wants to stand around for hours on cooking day morning watching 4 turkey breasts boil so that you can cool and bone them.  Just remember, if you have chosen 8-10 recipes and make 3 of each, you will only be doing this once every 4-6 weeks and IT WILL BE WORTH IT! Our rule for pre work is: The more of it we get done before assembly day, the better! Here are some pre-assembly day chores that you can tackle:

• skin chicken parts

• cook and drain pasta

• make coatings for chicken parts

• start crock pot meal

• brown ground meats

• dice or grind ham

• make sauces

• cook and dice poultry

Step 6 – Assemble Entrees & Stock Your Freezer

How long will it take? – You can plan on a 9-5 day to get 30 entrees assembled and into the freezer.  If you pre-cook everything for quick re-heats, your day will be longer.  And don’t think that it will take you twice as long as it does us.  We’ve met cooks who have put 100 entrees each into their freezers in a 12 hour day. Wow!  We’re impressed!

What equipment do I need? – Not as much as you think.  Here’s what we consider essential:

• 1-2 large mixing containers for each cook

• 2 sets of measuring cups and spoons for each cook

• one large dutch oven

• long handled utensils

• crock pot for each cook

• large measuring containers

Have you picked up on the word “large”? You will save lots of time by combining the filling for all 3 quiche in one bowl and then dividing them out into your 3 crusts rather than making each recipe separately.  To do this, you need LARGE stuff.

What procedure do you use?

• We work in the same kitchen but not on the same recipe.  For those of you who chose to cook with a partner, don’t even try doing the same recipe together.  You will get WAY confused. We divide the recipes by protein-type (no cross contamination problems). She does the beef.  I do the chicken.  We share the rest.

• Do one recipe at a time.  Say Tara starts with the Cheeseburger Quiche recipe.  She will mix up enough filling for 6 quiches – 3 for each of us.  Then she says “how do you want yours packaged, pal?” Nanci always chooses the freezer bag option so her quiche fillings go into 1 gallon labeled freezer bags to be thawed and poured into the pre-purchased, frozen shells right before baking. Tara opts to fill her quiche shells on cooking day and pre-bake them. Then she cools them and cuts them into individual pieces and even bags them separately for quick re-heats.

• We like doing a recipe from start to finish and checking it off the list before moving on to the next one. It’s safer than having all the recipes going at once with food sitting out everywhere!

• Be sure to label everything.  It will all look alike after a day in the freezer! We put the name of the entrée, the date it went into the freezer and simple cooking instructions so that no one has to get the cookbook out to start dinner.

How do you package your foods for the freezer?

There are lots of options here. A lot of it depends on your freezer space and your cooking style.  Nanci is a last minute person who likes to thaw everything at 5:30 in the microwave hence she uses freezer bags almost exclusively.   Tara, on the other hand, likes to freeze in her serving dishes and usually has 2-3 entrees thawing in the refrigerator at the same time.

• If you choose freezer bags, don’t skimp.  Use FREEZER bags!  Double bag your meats in marinade.  One little puncture and you’ll be sorry!

• The trick with freezer bags is to freeze them in thin, flat layers.  You don’t want a jigsaw puzzle in your freezer.

• If you choose rigid containers, use good quality freezer containers.  Your serving dishes work fine as long as you slide them into a 2 gallon freezer bag.  Try to remove as much air as possible.

What about casseroles?

If you don’t have enough serving dishes to freeze your casseroles combined, you can freeze the components of the casserole individually and combine the ingredients just before baking. Nanci does this all the time.  When she freezes Chicken Divan, she will have a 2 gallon freezer bag with 5 bags inside – one with the chicken, one with the sauce, one with the broccoli, one with the rice and one with the cheese.

Just be sure to put the parts into a larger bag.  We’ve made that mistake a few times!

This trick also works well for families with different dietary needs.  If Johnny is lactose intolerant, mom can scoop out a serving of the chicken, the rice, and the broccoli for him.  Then the casserole is combined and baked for the rest of the family.

How do you remember what you have in the freezer?

We didn’t used to know at all.  It was a “reach in and eat whatever comes out with you” situation.  One of our cooks came up with the Meal Inventory Checklist that is now included in our Freezer Cooking Manual. It works great for keeping track of what you’ve used and what’s left. Fill it out as you put the food into the freezer – saves standing on your head and counting it all later!

Step 7 – Clean Up and Evaluate

Try to plan enough time to do the clean up on cooking day.  You don’t want to face it in the morning!  Just remember that you won’t be dirtying these pots and pans and utensils for a very long time.  The clean up time that you save on a daily basis by cooking this way will astonish you.

Now is the time to do a quick evaluation of what went right and wrong.  What would you do differently next time? Jots down some notes.

By now, if you have stayed on course, you have planned, shopped, prepared, assembled, packaged, labeled and frozen a bunch of great foods for your freezer.  Whew!  Take a deep breath and relax.  Tomorrow you will begin to enjoy all of the benefits of being a 30 Day Gourmet.

Please Note: This is a shortened version of our Seven Steps of Freezer Cooking which is available in our Freezer Cooking Manual. To learn more about our Freezer Cooking Manual click here. To order our Freezer Cooking Manual or any of our other products click here.