I know what you’re thinking. Hey – isn’t she the one who HATES to cook? How can SHE write a cooking newsletter every month? Funny, that’s what my kids are saying too. (My husband knows better.)

Well, the truth is – yes, I hate to cook – on a daily basis, that is. Now freezer cooking - that’s another story. Cooking every 30 or 60 days is my favorite way to get the dreaded task done. And in the course of freezer cooking with Tara (a truly great cook!) for the past 8 years I actually managed to learn quite a bit. There’s always more to know, though, so I’m really looking forward to diving in and learning along with many of you.

This month’s newsletter is a salute to seniors and made me think about the older cooks in my family. I was born in Iowa and remember going to my grandparents’ house every Sunday for dinner. We always ate the same thing and it always tasted great! Roast, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans and pies for dessert. The thought of freezing that meal would have been foreign to Grama Tillman but for me it’s the only way that I can consider having company!

Everyone says that my mom was a great cook. I just didn’t pay attention, I guess. In June, my family got together at my sister’s house in Maine and I was commenting to my sister that mom must have made dinner every night but I just don’t remember what she cooked. Kathie (she’s a great cook, too) began rattling off mom’s signature dishes and it all came back to me. Wow – I do have a cooking heritage! Sure wish I had paid attention.

I met my husband, Bob, at our church’s youth group when I was 12 years old. We were married in 1979 in Union Lake, Michigan and have lived in Brownsburg, Indiana since 1981. I was an English, Speech and Drama teacher until we began having kids. Katy is 16 and just began driving this week. Becky is 13 and spends most of her time on the phone or on e-mail (luckily she can’t do both at once). Adam is 11 and just began checking his hair and clothes with his older sisters before leaving for school each morning. Jenna is 8 and thankfully still enjoys reading, cuddling, and cooking with her mom.

Click here for the Slagle family photo – critters included!

For the past 4 years our family has been engrossed in one of those “bonding” projects. We built a log home and moved in when it was only half done. What an adventure! We’re still at it - which is why I have a great kitchen but no cupboard doors yet.

Click here to see the log home project and my “test kitchen”!

We love having company – planned and impromptu. Last Sunday we brought 5 extra kids home from church. I love that stuff! Funny, though, how having people over usually means feeding them. I couldn’t do it without my freezer food.

I’m excited about making our website the #1 source of info for freezer cooking. It’s so much fun to hear from you. Your ideas, recipes, stories and suggestions are so encouraging. To keep up with all of it alone would be impossible. I’d like to introduce some key people who are part of the 30 Day Gourmet team.

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Meet the 30 Day Gourmet Team

Curtis Dicken

Curtis began working as our webmaster almost a year ago and has done a great job of “professionalizing” the site. This guy knows his stuff and we are lucky to have him. He’s also a professional photographer and has taken most of the photos that you see on the site (the good ones, anyway). Curtis is the techie brain behind the eStore , the message boards and everything else so if you have any comments, questions or problems please contact him at webmaster@30daygourmet.com.

Tammy Davis

Tammy has been an active 30 Day Gourmet fan for years and spends lots of time on our message boards. She has joined the team recently to monitor the boards and tackle the job of posting all of those great recipes from the old boards onto the new boards.

Read Tammy’s welcome letter here!

Consultant Coordinator

In the near future, we will be hiring one of our consultants to oversee this growing area of 30 Day Gourmet. We now have over 40 consultants who teach classes and conduct seminars about freezer cooking. Watch for a special section on the site just for consultants as well as a password-protected area of the message boards for consultants to share tips and ideas.

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NEW “STUFF”

Cooking Notebook – We’re really excited about this new product. It will give us all a place to put those piles of recipes that we keep downloading from the website! Manual owners can just copy their favorite recipes from their book and add them to this “working notebook”. Each 2” white view binder:

is personalized for the owner
includes 12 tabbed divider pages – (the tabs correspond with the recipe categories for our web recipes)
has 13 extra page protectors to get you started

If you buy the “parts” and do this yourself, you will spend this much. We buy in “bulk” (we do everything that way, huh?) so let us do the work.

On sale now for: $9.95 (regular price is $12.95)

Click here to see and/or order the new cooking notebook.

First eBook – Every day we get calls and e-mails from cooks saying “where’s the holiday book?” Well – it’s back! We are embarking on a new venture here and jumping into the world of eBooks. This will be a great way for us to create all of those “special” freezer books that you’ve been asking for. Freezer Cooking for Diabetics, Freezer Cooking for Vegetarians, Lowfat Freezer Cooking, Low Carb Freezer Cooking. You get the idea.
What’s an eBook? An electronic book is just a book that you pay for online and then download from the internet straight to your computer/printer. The pages are all set up in Adobe Acrobat so that every computer and printer will read and print the pages the same. You can also save it to your hard drive for later reference.
What’s the advantage? The price is lower for you because the costs are lower for us. You pay no shipping. And best of all—you don’t have to wait. Once you place your order, you are e-mailed instructions for downloading your eBook.
What’s the price? The regular price of our eBooks are $6.95. We’re cutting the price to $4.95 as a special introductory offer.
Interested in writing an eBook? We’re looking for experienced freezer cooks to partner with us in the publication of these eBooks. If you’re interested in learning more, e-mail Nanci at ebooks@30daygourmet.com. You will receive an autoresponse with all of the details within a few minutes.

Recipes Button on Homepage

Curtis is doing a great job helping us make the website the #1 source for freezer cooking information. One of the latest additions is the “RECIPES” button at the top of the homepage. We’ve been wanting to do this for a long time. When you click here, it will pull up a page with a listing of 50 freezer recipes available on the site with links to each. Another 50 recipes just for manual owners are listed here also. I’m working on adding the newsletter and message board recipes here too.

Message Boards Update

Thanks for your patience as we build our message boards. Curtis has just added a “user profile” feature so that you can find out a little bit about your fellow freezer cooks. With Tammy on board, the message boards are a great place to ask/answer specific questions about freezer cooking – anything from menu ideas to packaging tips to recipes galore. To visit the boards now, click here.

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SALUTE TO SENIORS!

With Grandparents’ Day just around the corner, I wanted to focus on seniors in this issue of Chewin’ The News. I have some great memories of my grandparents and many of them seem to revolve around food. My Grandma Tillman was a schoolteacher and librarian in Iowa but my best memories of her are the times we spent together in her large garden. My treat for helping pick the green beans was to sit on the back porch with a shaker of sugar and a big stalk of fresh cut rhubarb - eating away. Yum!

We love hearing from seniors who are using the 30 Day Gourmet system in their own cooking or to help their daughters and granddaughters. Here’s what a few have said recently:

Your method works well for retirees who do not want to spend every day thinking of what to cook when we have more fun things to do. The 6 person meals gives us 3 meals in the freezer. I have enjoyed your recipes so much and tell everyone who will listen about this method of cooking.

Joyce

Your cooking ideas are great – even for a grandma who doesn’t have to cook for a family who lives at home. I plan to use this to help supply food for my family who have young children. This is a way I can help them out!!

Glendia

My daughter and I cooked all day this past Saturday and had a ball!! What fun to have all those meals in the freezer and so economical, too. I plan to use this method for a long, long time!

Marge

Click here to read more comments from seniors.

I’ve found that seniors freezer cook for a variety of reasons. Some quantity cook for themselves because it’s hard to cook for 1 or 2 on a daily basis. Many cook with daughters and granddaughters who feel inexperienced in the kitchen and gain lots of confidence from having a “real” cook around. Others provide day care for grandchildren and want to provide nutritious meals and snacks. Lots of seniors freezer cook to provide meals for others who can’t cook for themselves. Based on their ideas and suggestions, I’ve put together a list of:

10 Steps to Freezer Cooking for Seniors

1.	Choose recipes that seniors like. Some favorites are “meat and potato” type entrees, soups and stews and frozen salads. Many seniors don’t care for casseroles. Follow the rules when choosing recipes to freeze. You can access a list at: Click here to review the Freezing Rules.
2.	Many seniors like their foods well seasoned as the taste buds seem to fade a bit with age. We often tease my dad about the time we recruited him to taste test the recipes for our holiday cookbook. He dipped everything in salsa first which made us wonder how he could choose the best stuffing recipe!

Click here for the other 8 steps!

Last month our Apron winner was a young mom who had attended a seminar at our local library. When I contacted her about the apron, she replied by e-mail and told us about her 3-generations cooking day. Here’s what she said:

I wanted to let you know how excited I am to have SURVIVED my first "cooking day!" After attending your seminar at the Brownsburg library, my mom and I now have meals in the freezer to last for six days a week until mid October. O.K. - so we went a little overboard! We had a great time, and we are both so relieved to not have to worry about "What's for dinner?" every night! Mom also took several meals to my aging grandparents, whose ability to cook nutritious/tasty meals seems to dwindle every year. I'm actually starting my first night of meals tonight. I waited until today, because I'm a teacher, and today is the first day back to school. Instead of being stressed about what will happen when I get home, I am so excited to just be able to spend the time at home with my two boys while my already-prepared dinner warms in the oven. Thanks for showing me how to simplify my life - my family will see the rewards!

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BONUS RECIPES

For our bonus recipes this month, I went to some “senior” friends of mine and asked for a “signature” recipe of theirs. You know, something that they are expected to bring to the potluck dinner. Which, of course, made me think about myself. What are my “Nanci Slagle made that” dishes? Hmmm…. I’m working on that one.

Quick Chicken Casserole is a favorite because it’s so easy to put together and freeze and is made with inexpensive, “normal” ingredients. The best thing about it, though, is that the recipe came from Mrs. Thompson who was the librarian at my elementary school in Wixom, Michigan. I still attribute my love of books and libraries to this dear senior lady.

Click here for the Quick Chicken Casserole recipe!

Barb’s Apple Bars come from my mother-in-law’s recipe file. She makes them whenever we come home for a visit and has taken them to countless church dinners.

Click here for Barb’s Apple Bars recipe!

Birdie’s Banana Split Dessert is “way good” as my kids would say. The 9x13 pan must weigh 10 lbs. when you’re done assembling this one. Birdie is a “senior” friend of mine – much older than she looks from what I hear. Every summer, Birdie opens her in-ground pool on Tuesdays to anyone and everyone. Moms and kids come by the droves and sit and talk about cooking, parenting, gardening, and a million other things. This is just one great recipe that I took home from “pool day at Birdie’s”.

Click here for Birdie’s Banana Split recipe!

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TREATS 4 KIDS

For the next few months, I’ll use this section to introduce you to my four kids. When I asked them all for their favorite freezer snacks, they all came up with desserts. Imagine that! What does that tell you about their mother?

Actually, I’m hoping that when there are grandkids running around here, my grown kids will say “will you make (their favorite dessert) with her/him like you did with me?” Well – I can dream can’t I?

Freezer Cheesecake – This is Adam’s favorite. I always envied people who could make a good cheesecake. I tried lots of recipes until I finally found this one. It’s good EVERY time and it freezes great! (In fact I just had a piece while I typed this.) Not that we freeze much cheesecake around here. We usually go through one of these in just a few days.

Click here to see a picture of Adam and his favorite dessert.

Click here for my Freezer Cheesecake recipe!

Muddy Buddies – Jenna loves making this cereal box recipe favorite with me. I included the parent and kid steps in the recipe because we always make them together. If I just leave these in a big bowl on the counter, they’re gone in a few hours so I usually divide them up among the four kids and put them into small ziptop bags with their names on them. Then I put all of the little bags into a larger freezer bags and the snacks go into the freezer. The kids can easily grab a bag and I find that they’re less messy coming straight from the freezer.

Click here to see a picture of Jenna the cook.

Click here for the Chex Muddy Buddies recipe!

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CONTEST WINNERS

Our Cook of the Month Winner is MizMolly (Molly Allen) from Suffolk, Virginia. Molly posted an inspiring message in the Assembly Day Stories section of our message boards. She said:

Cheer me on, fellow 30 DG-ers, as I try to reach my goal of 50 meals in the freezer by Friday! I’m determined that I will not have to think about a weeknight meal till at least Columbus Day! DH is out of town on business, so it’s just me and my boys (two mini-schnauzers - no help in food prep, except floor “sweeping”)...I’m taking advantage of the extra uninterrupted time before I go back to work as a high school guidance counselor on Monday.

Since 5:30 a.m. yesterday, I’ve prepared, wrapped, labeled and frozen the following:

Click here to see Molly’s recipe list. 50 entrees for $250. Great ideas!

Recipe of the Month Winner – Potato Corn Chowder from Debbie S.

When I saw this recipe, I knew that it would be a great one for our “Seniors Salute”. My dad will love this one! It reminds me of watching him eat chowder at a favorite seafood restaurant in Portland, Maine this past summer. Make some for the senior in your life. (If your name is Debbie and you recognize this recipe, e-mail me. We lost your address and need to send you some prize money!)

Click here for Debbie’s Potato & Corn Chowder recipe!

Apron Winner
Our September apron winner is Leslie M. from Peoria, Arizona. Leslie joined our subscriber list along with hundreds of others this month. We choose a winner every month from this growing number. Tell your friends. To sign up, click here.

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COOKIN’ QUOTE

A big thanks to one of our subscribers for sending this one along. No offense to those of you who are Martha fans!

Martha Stewart vs. Me

Martha’s way #1: Stuff a miniature marshmallow in the bottom of a sugar cone to prevent ice cream drips.

My way: Just suck the ice cream out of the bottom of the cone. For pete’s sake, you are probably lying on the couch with your feet up eating it anyway.

Martha’s way #2: To prevent egg shells from cracking, add a pinch of salt to the water before hard boiling.

My way: Who cares if they crack, aren’t you going to take the shells off anyway?

Martha’s way #3: To get the most juice out of fresh lemons, bring them to room temperature and roll them under your palm against the kitchen counter before squeezing.

My way: Sleep with the lemons in between the mattress and box springs. Sounds easier.

Click here for the rest of Martha vs. Me. They’re a hoot!

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GOURMET Q & A (from the E-mail Bag)

Q.	Hi! I have a question - how in the world can you and your friend cook 6 weeks worth of meals in one day? That’s 42 meals!! I find it absolutely impossible!! Sharon
A.	Thanks for e-mailing! Yes, we usually walk away with about 40-45 meals in one day. We choose about 8-10 recipes and make 4-5 of each for each of us. You save alot of time when you make multiples of the same thing. That can get boring, though, with some foods (like who wants to eat lasagna 5 times in 2 months?) so we make sure that we choose some recipes that are very versatile. For example, we make a whole bunch of meatballs and then make sure that we have 3-4 different sauces for them (spaghetti, sweet & sour, stroganoff, swedish). We always do chicken breasts in marinade. That goes into the freezer very quickly but can be made into lots of different meals when it comes out (broiled, grilled, stripped for fajitas or stir fry, baked, etc.) As you keep doing this too you’ll get quicker at it and you’ll be able to choose the right combination of quick and time-intensive meals to freeze. We also save time by not pre-cooking most of our foods. We pre-assemble them and get them into the freezer. They are baked on the day that we serve them. That’s just a personal choice and depends on how much time you have at the end of each day to get dinner on the table. Your cooking day will be longer, though, if you’re baking all of the meatloaves, casseroles, etc. Another tip is to do a few crock pot meals like soups, stews or sandwich fillings. They pretty much cook by themselves and you just have to cool them and bag them up. One big way to save time on cooking day is to do as much “prep work” as you can ahead of time. If you’re waiting until cooking day to boil and bone 5 turkey breasts that will take up a bunch of time. We go through the recipes on planning day and fill out Worksheet E writing down all of the things that we can do ahead of time and who’s going to do it.
Q.	I just received you book yesterday and I am almost half way through it. I am excited. I am a full time, working outside of the house, mom of 2, and wife. I want to try some of your recipes to get started. My question to you is when a recipe says completely thaw before warming or cooking do you know if it is safe to take the recipe out of the freezer and place it on the counter and let it thaw all day while I am at work? I am usually gone between 9 and 10 hours a day. Thanks for your help. Jackie
A.	The “official” answer to your question is “No, never thaw on the counter.” Here’s a good article to read that explains why. http://www.aginfo.fvsu.edu/teletips/food_safety/1109.htm On the other hand, I personally have done it a few times and no one has died here but then I tend to be one of those “risktaker” types. One plan is to have 2-3 entrees thawing in your fridge at the same time. Another (mine) is to leave your foods in the freezer and then thaw them in the microwave right before you cook them. I did that with a meatloaf last night. Hope that helps!

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NEWS FROM THE ROAD

When Tara and I did a seminar last month at our local public library, we didn’t realize that it would be our last “gig” together. Sure was fun!

I’ll be heading out on the road solo in September. If you’re nearby, I’d love to meet you.

September 15
Arnett Clinic - Lafayette, IN
This seminar is for employees only and is closed to the public.

September 21
10 - 12 Noon
Boone County Cooperative Extension Office - Burlington, KY
Contact: mailto:kroesel@ca.uky.edu

September 29
Mt. Pleasant Christian Church Lifeskills Program - Greenwood, IN
Register @ http://www.mount.org/lifeskills/register_fall2001.html

October 5

Carmel Lutheran MOPS group – Carmel, IN

Members only

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TIP OF THE MONTH

Seniors have been using their crockpots for years to help them to fix dinner in the morning and then “gallavant around” all day as my dad would say. Our message boards recently had a good discussion about crockpot cooking with lots of great website recommendations. Click here to check them out.

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WEBSITE OF THE MONTH

Each month I’d like to recommend a website related to our topic. When I found this site, I thought about my Aunt Nancy (yes, I’m named after her) who e-mails her grandkids, scans family photos onto her personal webpage, plays computer games and sends digital cards. She is a grama who’s staying young by keeping up with the times! She would love this website:

Check out www.igrandparents.com and be sure to visit the recipe section at http://www.igrandparents.com/grandTopics/articles/features/Recipes.asp

Fun stuff!

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I hope you’ve been encouraged, picked up a few tips and had a few laughs. Please e-mail us with your comments, suggestions and stories. We love hearing from you!

Nanci

30 Day Gourmet

P.O. Box 272
Brownsburg, IN 46112
www.30DayGourmet.com

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This page was last updated on Wednesday, June 11, 2008.