I’ve been learning a lot about freezer cooking. Cooking multiple meal ingrediants at once and freezing them to be ready for days that time is short and you want to break that habit of giving up too early and getting carry out or going out to eat.
I decided to try a crockpot of chicken breasts. I popped 6 huge breasts into the crockpot in the morning, with a little water and some garlic powder and a little seasoned salt. Not too much, just a little so that I would end up with some broth as well of the chicken for dishes.
It was SUPER hot and humid, so it was great to have the crock pot working away and not adding to the heat in the moby.
About 6 hours or so had created perfect chicken cooked and ready to cool a bit and slice up.
Once it was all cut up, I saved a bit out for my dinner (chicken and rice with veggies) and laid the rest out in a cookie sheet and popped it in the freezer to flash freeze for an hour or so.
I skimmed off a whole quart of good broth to freeze up for soup or rice.
And the little bit of fat and yucky bits I saved for my doggie friends…. I think a little bit of this chicky stuff on dry food will be delightful for my doggie girls! (I have an adopted doggie girl for a few days.. Miss Bella is staying at Moby Dog Camp while her folks are on vacation.)
In the end, I’ve got a big bag of easy to use chicken ready for any good meal I want to put it in. Chicken and rice, or noodles, or dumplins or spaghetti or well, just for a little bit of chicken in ramen noodles or even chicken salad! I thought about freezing it into little baggies and all that, but I think the flash freezing makes it really easy to use a little or use a lot.
And it will be great for the girls as well, just go in and grab a little chicken for whatever they want to make. We try and eat dinner together, but often, our schedules are a little weird, so this will help too on the amount of dishes we have to clean up, and all that.
I have done this in the past with sausage… I think I’m going to make sure I have a bag of sausage crumbles, and hamburger browned and flash frozen as well. Sounds like a great way to make it easy to make quick meals without resorting to eating out spending tooo much money on that. Eating out should be a pleasant and arranged event, not just because we haven’t thought ahead. It was so easy to do!
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I love my crockpot! The last time I did some chicken breasts, I served half with rice that I cooked in the broth; then I shredded up the other half, put it in a bag with BBQ sauce, and a couple of nights later we had BBQ sandwiches. It was very good!
I too am learning to do the freeze ahead of time dinner idea. It shouldn’t be so hard to think ahead, right? One thing I used to do is freeze the raw meat, but cooking ahead of time makes so much more sense. Another good meat to do is ground beef. I cooked a huge package of ground beef and froze it awhile ago and just today I broke off a hunk for biscuits and gravy. It’s wonderful how easy it is! Someone should write a cookbook for freeze-ahead meals, don’t you think?