Freezer Meals

I've learned so much in my first years of parenting. One of the most easy to remember is particularly easy because it's still a frequent reality - the need to prepare food and eat.

When my husband and I were still dating I remember once, when he reached his newest duty station that I prepared a lot of his favourite foods and then froze them. Overall it went pretty well. He ate just fine while I wasn't around and it probably saved him a bit of money.

I'd forgotten about freezer meals until I came across a pin about them on Pintrest. The moment I saw the pin I knew that was what I was going to need in preparation for our newest little bundle of joy - especially with a two year-old and a puppy in the house as well.

Ready to and eager to begin making and freezing meals I had to wait until when I thought would be the best time to make them. Although you should be able to safely eat a freezer meal a year later - you run the very high likelihood of the dish losing a lot of its best flavor in that time.

Nearly mid-February I was so ready to plunge in, but not due until April I knew it was best to hold off. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some of my puppy money on a 17 dish set of glassware from Amazon,

they are freezer, microwave, and top-rack dishwasher safe. I was still going to need something oven safe in my arsenal. I still had my online baby shower so I decided to wait and hope that people would order the other, smaller glassware sets that I'd added to the list for use in freezer meals.

I kept looking around online for a solution to my oven safe issue and found Sanctus Mundo airtight containers with stainless steel lids. Unfortunately they are super duper pricey so I had to think about if there were any other options or if I was really going to have to spend the last of what I had on those containers and once again forgo other things I needed as well.

I had to decide against them :(

There were Pyrex containers that were comparably more affordable, but only one of the sets I saw said that the lids were BPA free.

My parents vacuum seal and freeze food but I didn't have a vacuum sealer and preferred to avoid that sort of excess, possibly toxic plastic touching our food and feeding our landfill.

Before you begin freezing make sure that your freezer is set at the proper temperature and that all of the vents are not blocked. You will need for vents to still be accessible when you put food in otherwise your freezer will not maintain its proper temperature. Ideal temperature for your freezer is  0 Fahrenheit (-18 Celsius) for storing food. And -10 Fahrenheit (-23 Celsius) is recommended when freezing food. Make sure it's properly set at least 24 hours in advance.

Generally it seemed that freezer meals last 3 - 6 months. I put together a chart of collective info I saw on how long things should remain frozen:

Fruits and Vegetables – 6-12 months
Fruit pies, unbaked: 8 months
Poultry, uncooked – 9-12 months
Poultry, cooked – 4-6 months
Fish – 3-6 months
Lean fish: 6 months
Fatty fish: 2-3 months
Shellfish, uncooked: 3-6 months
Ham, cooked: 1-2 months
Bacon: 1 month
Chops, uncooked: 4-6 months
Meat, Roasts, Steaks, etc; uncooked – 4-12 months
Steaks, uncooked: 6-12 months
Ground Meat, uncooked – 3-4 months
Meat, cooked – 4 months
Cured or Processed Meats – 1-2 months
Casseroles – 2-3 months
Soups and stews – 2-3 months
Butter: 6-9 months
Bread and cake: 3 months
Cookies, baked or dough: 3 months
Ice cream and sorbet: 2 months

There was one other thing standing in the way of making freezer meals right that second. I still had frozen food waste in our large freezer. Thankfully, I had a plan for that.

Related Reading:
Getting Started: How Long Do Meals Last?
How Long Will Food Last in the Freezer? 
Issue #18: Safe Containers for Freezer Meals Five Best Containers for Frozen Food Storage
Plastic-Free Freezer Storage
Ideal Freezer Temperature 

Epic Pinfail In The Kitchen - Red Velvet Cheesecake

My parents were coming for Christmas, and despite a recent conversation with my mother about my fathers cholesterol I didn't deviate from my plan to make a dessert sure to delight both my husband and my father.

Today's pintest comes via this pin and the info found here.

First you have to make the red velvet cake.

Your dry ingrediants will be mixed in one bowl.

You're going to need a sifter for your cake flour.

Your wet in a second.

And the butter and sugar will be creamed in either another bowl or your mixer.

It says that it doesn't really matter too much what kind of pan you bake your cake in. Because I was planning on probably making the cheesecake the same day I didn't want to have to wash spring form pans all night in addition to all of the other measuring cups and what have you.

Once the red velvet cake was finished I set it out to cool.

Why is there a huge dent in the cake? Because it bumped into another one of my oven racks. After I moved it the cake pretty much just deflated.

Then I put the cake into a bag for the evening because the cake will end up being broken up anyway.

Between making cakes I still had to do dishes and wipe down my mixer.

If you've never made a cheesecake before (and quite honestly I'd only made one once before, years ago, and it went terribly) it's a pretty quick thing to make. Once you have an ingredient list it's just about as simple as, "mix all of your ingredients and then put into the oven for x amount of time."

Making this cheesecake is ALMOST that simple.
1)  line your spring form pan with aluminum foil.
2) you're going to break apart half of your red velvet cake.
3) cover the red velvet cake bottom with your cheesecake mix.
4) place your cheesecake into a ban marie (hot water bath.)
5) put the entire thing into the oven and wait 45 minutes.

When your time is up turn off your oven and wait another hour - the original poster urges you NOT to open your oven and peek. This wasn't a problem because I had approximate 12,037,102,934,835,724,387,092,348,238,427,345 things to do in preparation for my parents arrival.

Around the time my cake had come to room temperature

it hit me - I had my hands so full that I forgot to mix red velvet cake chunks into my cheesecake! In my mind the cake was now 100% ruined and I'd just wasted two days. My husband told me all that had happened was that I made a delicious cheesecake with a yummy crust and yummy topping. I was miserable. Then my mother texted me to tell me they were probably not coming.

The time came to get the cake into my cake saver for the night. I released the tab on the spring form and everything looked okay. When I flipped the cake onto a plate I sensed that everything had gone badly. I had to unwrap layers of foil to see just how badly it was and each layer of foil just made me more certain that this was a disaster. Closer to the cake there were small layers of cheesecake inside the foil. When I got down to the plate the cake looked a bit like someone had dropped it from a standing position. Maybe I can still save it? The cake was now upside-down and would have to be flipped again. Cake pretty much went all over the kitchen from there. There was cake all over the floor, cake all over the plate, cake all over the cake taker . . . it was just really horrifying for me right then.

I was left with a huge mess and a bag full of half of a red velvet cake. FML and FTP (Eff This Pin).