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 

Saturday Snack - Avocado Chicken Salad Cucumber Sandwiches

I really want to make sure I help get as many of my trials in creating dishes and snacks that are gestationally diabetic friendly so I've decided to at least occasionally post a Saturday and Sunday snack for you.

It's both hard to remember and hard to think I haven't mentioned my intense love of avocado but if it hasn't managed to come up yet - I absolutely adore avocados.

Today's snack is relatively quick and easy.

You will need:
Cooked or canned chicken - it's really your preference. Either way your chicken will need to be shredded.
Avocado - the amount you use is again up to you. I had half of an avocado cut and didn't use it all.
Salt
Pepper
Lemon or lime juice
Cucumber
Optional - Tomato
Optional - Fresh mozarella

Place a small amount of shredded chicken in a bowl. Add a little avocado and mix. Only you know how "wet" you want your chicken salad to be. I only used a few fork fulls of avocado - so maybe about 1/4 an an avocado.

Add a healthy squeeze of lemon or lime juice.

Salt & pepper to taste.

Set that aside and slice yourself a bit of tomato and/or fresh mozzarella. I only had mozzarella.

Wash and slice off a few pieces of cucumber.

Plate your noms and you're good to go!

You can either eat these as an open-faced sandwich.

Or a regular sandwich.

Ultimately I preferred to have it as an open face.

Kitchen Fail - Chicken With Noodles Revisited

There are pins on pintrest referring to "cream of chicken soup" as "cream of chemical soup."

Having already decided to add chicken with noodles to our regular rotation I found myself planning to make it for a second time. Only this time I wanted to do it without the added chemicals. This meant making my own cream of chicken soup.

I used this recipe to do so. The resulting soup definitely doesn't look like what I'm used to from the can but that should most likely be considered a good thing . . . right?

The recipe is a little vague about which herbs and spices to use in making your soup. I used parsley, garlic powder, kosher salt (bc at the moment I was cooking my sea salt had mysteriously disappeared), black pepper, and herbs de Provence.

For good measure I made sure to give the mixture of the called for chicken stock and my home-made cream of chicken soup to avoid any lumps and then threw my butter on top.

Here comes the fail - when I went to go check on our dish this is what I saw.

Somehow a bit of soap must have gotten into or was left on something I was using. The food had to be gotten rid of :(

Pintesting In The Kitchen - Crock Pot Chicken With Noodles

Ohio has a wonderful program called, Help Me Grow, and each Christmas they have a Christmas party. The first year I was able to go with my husband, the second we didn't have all the information to know when it was, and that brings us to this year. It was looking a lot like my husband was probably not going to be able to make it because of the time he leaves work. So i invited his grandmother to go with us and figured we'd just hope that my husband would be able to join us later on.

But just in case I thought it wise to pop some dinner in the crock pot for him should he find himself coming home instead of joining us at the party. I had a very late start in the day and found myself incredibly busy so I didn't get the food into the crock pot until around 2 PM.

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

This recipe is supposed to be cooked on low for eight hours but as I mentioned, I was trying to insure my husband came home to food so I chose to cook it on high for four hours.

Thankfully this is pretty quick and easy to throw together.

Chicken.

 Into the crock pot.

Two cans of cream of chicken soup.

Into the crock pot.

Chicken stock.

I like to use the chicken stock to help clean out the cream of chicken soup still left in the cans.

Into the crock pot.

A half of a cup of butter.

Sliced and thrown in.

Then I walked away until it was nearly time to leave for the party. Removed the chicken a bit early and did my best to shred it.

Left the noodles next to the crock pot.

Then left a note for my husband saying for him to stir the crock pot's contents, add the noodles, and make sure the crock pot is set for either high at 30 minutes or low for 1 hour.

This is the part where if you're the religious or spiritual type that you pray your husband can do this. Mine actually made it to the party so it never came up.

When I got home I put the noodles in and left it to cook on low for an additional hour. The result was delicious! Best of all the little picky eater ate some as well!

I will be adding this our rotation of regular meals and even plan to take some of the leftovers to my husbands grandmothers house for lunch to share.

Foodie Friday - Home-Made Raising Cane's Sauce

I friggin LOVE Raising Cane's chicken. I was even insistent that there be Raising Cane's at my wedding!

If you've ever had it before I'm sure it will come as no surprise to you that the 100 pieces of chicken we ordered for our very, very small wedding, went incredibly fast. I had a guest come late that knew there would be Cane's and when he met up with me he was sadly holding a cup of Cane sauce saying that he could tell it was here but that was all that was left.

When I first tried Raising Canes, I loved the chicken but didn't care for the sauce. The second time I had it the obsession that so many Cane's fans feel for it finally hit me. I've tried it on many non-chicken foods including hot dogs.

Copy cat recipes have popped up all over the internet and it seems where you find these recipes you always have someone who has worked for Canes leaving the comment of how they already know the recipe and/or the recipe you are looking at it completely wrong. I have yet to see an employee tell anyone in a public forum what the real recipe is.

It was dinner time and we needed to eat. I decided on some leftover fried chicken and some chicken patties (because frankly we didn't have enough of the "fried chicken" to go around). Suddenly I felt the urge to test one of these alleged Cane Sauce recipes.

I went with the one I found here.

1/2 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup ketchup
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp Worcestershire sauce
Lots of ground pepper

Mix first 4 ingredients the cover top with pepper. Mix well and cover again with pepper.

Refrigerate for several hours to let the flavors marry

I wasn't going to wait hours for sauce. We were already hungry. I think I waited a bit more like 10 - 30 minutes. When I was ready to eat I asked my husband to go get the food - I knew he'd take forever to do it so that added some extra time on from my 20 - 30 minutes for my flavours to marry.

The results:

First impression? Needs a tad more ketchup. But I was too hungry and too lazy to do anything about it so I kept on keepin' on.

It was good. Was it dead-on exact? Definitely not but still pretty close. If I'd had garlic salt I would have used that instead but I was out. I think that could improve the taste even more.

The recipe is totally worth trying and close enough I don't feel a true Caniac should be disappointed.

*I used Hellmans mayo and Heinz ketchup
**My husband took the pictures not me