Hamburger Pasta Casseroles

Once A Month Cooking – Hamburger Pasta Casseroles Freezer Meals

When it comes to cooking and baking, I love experimenting with once a month cooking. This type of cooking is when you spend a day or two making and baking up several meals for your family and then freezing them for future use.

This recipe will make 3 large casseroles that will each feed 8 people. They will keep in the freezer for up to 6 months. You will need three 9 x 13″ rectangular foil baking pans, that I like to pick up at our local dollar store or discount department store. After freezing, thaw the casserole in your refrigerator for 6-8 hours and then reheat in the oven for 20 minutes before serving.

Hamburger Pasta Casserole

4 lbs. lean ground beef
1 lb. thin sausage links, sliced into bite-sized pieces
2 cups onions, finely chopped
2 cups celery, finely chopped
1 1/4 cup green pepper, finely chopped
16-18 ounces pasta noodles
3 cans tomato soup
4 1/4 cups shredded American Cheese
12 ounce bottle chili sauce
1/4 cup pimento, chopped
2 teaspoons table salt
2 1/2 teaspoons chili powder
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 cups water
4 1/2 cups bread crumbs
1/4 cup butter, melted (not margarine)

In a very large frying pan, cook the lean ground beef, sausage links, onion, celery and green pepper until the ground beef is brown and no longer pink. Drain off fat. Cook your desired pasta noodles according to box directions, drain water and set aside. In a large stock pot, add your cooked pasta noodles and meat mixture. Stir in the tomato soup, cheese, chili sauce, chili powder, chopped pimento, salt, pepper and water.

Split the mixture up into 3 equal portions. Place mixture into each of your baking pans. In a small bowl, combine the bread crumbs with melted butter. Sprinkle seasoned bread crumbs on top of the casserole mixture.

Bake casseroles in a 350 degree oven for 30-45 minutes. Let completely cool before wrapping and freezing.

Shelly Hill has been working from home in Direct Sales since 1989 and is a Manager with Tupperware. Shelly enjoys cooking and baking for her family and friends. You can visit Shelly online at http://my.tupperware.com/Ravish30 or her Shakin ‘N Bakin blog at
http://wahmshelly.blogspot.com for additional free recipes.

Work Week Meals-Twice is Nice

It’s been at least six years since I balanced working outside the home almost full-time and having two kids. Friends were always amazed that I managed homemade meals on the table each night. Becoming a stay home mom with three kids made meal planning a bit easier because I was home BUT several of the lessons I learned as a work outside the home mom still apply. I’ll give you a sample menu for one week to show how I would pull all these easy lessons together.

Several lessons that make meal preparation easier for anyone are:

-Cook once, eat twice

-Your slow cooker is your friend

-Menu plan each week along similar themes

-Prepping Ahead

Cook once, Eat Twice

If you’re throwing chicken breasts into a skillet, why not throw in twice as many? You’re spending the same amount of time to cook the chicken and then you’ll have cooked chicken for an entirely different meal another night with little or no prep time. It also doesn’t have to be the same meal. Cooked chicken can easily go into casseroles, tacos and burritos or cobb salads. Cooked meats also freeze very well, so you can easily grab the cooked meat from the freezer and save yourself the cooking after the defrosting.

The same applies to baked goods. If you’re making a batch of cookies, bake a double batch and freeze half of them. Baked goods freeze beautifully if you make sure to take the time to wrap them carefully or use quality freezer containers. You’ll be able to grab homemade goodies quickly from the freezer when you don’t have time for baking or don’t want to. It’s especially nice in the summer to NOT have to bake too often. In addition, if you’re a small household, you can save money by baking your own goodies and knowing they won’t go to waste because you can pull small amounts out of the freezer as needed.

Your Slow Cooking Friend

I LOVE my slow cooker. I LOVE being able to throw a bunch of stuff into the slow cooker in the morning and come home to dinner. There are ample crock pot cookbooks out there if you’re not sure what to make for recipes. It’s still a great chance to cook once and eat twice as many crock pot recipes make large quantities of food and freeze beautifully. The slow cooking method is also a great way to let tougher, less expensive cuts of meat cook to wonderful tasty tenderness! You can also prep everything you need to put into the crock pot the night before and save valuable time in the morning.

Slow cookers can also save time and money cooking larger items for you like whole chickens, turkey breasts and corned beef which can be divided to several meals. During the summer, slow cookers can be placed outside (on a good day as I’m not sure they’ll survive rain storms) and let you prepare meals without heating up the kitchen (you’ll save on cooling costs and who doesn’t love NOT cooking during the summer!?)

Tammy Paquin is a work from home mom of 3 boys and is the owner and publisher of www.frugal-families.com,

Meal Planning Made Easy

By: Rachel Paxton

It’s no fun trying to decide what to make for dinner every night. Planning your meals ahead of time often saves you time as well as money.

There are many different ways to plan your meals. How you plan yours depends on how much time you want to spend now to save yourself time later.

I plan my meals once a week. Because I have limited refrigerator/freezer space and a small family to feed (3), this plan seems to work best for me. I only go to the grocery store once a week. When I’m getting ready to go to the store, I sit down and starting planning my menu for the next week.

This is a good time to go through this week’s grocery ads to see what’s on sale this week. I also take this time to clean out my refrigerator to see what needs thrown away and what can be re-used as leftovers in the next couple of days. Cleaning out your refrigerator weekly is crucial in avoiding wasting food that could still be used to make a perfectly good meal.

So after I’ve cleaned out the refrigerator and scanned the grocery store ads, I start my shopping list. I try to plan around what I already have in the freezer. For example, if I know I have a pound of hamburger in the freezer and I know I have spaghetti noodles on hand, then I just need to put spaghetti sauce on my list in order to have spaghetti for dinner one night.

I’ve also found that often we don’t need as much meat in our meals as you might think. For our family of three, a pound of hamburger can be used for both spaghetti and tacos. If I cook the hamburger all at once, I can just put half of it in the refrigerator for the next meal (a big time savings!). If I already have taco shells on hand all I need is to make sure that the sour cream I have in the refrigerator is still good and put lettuce and tomatoes on my shopping list.

You should always stock up on meat when it’s on sale. If you do you’ll find that some weeks you’ll end up buying almost no meat at all, if any. I also stock up on items like jars of spaghetti sauce when they’re on sale. Then I’ll always have a quick dinner ready on a moment’s notice if I already have hamburger (also bought on sale) and spaghetti noodles on hand.

Some weeks I realize that I already have much of what I’m going to need for the week. Some of the staples I keep on hand: sour cream, cheese, taco shells, spaghetti noodles, egg noodles, cream of mushroom soup, onions, potatoes, garlic, tuna, spaghetti sauce, tomato sauce, black olives, canned clams, and rice. These ingredients make a lot of the meals we eat, like: hamburger and rice, beef stroganoff, tacos, spaghetti, clam chowder, and hamburger gravy and mashed potatoes.

I usually plan for only 5 meals a week. I know that sometime during the week we’ll be eating leftovers or fending for ourselves due to time constraints.

This system has worked really well for me and saved us lots of money. I plan once a week, shop once a week, and don’t give a thought to meal planning for the rest of the week. And I don’t hold myself to cooking a certain meal on a certain night. I usually decide that day what I’m going to cook for dinner to be a little flexible.

There are many other ways you can plan your meals. Some people cook once a month and freeze their meals for later use (requires a lot of freezer space). A couple of books on this subject are Frozen Assets by Deborah Taylor Hough and The Freezer Cooking Manual by Tara Wohlenhaus.

Meal planning doesn’t have to be hard. Modify your plan to suit your family’s needs. Just make sure you HAVE a plan. It will inevitably save you time as well as money.

Originally published at Suite 101. Rachel Paxton is a freelance writer and mom who is the author of What’s for Dinner?, an e-cookbook containing more than 250 quick easy dinner ideas. For recipes, tips to organize your home, home decorating, crafts, holiday hints, and more, visit Creative Homemaking at www.creativehomemaking.com.

Homemade Pierogy

How To Make And Freeze Homemade Pierogies

As a busy mother and wife, I don’t always have time to cook an hour long dinner in the evenings. To solve this problem, I like to make our own freezer meals that I can thaw out, reheat or cook…and have on our dinner table in less than 30 minutes.

My family enjoys homemade potato and cheese pierogies so I like to spend an afternoon every couple of months making them and freezing them for future use. The following recipe is the one that I like to use.

Potato and Cheese Pierogies

Filling:

2 lbs. Velveeta Cheese, shredded
8 ounces Sharp Cheese, shredded
5 lbs. white potatoes, peeled and boiled
4 small onions, minced
salt and pepper to taste
1 clove of garlic, minced

Fry the minced or finely chopped onions in 1 stick of butter and set aside. In a large stock pot, boil 5 lbs. of potatoes; drain water, mash the potatoes and set aside. In a large bowl, combine potatoes, Velveeta and Sharp cheeses, minced onions, salt, pepper and garlic.

Dough:

4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup shortening
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs mixed with 1/4 cup of water

You will need to make several batches of dough but only make 1 batch at a time. I usually end up making 3-4 batches.

In a large bowl, combine the flour, shortening, salt, eggs and water until the mixture forms a stiff dough. Roll out the dough onto a floured dough board. Use a 4-5″ round circle cutter or empty coffee can to cut out dough circles. Place 2 tablespoons of potato filling in the center of each dough circle. Fold the circle in half and wet edges slightly with water to pinch them close.

In a large stockpot, bring 2 quarts of salted water to a boil. Add the pierogies in a single layer and boil them until they float. Drain on paper towels and let them cool. Once cool, place on a cookie sheet and freeze for 1 hour. Remove from freezer and place in plastic freezer containers, boxes or bags. They will keep for 9-12 months in your freezer.

You will need to thaw them for 20 minutes at room temperature before frying them in a deep fryer or frying pan. This recipe will make 12-13 dozen pierogies.

Shelly Hill has been working from home in Direct Sales since 1989 and is a Manager with Tupperware. Shelly enjoys cooking and baking for her friends and family. You can visit Shelly online at http://my.tupperware.com/Ravish30 or visit her Shakin ‘N Bakin recipe blog
for additional free recipes for busy moms at http://wahmshelly.blogspot.com

Meal Planning and Dinnertime Preparation

By: Jennifer Tankersley

I once read somewhere that home cooks have on average 21 meals that make up our repertoire of common family meals. I thought this was very interesting and set about to writing down what my 21 meals are. I actually came up with 23 meals that my family enjoys on a regular basis. By creating this list, I now know what I need to keep stocked in the pantry. You won’t have to stress over what’s for dinner tonight if all you need to do is to just take a look at your list! Feel free to add more than 21 meals to your list. The more you list, the easier it will be to come up with dinner tonight. This list is for your staple meals. It is not the place to add the meals you want to try out someday. Go ahead and do that if you want, but put your experimental recipes on a different list. Don’t worry if all you seem to come up with is just many different versions of Mac & Cheese!

Now that you have your 21 meals, this challenge will be a snap (or maybe just less painful)! One of the best strategies I know when it comes to meal planning is simply to plan ahead. I use a list that I call my Menu Planner to plan a pay period’s worth of meals (for me, that is every 1st and 15th of the month). My Menu Planner page is a list that shows the numbers 1 through 31 for every day of the month in the left-hand column. Next there is a Breakfast column, a column for Lunch, and the largest column for Dinner. Dinner is our family’s major meal so I am more specific for that column. Breakfast and lunch are more casual so I just list a few suggestions for me to refer to throughout the month. Feel free to refer often to your 21 meals list in order to help you fill in you Menu Planner.

My next step is to print out a grocery list and then I write every ingredient that I need from my Menu Planner into my Grocery List. Now when I go to the store, I get only what I need instead of what I MIGHT need at some point. That saves me money and it saves my refrigerator/freezer/pantry from having all kinds of odd and unnecessary items.

Mealtime with your family will be much more enjoyable when you take just a few steps to prepare. Challenge your family to help you create your Menu Planner list by asking them which meals they would like to enjoy in the next planning period (one week, two weeks, maybe even 1 month). When you get them involved, you are more likely to have greater success throughout the dinner experience.

Jennifer Tankersley is the creator of www.listplanit.com where you can find a Menu Planner and several grocery lists and over 200 other lists, checklists, and planning pages to help you put your world in order.

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