Modify recipes your family already loves for freezer cooking
There are many systems available to help people efficiently prepare multiple meals for freezer cooking. However, frequently families don’t like the meals and busy moms give up on the idea of freezer cooking. That is a shame because freezer cooking is one of the best ways to provide the benefits of home cooked meals to families and individuals whose evenings are too busy to include long food preparation. A solution to this problem is to modify recipes that your family already loves for freezer cooking.
There are a few foods that don’t freeze well. For example, fried foods, vegetables with a high water content such lettuce and tomatoes, and some herbs such as sage (gets bitter) don’t freeze well. When making a dish to freeze, you also should consider how the freezing process will affect the ingredients. You need to be aware that freezing potatoes can cause the potatoes to get soft so you should be careful not to overcook them. Some people even add them raw before freezing and allow them to cook while the food is reheating. Freezing onions cause a loss of flavor so you might want to add extra while freezing garlic tends to intensify its flavor so consider adding less. A bread crumb casserole topping can get soggy when frozen. It usually can be fixed by reheating in the oven uncovered which crisps the topping.
However, most dishes freeze well. Sometimes, it is not necessary to freeze the entire meal. If you have a recipe for meatballs which your family loves but use spaghetti sauce from a jar, a quick meal can be created by cooking the pasta while thawing and heating the meatballs in the sauce. Many children would like to live on chicken nuggets. By buying chicken breasts on sale, cutting the breast into pieces and coating with your own ingredients, an inexpensive and nutritious version of the dish can be created and frozen. You can take out as many pieces as you need and quickly bake. This is a great dish to have on hand if the adults want to try a dish and the kids aren’t as adventurous.
It is a waste of your time to prepare and freeze meals that your family ends up not liking. By modifying recipes that you know your family will enjoy and preparing them in bulk, you are guaranteed to have dinners that will be both quick and enjoyable.
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