Today I decided spur-of-the-moment to do a bunch of freezer cooking. It was a good thing I didn't have anything going on today, because it took me 5 or 6 hours! It was time well-spent though.
First, I scanned through my menu and picked out recipes I already had purchased ingredients for that would be conducive to freezing. I also selected recipes that used similar ingredients. Yesterday, I picked up a multi-pack of chicken breast on sale, so I put it to use right away instead of portioning it out like I usually do into quart bags to freeze for future recipes.
Before I started, I sketched out my action plan so that I would have a sequence to follow in my preparation to maximize my time. At various points during the afternoon (particularly as I spent time packaging foods for the freezer), I wondered if this whole freezer cooking afternoon was actually saving me time, but I came the conclusion that it did. For example, most of the recipes called for chopped onion and/or garlic, as well as chicken, so I was able to do the chopping all at once for several recipes at a time. Handling raw meat is my least favorite part about cooking, so I appreciated being able to process a large quantity of raw chicken at once, then disinfect once, instead of separately for each recipe. A few of the recipes called for fully-cooked chicken, so I boiled some chicken breasts in a pot with water and onion so that I could both cook the chicken and prepare several cups of fresh chicken broth I needed for other recipes (I learned recently from
The Cook's Illustrated Cookbook that onion is the only essential ingredient to making a good chicken stock besides the assumed chicken, water, and seasonings - you may as well save your celery/carrots/other vegetables for something else because they don't affect the flavor much). Preparing homemade tortillas can be time-consuming, but it felt much more worth it knowing that the effort was contributing to several dinners at once.
One thing I will do differently next time is focus on fewer recipes and make more batches of those. It seems like that would be more time-efficient, but for today, I was limited by the amounts of ingredients I had on hand since I had not planned ahead of time.
At the end of the afternoon, here is what I ended up with:
3 meals of Creamy Chicken Enchiladas
2 meals of Curry Chicken Salad (for wraps)
2 meals of Arroz con Pollo (Mexican chicken with rice)
2 meals of Chicken Tortilla Soup
1 meal of Lemon-Dill Chicken
2 meals of Honey Chicken
6 individually-wrapped burritos (to use together in a dinner casserole or to reheat quickly for lunches).
Additionally, I also put together an easy refrigerator cherry cheesecake and baked a loaf of braided Challah bread that won't end up in the freezer but is for our lunch tomorrow after church because we're hosting company.
That was a successful day in my book - thanks to my husband who did all the laundry while I was tied up in the kitchen and who washed many of the dirty dishes I generated!
