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Just a quick note to remind you that even if you are just cooking for two, you can make large recipes and have your freezer full of “prepared meals” that you make yourself. If you love spaghetti or soup or anything liquid like that, you can have your spaghetti and eat too again and again! When I make meals, I usually make a full recipe or even double it and then use either plastic or foil containers to arrange a meal of leftovers that I then vacuum pack in my FoodSaver or that I first freeze in individual servings and then vacuum or put into Ziploc bags. For example, if I have made soup (cream of vegetable with asparagus!), as I did last night – it was cold outside and I do mean cold! – I pour the remainder of the soup into muffin tins and freeze. Then, when frozen, I place the tins in about a half inch of warm water and out pops the soup “muffin-sicles” to be put into freezer bags. I label the bags and I have measured amounts of soup that I can pull out and thaw in a pan. Each “muffin-sicle” is about 1/3 cup of soup and so I can thaw three for a cup for one person.
Finding lemons and limes on sale is a blessing because you can buy 10, 20 or the sky’s-the-limit of fruits, wash them and then cut them in half, ream the juice, put the juice into plastic ice cube trays and freeze the trays of juice. Each juice cube is approximately an ounce of juice. Don’t throw away the empty rinds either, but freeze them in a freezer bag as well and when needing lemon or lime zest, grab however many needed and grate away. They are much easier to grate frozen. I make large amounts of pesto and freeze it in cubes as well or in small jam jars.
In other words, make life easy and think “large quantities” in order to freeze the leftovers to have ready for a day when you are in a hurry. As the holiday seasons approach, those kinds of days may get more and more frequent!! Happy cooking!
Thanks for the “handy-dandy” tips! (:D)
Glad to be of service, Hawkeye!!
These are some really good ideas I will try putting to use. I’m not good at freezing leftovers because they always seem to get icy and taste not so good-not fresh enough.
The muffin tin idea seems like it might work well. Thanks!
I invested in a Tilia FoodSaver for vacuum packing “TV Dinners” to avoid that icy taste. I use freezer bags for things like soup, juice cubes, etc. I put leftover spaghetti sauce, soups, alfredo sauce, gravies and that type of thing in the muffin tins to give me specific servings. I have eaten lite tv dinners for the trays, which I then use to put single servings in and then vacuum pack them in the FoodSaver for later use. They can be put right into the microwave in the packaging just like a dinner from the store and they can be used over and over again. I suppose I could ask people to save them for me!!