Freezer Cooking

I have been intimidated by the idea of "freezer cooking," "batch cooking," whatever you want to call it, for years. It wasn't until I participated in an online roundtable on meal planning last month that I realized something super important: there are different ways of freezer cooking. Maybe this is ridiculously self-evident to most people, but my mental picture of freezer cooking was that you had to dedicate a full weekend (or similar block of time) to cooking all the food in the world, and fill up your freezer with it, and then... I was a little bit foggy on how it was actually helpful, because I think I was picturing freezer meals as being a way to save dinnertime if you weren't able to make whatever you had already planned.

Last assumption first, while there are certainly some things that you can pull out of the freezer and use immediately, that's probably not going to be the main way that freezer cooking is helpful: quickbreads, breakfast cookies, chocolate banana oatmeal fudge bars, yes, but main dishes not so much... For full meals, it's more about having the prep work done ahead of time than about having healthy versions of instant pizzas in the freezer. Having a menu plan is still important—ideally, the freezer meals get built into the menu plan, so that they're written down and I can see on my planner a day ahead that I need to pull whatever it is out of the freezer and let it thaw in the fridge overnight.

Matt and I were talking about this a couple of weeks back, about slow cooker freezer meals specifically; he was confused about how it could possibly be all that helpful to have, say, a pork shoulder frozen with a marinade. "But you still have to cook it all day!" I certainly saw his point, but (as we were actually discussing an upcoming cookbook that I'm excited about on slow cooker/pressure cooker freezer meals) it got me to think through exactly how it would be helpful. Yes, in that case you still have the cooking time of a regular meal, but all of the prep work is done and if you're planning your cooking ahead, there's no last-minute "oh no, the orange juice has been sitting in the fridge too long and has a funny smell so I guess we're making carnitas with grapefruit juice today!" (It's not awful, for the record, but orange is definitely better.) And as we're getting ready to have a newborn in the house, even the 20-minute prep work of making a spice rub, coating the pork, dicing the onion, and making the marinade sounds a whole lot more challenging when I picture trying to do with with a tiny person who wants me to sit on the couch and feed him constantly. So in that case, yes, being able to dump the thawed bag into the slow cooker and turn it on instead of doing that small amount of prep work would be legitimately helpful.

Okay, now back to my first assumption. There certainly are people who do huge batch-cooking marathons and get an entire month's meals into the freezer in one go, and that works for them, and that's great! But there are other people who just make double batches of suppers when they know something freezes well, and stick one batch into the oven/slow cooker and the other into the freezer. Some people mainly freeze breads/sides/snacks, things they can easily use from frozen (or after a quick thaw). And some people just make staples ahead of time, things that can easily be transformed into a variety of meals, like beans, rice, tomato sauce, pesto, cooked meat... 

And any of those methods, or any combination of them, helps to save time and get dinner on the table more smoothly. I've actually been doing a little bit of several of those methods for years without realizing that I was "freezer cooking": sticking leftovers in the freezer when there's enough to serve as another full meal, keeping things like pesto and pureed beets portioned out in the freezer, storing batches of muffins or individually wrapped bars in there to be easily grabbed for quick breakfasts or snacks.

I've been trying to be a little more intentional about it as we prepare for a new baby, though. I don't even remember how I started reading the Thriving Home blog, but our family has enjoyed their recipes (and their "real food meets reality" philosophy) for a while now, and when Polly and Rachel released a cookbook full of freezer meals last fall, I was so excited to pick up a copy. Many recipes from From Freezer to Table have since become favorites in our house—their Killer Carnitas, Peach Baked Oatmeal, and Pesto Feta Tuna Melts all made it onto this week's menu plan! 

And in this last however-many-weeks pre-baby, I cannot tell you how helpful it is to have meal components already in the freezer and easy to assemble! I'm exhausted today, and had been dreading the end-of-the-day "they want to eat again?" time... until I realized that all I have to do is slice bread, pull pesto out of the freezer, and combine tuna with a couple of items from the fridge. I can practically make supper sitting down! Little Bear can peel some carrots for me, and if I have enough energy we can make ranch dip, but if not there's some hummus in the fridge. Easily-assembled suppers are very, very valuable!

Do you use any (or all!) of these methods of freezer cooking, or are there other ways of doing it that I missed here? How do you incorporate cooking ahead into your meal planning?

Instant Pot convert

Confession: for the past several years, I've been ever-so-slightly scornful of the Instant Pot as a, perhaps not silly, but unnecessary extra appliance, a fad that would burn itself out quickly enough.

I was wrong.

This pregnancy has been... not easy. There's nothing seriously wrong with me or the baby; I have chronic loose joints, which during pregnancy makes standing/walking/bending down much harder and more painful than it otherwise would be, and means I tire more easily. I had to stop sitting on the floor months ago, for example, because it was too difficult to stand up and walk again. And now that I'm mid-third-trimester, I am so tired all the time, but that's kind of to be expected.

All that to say, my meal-planning abilities have been lackluster lately. By the time the kids are in bed and the kitchen is clean, and maybe I've even picked up after the two-year-old tornado, I am firmly stuck on the couch until bedtime. Getting chia pudding started in the fridge last night (3 minutes of work max) was an embarrassingly rare feat of breakfast-prep. Pulling meat out of the freezer so it can thaw in the fridge overnight just hasn't been happening. (Though to be honest, I couldn't tell you how much of that is due to being pregnant-hurting-tired and how much is attributable to the meat being in the chest freezer out on the sub-zero deck...) 

And so the Instant Pot has been saving me, over and over again. Oh, the chicken breasts are frozen and it's mid-afternoon? Not a problem. Ground beef is frozen and supper needs to be in the slow cooker in an hour? That's fine. I told Matt we were having moose stroganoff, and accidentally pulled out stew meat instead of steaks? Pressure cooker to the rescue. And the reason I first decided to give it a try: dry, unsoaked beans to cooked in less than an hour! I haven't even found a permanent home for it off the counter yet, because I've been using it almost every day. (And we got an 8 quart, so while it's not too heavy for me to lift, it's certainly heavy enough that I don't want to be hauling it up and down twice each day.)

Even with all of those applications, I would still have said that it was nice to have but not necessary... And then we got home tonight after a long afternoon of appointments and discovered that the pork shoulder I'd had in the slow cooker all afternoon was not done, not even a little bit. It wasn't the first time in the last month that a recipe hasn't gotten done in the called-for length of time in the slow cooker, but the other times were new-to-us recipes, so I figured they just hadn't been written well or I'd made too many "tiny adjustments" to the recipe. Tonight's planned supper was a recipe that I made successfully in the same slow cooker two weeks ago—the only difference was that las time I use high heat instead of low, because I got it started (quite) late. And looking back, all of the failed recipes were supposed to cook on low. So it seems that the low heat function of our slow cooker—which is certainly at least as old as I am—is no longer working properly. I guess it's time to actually read the four or so articles I have bookmarked on how to convert slow cooker recipes for the Instant Pot!

We've loved our ancient slow cooker particularly because it has a dial instead of buttons: with the frequency of power outages this winter, it has been helpful to have one that doesn't reset when it thinks it's been turned off and on again! But I'm also grateful, now that I can't rely on it anymore, that we have a machine that can take its place; it's rare enough for the kids and I to be out of the house for a long span while the slow cooker is on that, at least for now, it shouldn't be a huge deal to go reset the Instant Pot if we lose power while it is running. And we probably have less than three months left of winter, so power outages shouldn't be a regular thing for too much longer.

Do you have an Instant Pot (or other kind of electric pressure cooker)? What's your favorite way to use it? I would love more ideas—I know there are so many more things to do with it than the ones I've tried!