Happy Birthday Taylor!

Happy Birthday Taylor

My children have a bad habit of picking birthday themes that are almost impossible to do. (And also Halloween costumes that are impossible to make, but that is a different story.)

So when Taylor announced that he wanted a Skylanders birthday party, I knew it would not be easy.
That is a new game.
They do not have that birthday theme in the store and they do not have it online.
It does not exist.

But he was insistent.
I tried to order a Skylanders cake but they don't make those either.
I have a lady that I have always used that could have built me a dragon cake, but she closed her shop here in town, so...
I decided to make Taylor some cupcakes with a  "Portal of Power" style like the Skylanders game.

That brings up a strange problem considering that this is a blog about preparing food is mass quantity and freezing it so that your family has home made food to eat.

I cannot bake.


Cakes don't rise.


Pies don't set. 

Brownies dry out.

Even cornbread crumbles.

I cannot bake.

But Taylor did not ask for a lot.
He did not want a lot of people there (just two friends to come play the video game with him).
He did not want a very expensive present (just this one video game).
But my baby wanted a Skylanders cake, so I gave the cupcakes a shot.
They tasted fine and the cake did rise. (I cheated and used a boxed mix!).
They certainly did not look like the Portal of Power from the game but my son was impressed.
Mama made him a Skylanders cake and that was all he wanted.

Happy Birthday Taylor!

When It Really Matters!

I have never really been much of an outdoor person. 
There are bugs there.
And its hot. 
I just prefer my air conditioned, bug free home. 

That is until  I caught a very bad case of  "make the house look prettier by planting roses" from my sister Laurel and my friend Laura.
So on Friday of last week, I found myself outside digging up the last of the weeds in the front flower beds so that I could plant something called Knockout Roses.
Without too much detail, I "lifted, twisted, turned" wrong while working with a shovel and I was down like a shot.
What followed was a blur of  PAIN (that I will not bore you with) and I found myself on the couch at my friend Laura's house until Ty could get to me.

I spent three days in the bed before returning to work on Monday where I walked like an 80 year old woman (according to my 9 year old daughter Lilli).
I still have not gotten to do the bulk freezer cook that I spoke of in the last blog.
And that is the point of this entry.

Because my freezer is a constant rotation of prepared meals, Ty was able to choose from meals that had been stockpiled from the last month's bulk cooking session. So there was never really any stress over what were we going to eat.
We've had pizza (homemade),
chicken tostadas,
sausage in a cream reduction with pasta (that sounds fancy, huh!).
The stockpile allowed me to keep feeding my family when I was down and out for the count:
When it really matters.

I will cook this weekend and this is one of those that will definitely get made.

Key West Grilled Chicken

9 tablespoons soy sauce
6 tablespoons honey
3 tablespoons oil
3/4 cup lime juice
3 cloves garlic
6 pounds chicken

Divide chicken evenly into three Ziploc bags. Divide marinade ingredients into each bag (just divide each amount by 3. Its easy.)
Marinate one bag for 2-3 hours. Freeze the other 2 bags.
Grill the chicken you marinated. Save the other 2 for another day.  Look! You just cooked dinner for 3 days!

No Soup for You!

I don't like soup.

 I have never liked soup.
I always associate it with being sick (I think I must have been forcibly fed Chicken Noodle Soup as a small child or something.)
So the fact that there are a lot of freezer cooking meals that are soup originally posed a problem for me. Because I don't like soup.

I knew that there were a lot of benefits to soup:
1. It contains a lot of vegetables and usually in small pieces so that you can sneak it into your children.
2. Its a one dish meal, possibly served with a roll.
3. Because soups are usually frozen completely cooked, they are very quick to prepare if you are arriving home late or leaving early for the previously mentioned soccer practice at 6.
4. Its cheap to make and goes a long way.
But I don't like soup.

I decided to try it, steering as far away from Chicken Noodle Soup as I could.
I started with 3 bags of dry lentils and some ham.
Following a very simple recipe, I came away with a very large pot of lentil soup. I sure hoped I liked it, because there was a lot of it.
How could you not like it? It was made with fresh ingredients, there were no ingredients that sounded like a science experiment (polysalasoluaminate), there was not a day's worth of sodium in each bowl, there was not funky metallic taste from coming from a can.
It was good.

My soup making has branched a good distance from there.
There is the Spicy Italian Sausage with Cheese Tortellini. (Its good, but its not good for you.)
There is the Split Pea with Ham. (That one is really good for you.)
There is the Buffalo Chicken Soup that is so good I gave it for a gift to my boss at Christmas.
And, by the way, I make a really good Chicken Noodle Soup.

Buffalo Chicken Soup (this one ain't cheap.)
This will make 3-4 gallon bags of soup.
3 Deli chicken or 6 pounds of cooked chicken
6 Tablespoons of Butter
1 1/2 cup chopped celery
1 1/2 cup chopped onion
90 ounces chicken broth
4 1/2 cup milk
3 Teaspoon Salt
4 1/2 Teaspoon Hot Sauce
4 1/2 Cup Mozzarella Cheese
20 ounces bleu cheese
1 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
1 cup of flour

Directions
Debone the chicken or chop it up.
Melt butter in stockpot.
Brown onion and celery.
Add the broth, milk, salt and hot sauce.
In a mixing bowl, mix the cheeses and flour. (This keeps the cheeses from clumping together. I have skipped this step. DO NOT DO THAT!)
Add cheese gradually to the soup, stirring it in and letting it melt as you go.
Stir in the chicken.
Cool and freeze.
Or if you are a normal cook and don't freeze everything as you cook, heat through and serve.

Look at the Calendar!

Look at the calendar!

In the last post, I said "you never know what you are going to get." That's not actually true. At my house, you always know exactly what you are going to get. 

True confession time: On the door into Ty's office, there is a beautiful 31 organizer (if you need a 31 organizer or any other 31 products, let me know. I will hook you up with my friend Kathryn.). In that organizer, there are two calendars. One is filled in with soccer games, field trips, project due dates, meetings, BUNCO, vacations, etc. Everybody has a calendar like that. 

But there is also a calendar of the current month filled in in pencil with every single dinner and side dish that we will have on every night for the entire month. 

No, really, there is. 

 If you call me, I could tell you what we are having for dinner any night of the month. 

Now true, it is written in pencil. Sometimes it has to change. Sometimes you end up eating at a friend's house or going out to eat. But then that's night's meal can be erased and moved to another spot on the calendar. Seems a little, I don't know, OCD, maybe. 

And maybe it is. 

But it works for us. 

Meal Calendar Benefits

1. When you know you have soccer practice at 6 and you don't get home til 5, you can choose a crock pot meal for that day. That way when you walk in the house, dinner is done. Feed them. Shin guard them. Walk out the door. Plus its still warm in the crock pot 30 minutes later when your husband gets home. 

2. Planning side dishes ahead of time keeps you from the dreaded "can of green beans, can of corn" because that's all that you have in the house because you did not plan ahead. Instead, when the calendar says "Chicken stirfry", it also says "fried rice" (and yes the rice was cooked ahead of time and its in the freezer) and it says "egg rolls" (and yes they are homemade and are in the freezer). 

3. With all the side dishes planned, you can minimize those last minute "oh no, I don't have trips to Walmart." It really is those trips that eat away at your family budget.

4. If on the calendar it says you are having BBQ Pork Sliders on the 24th of the month and your husband chooses to go to Full Moon BBQ that day for lunch, you can still serve BBQ Pork Sliders for dinner without guilt because its been written up there for 23 DAYS!! Its not like he did not know what was for dinner.  He just gets to eat BBQ 2 times that day. Look at the calendar!

Now the following recipe is not a freezer meal, but its just so stinking cool that I have to tell you about it.

Caramel Pie

2 cans sweetened condensed milk

2 graham cracker pie crusts

Cool Whip or Whipped cream

1. Place cans in crock pot and cover with water. Cook on low for 8 hours. (I know that everyone always boils for three hours and you have to watch it and keep adding water, but this way it manages itself. That is just so stinking cool.).

2. Take out of crock pot and let cool.

3. Open and pour in pie crust. Chill. Cover with whipped cream. 

Yummo! 

And I know you are asking, why make two?

More on that another day!

Maybe just a Little Variety

Chicken, AGAIN!

                                 Baked chicken

                                                                                         Barbecue chicken. 

Heart Attack Chicken (Don't ask. Its just a name that Ty made up for a dish I used to make. "Used to make" is the key phrase here. It was VERY good, but real people can't eat that way without dying.) 

That is all I used to cook. I literally made those three chicken dishes and Prego sauce with hamburger meat that I tried to pass off as spaghetti. Trust me, that is not spaghetti sauce. But I will talk about spaghetti another time. If I cooked, it was one of those four things and EVERYBODY was sick of eating it. Fast forward to today...

I will cook in four days.  Our menu includes some of our staples like Italian Chicken Salad (stolen from a friend of mine (Jenny Leigh!) but we have had it every month for over two years now.) It contains some favorites that are "really good but not good for you" (that's one of my favorite food sayings which I like to say in my best Julia Child voice), like Buffalo Chicken Soup and Sausage and Penne in a Cream Reduction. The "bad for you" meals always return after a 3-4 month absence from the menu.   But it also includes some new meals that we have never had, or at least, never had homemade.  These include Mongolian Beef and Zuppa Tuscana ( a potato and sausage soup that I hope turns out well.) That was one of the points of learning to freezer cook, to add a little variety to our boring evening meal.
And variety and excitement have been achieved:
                                    Old meals.
                                               New meals.
                            Soups.
                                                     Roasts.
                                                                          On the grill.
                                                 In the crockpot.
                                                                                        At 350 for 45 minutes. 
You never know just what you will get. You just know that it was prepared ahead of time, with love and a particular meal in mind.

Italian Chicken Salad

Ingredients

6 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken (I buy mine at the local warehouse store, i.e. Sam's)
A large bottle of Italian dressing
2 Ziploc bags
A crockpot
A big salad

Directions (YOU CAN DO THIS!)
Place 2 pounds of chicken in crockpot. Place 2 pounds of chicken in each of the other bags. (Usually in the 6 pound package of chicken from Sam's there are six pieces so I find the math very easy.)
Liberally pour dressing into all three, both bags and the crockpot. Put the bags in the freezer. Turn the crockpot on low and cook for 8 hours.  When its done, shred that chicken and serve it on your big salad. AND... salad is not complicated. In this recipe, its lettuce, dressing, chicken and croutons. But add carrots if you want. Or mushrooms. Or pea pods. But don't over think it and stress. Salad is just nature's way of cleaning out the produce drawer in your fridge.

That's it. Your dinner is in the crock pot and you have two more in the freezer. So next time you want to eat this, like next week, you don't have to go buy chicken and prep it. You did that part already. Just dump the FROZEN chicken and Italian dressing block in the crock pot (thaw just a little so you can get it out of the bag). Turn it on low and walk away. In 8 hours make a big salad. Dinner is done! You did it again! You are the Queen of the Kitchen and you have conquered the evening meal with no blood, no tears and no trip to McDonald's.  And you still have that trick in the freezer to pull out when you need it.

How Do You Do That?

How do you do that?

I get that question a lot.

I answer that question at least once while I am in Sam's each month buying 2 whole pork tenderloins, 36 pounds of chicken, 12 pounds of ground beef and 5 pounds of beef tips.
"No, ma'am. I don't have a restaurant. I just cook for my family once a month and freeze everything."
"No ma'am. I only have a side by side fridge." (In the beginning I did have only a side by side. Now I do have a separate deep freeze.)

How do you that?

I used to ask myself that question when I would begin to prep for a month's worth of cooking. I would be poring over recipes, trying to multiply them out to cook multiple times, trying to figure out how much meat to buy, trying to maintain a budget, trying to bring some variety to our diet while at the same time cooking something that everybody could and would eat.

How do you do that?

I answered that question just this week for a woman in Walmart. She commented that I must be making a lot of  spaghetti. My buggy had 3 jars of Alfredo sauce, 6 jars of marinara sauce, a packet of pepperoni, a packet of salami, a rotisserie chicken 6 bags of mozzarella cheese, and 32 pizza crusts.
"No ma'am. I'm making pizza for dinner. We were out." Of course she looked confused.
So of course I elaborated. "I make my own pizza and freeze it. I'll make our dinner and then I will make 28 more so that the next time we are having pizza, we already have it."
And you can see the light go off in her head! "I had never thought of it that way. Next time I make pizza, I'm going to do that." And of course by this time she's going through my buggy to see exactly what I'm buying that you can freeze.

How do you do that?

How did it all start?
During the summer 3 years ago, after a spring filled with chicken fingers, frozen pizza and McDonald's, I decided that there had to be a better way to feed my family. It could not go on like that. You see, spring is hard for me. I am a special education teacher and the spring is filled with IEP's. Add to that, the activities of 2 children, church involvement, two birthdays and a spring dance recital, well... there just had to be a better way.

So I set out to find it.  I started with a single cookbook. Once a Month Cooking: Family Favorites.  It gave a basic plan and some basic rules. I followed the plan. Some of their recipes worked. Some flopped. We ate it anyway. In fact, one of Ty's famous dinner questions came from this first month "How many more times do I get to not like this?" Bless him. He has suffered through a lot of under-seasoned soup and some apple flavored pork (I have promised to never make that again!).  Since then, I have discovered several websites and bought many more cookbooks.  I've learned how to take a normal recipe and determine if it will freeze and at what point in the recipe you need to freeze it.  Its been a lot of trial and error. Its had some highs and lows. There has been a spilled taco pie and a bag of soup pour on the floor (that will make you cuss, even if you don't cuss).  There have been moments of "DOH" and "Ah-HAH!" and I will attempt to share them with you.

Pizza Recipe

10 packs of Mama Mia's individual size pizza crust. (This will give you 30 pizzas. I also bought 2 large crusts to have for dinner for me and Ty.

That's the extent of my recipe. After that you can do whatever floats your boat -  pizza wise. This time I did 3 meat, Alfredo, Buffalo chicken, and BBQ chicken. Use BBQ sauce, wing sauce, pesto sauce, Alfredo sauce, marinara, whatever.
Lay each crust on a small piece of freezer paper. I lay 12 on my kitchen table at one time and try to make 12 of the same kind at once. It just makes it simpler. Top it like you were going to put it in the oven. Then slide each one flat into a Ziploc gallon freezer bag. (3 of them will it into one bag.) Then lay them flat in the freezer. That's it.
When you want to eat one, take it out, put it on a cookie sheet and bake it at 425 for 20 minutes or so. Make a salad.  Dinner is done! It will taste better than frozen because its homemade and you will fill better about it because you know exactly what went into it. And if you will make the two large pizzas like I did, you will have those for dinner the night that you make it. Yay you!