Freezer Cooking Day

Once I finished making the Chocolate Chip Pancakes, I made the Brown Bag Burritos. Since I already had chicken cooked, I went ahead and substituted chicken for the ground beef. Because you know how I just can’t bear to stick with a recipe exactly!

I realized that I didn’t have enough tortillas for all the filling, so I just filled the tortillas I had and put the rest of the filling in bags to freeze. While not quite as nice as having the burritos completely made, it’s really simple to just thaw the filling and make up a quick pan of burritos. Plus, it takes up less space in the freezer.

And then the freezing oranges experiment commenced.

I just cut, peeled, pulled them into pieces and stuck them in a freezer bag. I’m anxious to try them in some smoothies and see how they turn out. I have visions of variations on Orange Cream Smoothies.

Then it was time to roll out the bread dough for Cinnamon Swirl Bread. I’m happy to report that it actually turned out this week and we ate almost the entire loaf for dinner.

I spent the rest of the evening making granola, finishing our homeschool lessons for the day, playing with the children in the snow, cleaning up messes and more messes (!), getting dinner on the table, helping Jesse shovel the mountain of snow on the driveway (talk about a workout!) and then we all settled in and read four chapters of On The Banks of Plum Creek before bedtime.

All in all, it was a good day — even if my kitchen isn’t very clean right now and I’m pretty tired!

Coming up tomorrow: Granola photos and Cinnamon Swirl Bread recipe

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First up, I mixed up the Chocolate Chip Pancake batter.

I used some milk from the freezer in the batter. I also grab up marked down milk when I find it on a great deal and then freeze it to use in pancake batter.

While cooking the pancakes, I laid the chicken out on a cookie sheet and popped it in the oven to bake. I used to boil chicken breasts, but a reader left me a tip last year about baking them in the oven instead and I’ve found this to be much easier and the chicken ends up a lot more tender and juicy.

I then dumped all the bread dough ingredients in the bread machine and set it on the dough cycle. I just seriously love how simple it is to make dough using my bread machine!

I let the children have Chocolate Chip Pancakes for lunch. I guess they are getting their share of chocolate chips today!

The only problem is that they love Chocolate Chip Pancakes so much, that after they’d had their fill for lunch, we only had four pancakes left. I guess I need to make a bigger batch next time if I want to have any left for the freezer.

Next up: Brown Bag Burritos and my experiment with freezing oranges

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We’ve been busy as beavers this morning! I’m finally sitting down for a coffeebreak while the children watch Jelly Telly.

Breakfast was Oatmeal with Turbinado and Mini Chocolate Chips. I think I won some big brownie points with the children for letting them have chocolate for breakfast.

I found some Enjoy Life Chocolate Chips marked down to $0.99 per bag at the health food store on Saturday night, so I’ve been a bit more lenient with dolling out chocolate chips around here. Just don’t ask me how many handfuls I’ve consumed in the last few days, okay?

Then it was time to clean the kitchen. I have no idea how it manages to collect the messes it does in such a short period of time. It was completely clean yesterday afternoon! The only good thing is that I’ve found if I try to have it all cleaned up at least once a day, it never becomes overwhelmingly unmanageable.

Much better! The children all settled in to do some crafts at the kitchen table while I started in on my Freezer Cooking List.

Next up: Chocolate Chip Pancakes, Bread Dough and Chicken

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As I’ve mentioned in the past few months, I’ve been simplifying and streamlining a lot of areas in my life so that I can focus on the most important priorities, not overload my plate and have time to “stop and smell the roses” instead of feeling like I’m barely staying afloat.

One area that I’ve felt needs some revamping is my method of Freezer Cooking. When I had one and two small children, it was pretty simple to pull off a six-hour Freezer Cooking Marathon if I did a few hours in the morning while the girls played or helped me and a few hours in the afternoon during naptime.

Now that I have three children and a big chunk of our day is dedicated to homeschooling, I’m finding that fitting in a Freezer Cooking Marathon is just not, well, fitting in. In addition, we haven’t been eating casseroles and instead are mostly eating simple dinners of meat, veggies and either fruit and/or mashed potatoes, rice or bread. These meals don’t require a lot of prep work ahead of time, unlike the meals I used to make on Freezer Cooking Days.

The past month, I’ve been experimenting with doing a 30-minute batch-cooking session once or twice each week — marinating four meal’s worth of chicken breasts, quadrupling a batch of meatballs, making up a quadruple batch of pancakes or cooking a roast in the crockpot and then shredding it and turning it into a few meal’s worth of barbecued beef. I usually tack this onto our regular dinner prep in the late afternoon and I’m discovering if I do this once or twice each week, we consistently have at least a week’s worth of meals in the freezer at all times.

I was feeling guilty about doing Freezer Cooking this way as it just didn’t seem “right” compared with how I’ve always done it. When I was talking with FishMama about the guilt I was struggling with in admitting to you all that having a Freezer Cooking Marathon is just not working for us right now, she reminded me that there is no right way to “do” Freezer Cooking.

It’s not about trying to copy what works for someone else or trying to mimic what once worked for us. Being a successful homemaker, wife, mother and home economist is about finding what works for you and your family and doing that — and having freedom from guilt about what others do or don’t do.

So, I’m going revamp my previous Freezer Cooking methods and do what works for us right now — which is just having a mini freezer cooking session once or twice a week. I might not stay as far ahead or have my freezer quite as stocked, but it will still save us a great deal of time. And I really don’t think it will end up taking any extra time and my kitchen won’t get so utterly destroyed all at once (though I might end up washing a few extra dishes by breaking it up like this).

I’ll still be posting an occasional freezer-friendly recipe, but I’m handing off the hosting of the monthly Freezer Cooking Day link-ups to FishMama for now (she so generously offered to take over the shouldering of it for me!). I may pick it back up again in the future, but for now, I’m going to guiltlessly enjoy doing what is working for our family.

photo from Shutterstock

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So, I did a very short Freezer Cooking Day this past Saturday. Actually, I don’t think “day” really describes what it was – since it was more like “snatches of time” in the middle of a busy day.

To be completely honest, I got all lazy and didn’t really do it “right.” I guess you could say I’m adapting FlyLady’s slogan: “Housework done incorrectly still blesses your family.”

Getting past perfectionism and being satisfied with “good enough” has been one of the best lessons I’ve learned as a homemaker. Because seriously? No one lives in the perfect, catalog houses anyway.

I cooked up a TON of chicken (something like 16 meals’ worth!) and then just chopped the cooked chicken and sliced the marinated chicken. And then {gasp!} I dumped it into two big freezer bags and stuck them in the freezer. I know I should have probably frozen them in individual meal-sized bags, but I ran out of bags and time.

The same with the strawberries, bananas and peaches. I’d planned to make up these snazzy Fruit Smoothie Kits complete with yogurt frozen in ice cube trays and the like. But I was short on time since we were leaving the next morning to go out of town, so I decided it was better to get something done and to go to bed at a decent hour, than to do everything perfectly and stay up all night.

{Is it a sign that I’m getting old or that I’m getting smart when I choose sleep over perfectionism?}

Only time will tell if my lazy methods end up taking a lot of extra time. For now, I’m just happy to have a big bag of muffins, three big bags of frozen fruit for smoothies, 40 homemade oatmeal packets and about 16 meals’ worth of chicken in the freezer making meal preparation over the next few weeks much smoother.

And all told, I probably spent no more than two hours –broken up over the day – to pull it off, including clean up.

Sure, it’s not my most impressive Freezer Cooking Day spread, but it’s something. And that something will come in very handy during the busy weeks ahead.

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Did you have a chance to do any baking or cooking this week? If so, post about it on your blog and leave your link below to your direct blo g post. I’d love it especially if you could share pictures and recipes so we can get ideas for our next Freezer Cooking Day! And I’m guessing many others would be inspired as well.

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The final results of Saturday’s Freezer Cooking Day:

–4 meals’ worth of Barbecued Beef (Wasn’t really thrilled with how the recipe turned out, so I’m not sharing it here — maybe next time!)

–3 meals’ worth of Southwest Roll-ups (enough for

–4 meals’ worth of Marinated Chicken

–48 Frozen Fruit Cups

–Quadruple batch of Whole-Wheat Chocolate Chip Pancakes (Recipe was supposed to be coming, but they were all eaten before I got a picture. I’ll likely make these next time around and try to get a picture so I can share the recipe then!)

–Cooked bacon for BLT sandwiches and salads (enough for 3 meals)

–Cooked and chopped chicken for Homemade Pizza and Chicken Pasta Salad (enough for 4 meals — 2 of each)

By the end of my Cooking Marathon, I made enough for 18 meals or parts of meals, plus pancakes and fruit cups. For 2 1/2 hours of work, that was every bit worth the effort spent!

We still have 6 meals leftover from last month’s Freezer Cooking Day, so I’m pretty sure we’re just about set for dinners in May — and that’s such a great feeling! Yes, Freezer Cooking is very worth it.

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Did you have a chance to do any baking or cooking this week? If so, post about it on your blog and leave your link below to your direct blo g post. I’d love it especially if you could share pictures and recipes so we can get ideas for our next Freezer Cooking Day! And I’m guessing many others would be inspired as well.

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