Adventures in Cooking, Recap

So I am about to venture into my second round of Crockpot meals. The first batch was great – convenient, easy, and different meals. However I think I am only going to be making the beef stroganoff again, jsut because it was simple. A lot of the more adventurous and complex recipes we tried tasted good the first time, but by the second leftovers, everything was, as Josh described, “all the same mush” with different flavors. I tend to agree, even though I had fun making everything and nothing really tasted bad! We are texture people.

However, beef stroganoff was a big hit and continued to be good warmed up. Here is the recipe I used:

Crockpot Beef Stroganoff
1-2 lbs cube steak, cut into one-inch pieces; or 1-2 lbs stew beef, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
2 cans condensed golden mushroom soup (no substitutes!)
1 cup chopped onion
1 Tb Worcestershire sauce
1 14 oz can beef broth
8 oz button mushrooms, cleaned and quartered (optional)
salt and pepper to taste
4 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
1/2 cup sour cream (or yogurt, which I used the first time)

In the crockpot, combine the meat, soup, onion, Worcestershire sauce, beef broth, mushrooms, salt and pepper. Cook on low for 5-6 hours. Stir in cream cheese/yogurt and sour cream about half an hour before serving, stirring every ten minutes or so to break up cream cheese.

Boil pasta of your choice and add to crockpot before serving to assimilate.

Another one that was great and I would recommend is the Hawaiian chicken – again very easy, and tasty. This was actually our first meal, and we ended up sharing it with friends, so there were not so many leftovers! So it may also be mushy, but it has a good, not too crazy taste. Here is the recipe:

Hawaiian BBQ Chicken

3-4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/2 bottle of Lawry’s Hawaiian marinade
1/2 bottle of sweet/spicy bbq sauce of your choice (I used Bull’s Eye Kansas City Style hickory)
20 oz can of chopped pineapples
White Easy Rice

Chop up chicken, and put in freezer bag with pineapples. Add marinade and sauce and squish around to combine. When ready to cook, thaw then add to crockpot, cook on low for 4-6 hours. Serve with White Rice.

Note: when the chicken is chopped up, it seems to get a little dry if you cook it all the 6 hours. You could also leave the breasts whole and then pull them apart like “pulled pork” int he crockpot or serve them whole. I like chopping b/c it goes farther, more servings.

Other suggestions from what I’ve learned:

1) Easy Rice is your best friend! It does have a different consistency than bagged rice but the convenience cannot be beat. Buy the boxes, not the pouches. I bought two boxes of white rice and they lasted the whole month – I haven’t even touched the brown rice yet.

2) Shop bogos to save on things you need multiples of, like meat and canned veggies. But don’t buy more than you will need JUST because it’s bogo. You can do this for 100 a month if you do it smart.

3)For meals that don’t include all the food groups, buy bags of frozen veggies to complement.

 

All the other meals we had from the last round were fantastic! I would suggest at least trying each one once if it looks tasty to you. Here are the next ones on the docket for February:

Crock Pot Pork Spare Ribs (ribs are on a great deal at Winn Dixie this week!)
Stuffed Bell Pepper Soup (we love stuffed bell peppers so this sounded amazing)
Slow Cooker Jambalaya
Chicken and Sweet Potato Stew
Chicken Taco Soup
Beef Stroganoff

Pictures and recipe details next post!

How to Make Homemade Food, Work All Week and Share One Car with Your Husband

So I decided to venture into the whole prep-meals-for-the-crockpot-and-freeze-them fad I’ve seen on pinterest this month. December was a little slow for us with the holidays but I knew when I went back to work, and my husband went to work at his contract job with new hours, we would be hard-pressed to find time to cook good food – and I will not waste our hard-earned money on fast food garbage! So having a meal in the crockpot in the morning without having to prep it the night before or the day of started to sound really really good.

So I did my research (my Pinterest research), and found that not all freezer-Crockpot meals are created equal. Some people like to make bbq chicken in the crockpot. Not for me. Others like to make chinese food meals in the crockpot. Interesting. And then there are your standard fares like soup and pot roast. So I sought out several meals that sounded appealing to me, would be easy to prepare, and give us a little bit of variety. My husband works at Chickfila right now too and if I fed him chicken for dinner every other night when he got home, he would probably rather starve.

So here are the meals I picked:

Thai Peanut Chicken (http://thelontfamily.blogspot.com/2011/11/crock-pot-thai-peanut-chicken.html)

Hawaiian chicken

Applesauce BBQ pork (http://whoneedsacape.com/2012/11/crockpot-freezer-cooking/)

Balsamic Onion Pot Roast (http://melissafallistestkitchen.blogspot.com/2011/09/freezer-cooking-slow-cooker-meals.html)

Orange Chicken (six sisters)

Beef Stroganoff (http://www.sixsistersstuff.com/2011/08/25-delicious-slow-cooker-recipes.html)

Sounds yummy right?! The first few were single recipes I found on blogs via Pinterest. Some of them, like Melissa, had more recipes featured but I decided not to go with those. The Six Sisters’ site has a bazillion recipes, but I only chose about two of theirs. The pulled pork recipe from Who Needs A Cape has great overall instructions for how to go about a big cooking day, with shopping list etc for all of her meals. Another great blog for the freezer meals is Mama and Baby Love, which is also full of other great homemaking and family tips.

Okay so getting started on this can just be overwhelming. I only did 8 meals with zero counter space and I got a little overwhelmed. But just put on some Norah Jones music and start in the morning sometime (not at 3:30 in the afternoon ahem…) and make yourself a little lunch or dinner to keep you going if you are prepping through those times. Because you will become hungry!

Step 1) Find your recipes. Copy and paste each into a Word Document and then print them.

Step 2) Write down what ingredients you need and how much. Double check your pantry for items that you may already have and assess if need to get more or not. I started with the meats, then the produce, then the other items, like canned or frozen things. Don’t forget the accompanying starch or side that may not go in the crockpot, like pasta or rice, and go with minute rice or Uncle Ben’s or something like that to make it easy to prep in the evening.

Step 3) Go shopping! I went shopping the day of for my stuff, but then didn’t get started until later in the afternoon. Not recommended. You could probably go the night before and then have everything ready (don’t freeze the meat) the next morning, or go the store earlier in the morning before noon and then get started when you got home. I don’t have little ones yet, so this was an easy process for me with the house and kitchen to myself. But the other ladies’ blogs have great tips on getting the kids involved helping! If they are really little though it would probably be good to have someone at the house to keep them occupied since this will take a good 3-5 hours depending on how many meals you decide to do.

Step 4) Get out your freezer bags and write the name of each meal on each one, as well as how long and what temp to cook it for and any other instructions you need to know or prepare the day you make it. For example, one of my recipes for the balsamic pot roast calls for taking the juice from the roast and reducing it before you serve the roast, so you can use it as a gravy. A small extra step, but an extra one you would want to remember. The sausage and peppers calls for adding olive oil to the crockpot when it cooks (make sure you write down how much!) Etc Etc.

Step 5) Prepare your meals! Some like to put the meat in the bag, then chop all of the veggies then divy it out. I personally went by each meal sheet because that helped me keep my head on straight. I left the meats in the fridge until I needed each one and started chopping the different veggies and setting them on plates designated for each meal.

This way there would be no “measuring” when I went to put it in the bag. The recipe called for two green peppers, so on the plate are two nicely chopped green peppers, instead of ALL of the green peppers and then I have to decide how much to put in the bag.

Also, some of the recipes called for browning the meat before cooking it. Since we aren’t cooking the meal immediately and the crockpot can easily handle frozen food, I didn’t bother doing that, but think about adding another hour to your cook time or thawing the meal completely overnight before you put it in. I don’t think it has affected the flavor or quality of any of our meals so far.

  I decided to cut my chicken for the meals I prepped,

even though it didn’t necessarily call for it.

Step 6) Assemble your meals in the bags. Here is my beef stroganoff ingredients:

Get it all mixed up good and flat…

Try to press the air out of each bag as much as possible. Then they will lay flat better in the freezer…

Step 7) Make room in your freezer and lay them down flat. (This should probably be done before you start actually to ensure you have the space! I had to rearrange a few things before I could put the first one in).

Step 8) Clean up.

I hope this is helpful and maybe some of you who have been entertaining the idea of pre-making meals for the week or month will have confidence to take the plunge!