Cook Once and Eat for a Month | Easy Scratch Made Freezer Meals

hey friends welcome back to acre homestead my name is becky if you're new welcome to my kitchen we are going to be cooking up a whole lot a lot of freezer meals we are going to be cooking 11 different recipes if we get to every single one of them today and i'm gonna at least double if not triple a lot of them so we're gonna be cooking a ton of meals i did a little bit of prep yesterday let me bring you back to yesterday so you can see what i did yesterday was a work day for me i was up in my office all day but i did a few things around the kitchen so that they could be working for me while i was doing something else first thing i did was i put four whole chickens in my roaster pan these are chickens from butcher box and i'm super happy with them i can link them down in the description box and i sprinkled on some homemade seasoned salt i was pretty liberal with the salt on top because that's a lot of chicken i then poured in one quart of broth i turned that on about 350 degrees and let that cook for a few hours i got out some vegetables to thaw that we're going to use tomorrow and then i started some rice this is brown rice and broth this all is in here i went upstairs and i sat while the rice was cooking once the rice was done i came down and i shredded up all the cheese plus extra cheese we'll need i shredded up parmesan cheese cheddar cheese and mozzarella cheese using my new shredder that i absolutely love you all have seen me use this at my mom's house and i now have my own and i love it you can see how beautifully the roaster cooks up those chickens fall apart tender i picked the meat off the bones and i put the bones back in the roaster pan the rice was done i'm using brown rice as an experiment in these freezer meals for the first time and i think it's going to work really well after that i put in black beans into my insta pot because i needed black beans for some recipes i filled up my roaster with some water for broth and that is the prep that i did yesterday i like i said i was working in my office all day yesterday so i could have those things kind of cooking and going while i was doing other things now this morning i got up really early and i started our red sauce i wanted to get up early and get the red sauce going the spaghetti squash going and some italian sausage going because i wanted these things cooking while i was showering and getting ready for the day i didn't want that time wasted where something could be actively working for me and that is why i decided to get up early and do that so that when i came back downstairs to get ready to do a huge cooking day all the things that i would need pre-cooked are already done we're going to be done and ready for me i also took that time to go ahead and get the dishwasher unloaded the garbage emptied and my kitchen counters wiped down one more time i really prefer to work in a clean kitchen i think that it's just a more relaxing environment to be in and so that's why i went ahead and did that when i plan my freezer meals i try to think of recipes that have the same ingredients so that i can prep just extra of those ingredients so i need celery onions and carrots for both my sloppy joes and for the bolognese sauce that we're going to make for our lasagna so i went and i prepped these all of them that i would need for both recipes this morning now that our meat is browned i added a little bit of tomato paste and then i'm going to deglaze the pan with some red wine and then you can see that i have some canned crushed tomatoes in the back there those are homegrown crushed tomatoes which is pretty exciting and we're going to let this cook and brown up and then we're going to add the wine and the tomatoes i get asked a lot why do i cook like this why do i cook so much food and it's because i am passionate about home-cooked food i love home-cooked food and i don't want to cook every night of the week i think that with the pressure of having to cook every night of the weekend take some of the joy out of cooking for me i clearly enjoy doing this or i wouldn't spend an entire day cooking but i don't want to have to cook every night of the week to have a home-cooked meal every night of the week so i have discovered that freezer meals are the best way for me to have food in my freezer for those nights where i just don't have the energy the time to cook josh and i enjoy eating out but what we've learned over the last two years is that we want to be more intentional about when we eat out instead of resorting to takeout because you know we're both tired and we don't want to cook if i have freezer meals in my freezer it's a way of ensuring and just giving me peace of mind that we can eat at home really good quality food whenever we want to and i don't have to worry about having to cook all the time and i do this for a few reasons i do it because i can control the ingredients a lot of what i'm cooking with today are homegrown ingredients or they're locally sourced from local farmers in my area the things that i can't grow the meat the produce the dairy and i can have a higher quality product for a cheaper price as opposed to eating out i can spend a little extra money buying higher quality ingredients instead of using that money to go to take out if that makes sense that's kind of why i do this and i just think that it's super important and it's a way of having a little bit of food insurance meal insurance in my freezer the recipes that we're going to be making today some of them are my recipes some of them are my mom's recipes and some of them are recipes my sister-in-law found i asked her what recipes or what dishes do you want for your freezer meals and she sent me a list of some recipes that she found online and i'm excited to give them a try two of them are beef and broccoli and honey sesame chicken these the way that we prepare these are completely different than the way i normally prepare my marinated chickens you don't just dump it into a ziploc bag and call it good there's a completely different like technique to it so i'm going to show you that technique i'm going to do that same technique that i was reading on this other bloggers recipes with my mom's kung pao chicken recipe which is good i haven't had that in a long time so i'm excited to have that in the freezer and then my sister-in-law also requested that i make her some pizza dough and lasagna bolognese so we're gonna do lasagna bolognese with bechamel sauce we're also gonna do a fettuccine tortellini pesto bake that is new to me i've never made this before so that's going to be fun and those were the recipes that my sister-in-law came up with that she asked me to make for her i need a few more meals in my freezer than that so i came up with some recipes that i'm going to make for josh and i i'm going to do an italian stuffed pepper we're going to do a tex-mex casserole like a bean and rice and chicken casserole i'm completely making this recipe up so that's going to be fun we're going to see how that turns out i think it's going to be good because it's going to have all good things that i like beans rice corn chicken taco seasoning peppers onions and all the good stuff and i'm going to make up a sauce to put on the top i'm just coming up with this recipe in my head so we're going to figure it out together we're going to do the broccoli chicken spaghetti squash bake because i grew a ton of spaghetti squash and we need to be using that up we are going to do creamy mushroom pork chops and sloppy joes so those are the recipes if you're interested in any of the recipes we're going to be cooking today i will link them down in the description box whether they're my recipes or someone else's recipes you'll be able to find them down there i also wanted to mention i normally get out everything that i basically need to do one of these freezer cooking days and today i decided to do something different because when i came down here the kitchen was really clean and organized normally i do my grocery shopping the day before i do one of these bulk cooking days and i did my grocery shopping a few days ago so i had already put everything away so i thought let's try something new let's see if we can do this with a really clean kind of minimal organized kitchen and see if i feel better about doing this i love my freezer cooking days but sometimes it can get a little overwhelming when i have everything stacked up on the counters it is more efficient if i do my grocery shopping the day before not to put everything away and then pull it back out but today because i didn't do that we're going to try something new so let's get the bechamel sauce going first we have our bolognese sauce made here and we'll make the bechamel sauce so that we can get these lasagnas put together and we can move on to the next recipe it's always good to start if you're going to do one of these freezer cooking days to try to get something under your belt and finished and checked off the list so you can have that confidence to keep moving forward and that encouragement that you're on the right track last time i made my bechamel sauce i used whole wheat flour and it turned out really well no one even noticed so i'm trying to use up my whole wheat flour because i want to start grinding my own but before i do that i want to use this up first so we're going to make our bechamel sauce with whole wheat flour again while i'm waiting for my butter to melt i'm going to season this with some salt and pepper and i'm gonna get some nutmeg in here as well always use whole nutmeg if you can [Music] this is a two cup measure it's revolutionary to me i love it [Music] we cooked our flour and butter mixture for about two to three minutes to cook that flour and make sure it doesn't have a raw flour taste and then i added half the amount of milk we need for this recipe i'm going to let this thicken and then i'll add the rest of the milk my bechamel sauce is cooking away so in the meantime i'm going to bag up two baggies worth of italian sausage for pizzas that we'll have later this month i already strained the fat off of these i need enough italian sausage for the stuffed peppers but i should have enough here to have enough sausage for two pizzas or four pizzas because i always make two pizzas at a time i will write on them the date and what it is because i don't want to forget that this is italian sausage because if i have time i'm gonna cook up some breakfast sausage too while we're waiting for this beautiful bechamel sauce to thicken up let me tell you what we have in here we have our bolognese sauce which is ground beef italian sausage the ground beef is 100 grass-fed grass finish from butcher box if you shop through my link i can link it down below you get two pounds of grass-fed grass-finished beef in every box of your membership we also have homegrown tomatoes in here homegrown carrots parsley basil and garlic that are homegrown i put in a little bit of red wine and what else do we have in here i think that is it it's fantastic i did season it but we have to taste both of these for seasoning before we assemble our lasagnas and in here it's going to get steamy we have our spaghetti squash the oven's off right now but i'm just letting it continue to steam and evaporate some of that moisture so we don't have a runny spaghetti squash casserole our bolognese sauce is done and i want to start our stuffed pepper filling mixture so we have more than one thing cooking at a time i have homegrown onions pre-chopped so i don't have to worry about chopping them we're going to cook those in here and saute them up and then i'm also going to add some homegrown kale to this i'm going to let this cook down and this is going to be part of our filling for our italian stuffed peppers just going to break this up a little bit i'm going to prep these and then i'm going to wash them when i do my stuffed peppers i like to cut them in half so i get two stuffed peppers per pepper i feel like if you use just one pepper per stuffed pepper that's kind of a lot of pepper where's my bowl i always like to have a scrap bowl so i can just put it in here and move on with life my garbage goes in my garbage can so when i'm doing days like this i like to try to break it down and think about what can i be doing while something is cooking so instead of me waiting for my bechamel sauce to be done before i move to the next step i try to just go ahead and move to the next step that's one way i can try to get as much done in a day as possible my chickens are always happy after a day like this because they get so many goodies all of these pepper fillings and any scraps we have are going to be going out to the chickens and they're going to enjoy it i'm going to get the mushrooms prepped for the creamy mushroom pork chops i think i forgot to mention that we're also going to be making beef and broccoli so that's going to be one of those new recipes where we're going to do it in that unique way that i'm really curious and interested to find out how it goes i do need to wash these mushrooms i gotta find my colander there's mixed reviews on whether you're supposed to wash your mushrooms underwater or if you're supposed to use a damp paper towel to wipe them off i always wash them under water i like to make sure they're really nice and clean and then i just saute them up enough to where i cook off any excess moisture if you don't have time to devote an entire day to freezer cooking a way you can start to build some freezer meals in your freezer is by doubling a recipe the next time you go to cook dinner instead of cooking one meal cook two and put one in the freezer all right let's taste our bechamel sauce here needs a little bit of salt let's taste our bolognese while we're at it got a new spoon and then we can adjust the seasoning on both of them as needed that is perfect i'm going to put a little bit of garlic powder in here as well this is some home grown garlic and then we'll put our seasoned salt our filling mixture for our stuffed peppers is done we'll just have to add the rice that we cooked yesterday i need to put this in a different container i'm going to leave that out because we're definitely going to be using that more today i can't even believe it we're already about to assemble and complete our first dish which is our lasagna this is some home well not home home grated parmesan cheese i went ahead and i grated a whole block there i just put a little bit of sauce down on the bottom i'm going to use these flat no boil noodles these are my favorite for this recipe just lay these down i'm using the foil pan for my sister-in-law i don't want her to have to worry about dishes or anything like that right after having a baby kind of defeats the purpose of doing a freezer meal but for us i use a just a glass 9x13 i freeze in them all the time and it works really really well my baby shower that i typically give my friends and family for having a baby is meals and i always like to ask them what they would like because i want to make sure that you know i cook what they're going to enjoy eating especially after having a baby and i do ask for any dietary restrictions or anything like that so that they can enjoy the food that i cook for them i also am making pizza dough i think i forgot to mention that earlier so we're gonna make that as well because she asks for pizza first two dishes are done we have two lasagnas i made too much white sauce i did add extra ingredients because i wanted to top our stuffed peppers with white sauce i might even have enough to use this as part of the cream of mushroom soup for the pork chops so we'll just see how far it goes and i didn't quite make enough of the bolognese sauce which is totally fine i didn't think i was going to i'm going to show you how i'm going to make this stretch for the peppers this is the rice i made yesterday we're going to make the filling for the stuffed peppers i'm going to put some rice in this bowl and we're going to put our filling mixture we made this has our kale our onions our sausage this bowl might be a little small no that looks like it's going to be perfect so we're gonna mix this filling mixture together it smells so good i think i'm gonna add just a little bit of this white sauce so that it kind of binds together because we're using brown rice it's not super sticky together like white rice would i think this is going to turn out really good i do have a base recipe for this but i'm i'm kind of making this up now on the fly because sometimes that's just what i do especially if i've made too much of something i don't want it to go to waste or whatever i just add and adjust add and adjust and the more you cook the more confident you'll get in the kitchen and the more you'll know what you can you know adjust and what you shouldn't adjust and this is perfect here so we're going to go ahead and get our peppers stuffed if i don't have enough of this red sauce i got a can of my homemade marinara sauce which i think i'm probably gonna add you know what [Music] i think i'm gonna actually get a thing of pizza sauce out because i don't think i you know this yeah pizza sauce basically has the same ingredients except there's no meat which is fine because there's meat in the stuffing so we're going to add that to make the red sauce stretch put a nice base layer on the bottom and this is where my hands are gonna get a little bit messy that's okay though and we're gonna take our filling mixture we're gonna stuff our peppers to me this is where cooking becomes fun typically what i would do on these stuffed peppers is i would top them with more red sauce and i've got home canned marinara sauce so i would normally do that but because i have extra white sauce i'm going to top these beautiful stuffed peppers with white sauce and i basically just made up a new recipe i think this is going to be so good it might be our next favorite recipe and that's the fun thing about just getting in the kitchen trying new things and seeing what happens we're going to top this with cheese after we do this you could easily make this recipe vegetarian just skip the sausage you could put mushrooms in it instead if you wanted that meaty flavor and just use marinara sauce on the bottom instead of the bolognese sauce i was thinking about maybe topping them with some mozzarella cheese too but i think that this is going to be good it's going to be creamy enough with the white sauce and with the parmesan cheese because these have a sauce on the top i think i'm going to pop them in the freezer right now without anything on them i'm going to let them freeze solid and then i'll put a piece of parchment paper and foil over the top just so that if i put foil on the top right now i think a lot of it's going to get on the foil the sauces so so these are going to go straight in the freezer just like this things are happening we're getting things done two things done a few more things in the making i'm gonna in here go ahead and get the sloppy joes going and in here i'm sauteing some peppers we're gonna make the i don't even know what to call it rice and bean casserole rice and bean mexican rice and bean i don't know we're gonna make it up and it's gonna be really good i have some home canned salsa we're gonna put on top as a sauce because these are frozen peppers they have a lot of moisture i just strained off some of that extra moisture and i'm gonna add some of our onions in here and we're gonna saute those together i'm putting in here four pounds of ground beef this is our butcher box grass-fed grass finish beef friends i i keep saying it and i'll say it again i'm so happy with the quality i ate some of that salmon that i bought and the salmon was so good i'm normally not a seafood person but i'm really working on trying to expand my culinary i'm trying to like seafood and i cook the seafood or i cook and i cook the salmon and it wasn't fishy tasting at all i cooked it really high hot we'll cook it together sometime but one thing that i love the most from butcher box is their grass-fed grass finished beef or all their beef that is grass-fed grass finished i'm really passionate about that i think that's super important not only for your health but also for the environment so we have our beef in here i'm gonna go wash my hands and we'll be back to do the next step on that so normally i make my sloppy joes with onions and peppers but because i chopped up a ton of celery and i have my carrots here we're going to use onions carrots and celery in our sloppy joes i've definitely done that before and it's really good i'm just trying to make things a little bit more efficient the peppers that i already have pre-chopped in my freezer are a little bit too big and i don't have my food processor to chop them up smaller so this is what we're going with and it'll be just great so while this is cooking let's start layering our tex-mex rice and bean casserole i cooked a lot of rice so i think i'm gonna be able to get three of these casseroles now we have our black beans that we made these are home grown black beans i'm gonna put a scoop in each one of these i used the pork broth that we made in the last what we eat in a week video in this and it just smells so good but you could make this vegetarian too if you wanted we are going to add chicken but if you didn't want to add meat you could certainly just do the rice and beans i just added some seasoned salt to this i want this to get really caramelized and cooked down quite a bit so while we're waiting for this we're going to continue to add layers to our casserole and this meat is cooking away if you had canned corn you could use that this was frozen corn that i just thought and i did strain out any extra liquid this is the chicken i cooked up yesterday whatever i don't use today i'm going to try canning it for the first time i'm a little bit nervous about that but i think it's going to be good i just bought myself an electric pressure canner you could do this with ground beef you could do this with pinto beans whatever you like or don't like this this is really versatile those are looking nice and caramelized so we're gonna just kind of evenly divide the peppers and onions between these casserole dishes i'm just going to put them on here like this that's kind of the cool thing about this recipe or lacquer of it's not really a recipe is you could really do whatever you want if you liked red peppers better than green peppers you'd use those if you don't like peppers don't use them so in my bowl i'm gonna put a jar of our home can salsa we can together [Music] and then i have some this is enchilada sauce homemade enchilada sauce that i found in the freezer so we're going to add that as well i want to can that at some point i just haven't gotten around to it yet and then i have one pint of sour cream and we're gonna see if this is gonna be enough sauce for all three of these okay let's see if this is enough for all three of these i think they may need just a little bit more sauce so they don't dry out so i just opened a can of salsa verde that i'm going to put kind of on the top and that's going to be perfect that's going to be the moisture level that we need in order for this to taste really good so this can be kind of it's kind of create your own adventure recipe and then we're going to top with cheese and then we have three delicious dinners all done our meat is nice and round and it's starting to stick a little bit to the bottom which is what you want that's the fond or fawn i think that's how you say it that's gonna give you that umami really rich flavor so we're gonna add our vegetables now i'm gonna add some grated carrot and then we have the celery and onions that we chopped and i chopped these super super fine and i'm gonna cook them down so you won't even really know they're in there i'm getting ready to do the next step for the sloppy joes but in the meantime i was starting to prep the pork chops and these things one are still a little bit frozen but look how big they are there that's probably an inch and a half if not two inches so these really really thick ones i think i'm gonna cut them in half just because they're so big i'm gonna have to wait for them to thaw completely too before oh yeah see seems like a more realistic sized pork chop gosh i was going to stuff some of these if you watched the grocery haul where i bought these i talked about stuffing them but you know maybe i should have hmm i'm thinking through this out loud with you i probably should have left the really big ones and stuffed those okay these four i'm not going to cook today i'm going to cook those sometime this week and we're going to stuff them together since we're waiting for the pork chops to thaw i thought let's go ahead and get the alfredo sauce made for the tortellini bake the recipe or inspiration recipe that my sister-in-law sent me called for store-bought jarred alfredo sauce but alfredo sauce is the easiest thing to make it's butter cream garlic salt pepper and parmesan cheese so it really is super easy to make so i'm going to go ahead and make it homemade because it doesn't take that much longer than just opening up a jar but the recipe i will link down below calls for jarred while we wait for this to thicken we're going to finish off our sloppy joes this is some homemade ketchup that i made to in 2020 we might need one more jar of that we're going to add some mustard some seasoned salt i haven't seasoned this meat at all yet homegrown garlic that we freeze dried together i'm gonna go ahead and put the garlic powder in our alfredo sauce too while i have it out that's elephant garlic so it's not very potent so you can use a lot of it and then we'll just put a little bit of brown sugar and some worcestershire sauce and that's it for sloppy joes we're just gonna cook this down after i stir it i'll know if i need to add one more ketchup and i definitely do so i'm gonna go grab one more ketchup so this year i didn't make ketchup but i'm going to make ketchup next year and we're going to do it the right way we're going to de-seed and de-skin our ketchup and it's going to give us a better texture i liked the flavor of it but the texture wasn't like you normally would expect from a ketchup you know what friends we might need one more i think i'm going to put one more in there and then i did put some water in my mustard and shake it up because i wanted to get the rest of that out of there just to use it up so that i can recycle this this alfredo sauce is already done it hasn't even been five minutes all we have to do well i guess it's not technically done all we have to do is add the parmesan cheese and then i have to reread the recipe of how to assemble this recipe and this is done i'm going to take this off the heat i'm going to have this cool so that we can package it up all right friends i almost just said these are done without tasting them so we're going to give them a taste test my friend ruth who used to live with us for i don't know you lived with us for like what a year she's in town she lives in arizona now so she's gonna hang out with me she just um shredded up our spaghetti squash having some cheese and crackers and we're just gonna hang out while we finish these meals together she might have to be my taste tester too okay so this is the sloppy joe mixture do you wanna taste it sure i haven't even tasted it so i don't know if it's gonna be good or not i like it maybe a little bit more tomato all right i mean like a little bit more saucy more saucy okay i think the flavor is really good though all right we have a new spoon we're gonna taste this sauce oh yeah that's good that's really good you can taste how can you go wrong with cream parmesan cheese and garlic taste it it's gonna have pesto in it too ooh yum it's okay it's good yeah awesome that's great this is one that my sister-in-law and i found and i forgot that it needed chicken but just like any of these other recipes if you want a vegetarian just leave the chicken out because these are cheese tortillas that i got at costco and these things are really good i've bought them a couple times i'm going to make this for me and my sister-in-law like i said so once again we have a foil pan for my sister-in-law and a glass pan for me and what we're going to do is we're going to combine everything in our bowl so we have our pre-cooked chicken that we cooked yesterday i just chopped it up we have two of these packages of tortellini i have some homemade pesto we made this together this is onion top pesto so it's not made with basil it's made with onion tops i'm gonna put we're gonna start with half the jar my friend is heading out to hang out with her sister and then she'll be back tonight and we are gonna enjoy a lasagna for dinner so that'll be really good this sauce smells like fondue if you have ever made homemade fondue oh my gosh it smells so good to add a little bit of mozzarella cheese as well so like i said this is a decadent one oh my goodness friends i just tried it with the pesto i tried some piece of the chicken with the pesto and the sauce on it this one is a winner well as long as the tortellinis cook up and the texture's good that's the biggest question mark because i've never done anything like this before so i don't really know but say you didn't make this into a freezer meal and you just made this recipe so good so so good i don't think you were supposed to cook the tortellinis first i guess i didn't read that far let me reread the recipe and make sure i didn't just totally mess this up no it says either fresh or frozen tortellini in a large bowl combine tortellini alfredo sauce chicken pesto mozzarella stir to combine and that's it so i didn't do it wrong thankfully after i get this all made up i'm going to take a minute and i'm going to wash a few dishes i'm going to just clean up a little bit and make sure that we're not you know making a huge mess or anything i have been enjoying having my kitchen pretty tidy throughout this whole experience and i want to keep it that way i want to get started on the spaghetti squash bake we already have the spaghetti squash baked my friend when she was over she went ahead and peeled the spaghetti squash out of the spaghetti squash and there's broccoli in the recipe i normally when i make this recipe use frozen broccoli which is already pre-blanched but i don't have any of that right now and i bought some fresh broccoli so i'm going to go ahead and cook them up with a little bit of peppers and peppers i have red peppers and green peppers i was gonna say peppers and onions in here because i think if i put them in there raw when they i go to do the final bake they're not going to be quite cooked enough this recipe is my mother-in-law's recipe we lived with her for a while when we were moving between houses and she made this and it was so good and it's a great way to use up spaghetti squash because i grew a ton of spaghetti squash when i cook with spaghetti squash i try not to mash it too much i try to kind of fold it into the sauce so that it keeps its texture and i decided not to add any chicken to this so this is a vegetarian dish even though the recipe calls for chicken so this is the last of the cheese we need today and you can see i shredded way more than we need so what i'm going to do with this cheese half of this cheese i'll put in the refrigerator that we can use at some other time maybe when we have the pizzas or whatnot the other half i will put in a ziploc bag and that will go in the freezer for later use and this is at least three dinners worth if not four i got three zibak bags out but i might have to get another one if you don't have a lot of freezer space but you want to start doing freezer meals things that go in ziploc bags are going to be your best bet because they get really flat and they don't take up a lot of room in your freezer i'm excited for this recipe i just reread the recipe again and i think this is going to be absolutely delicious i have our garlic infused oil here we're going to saute them in and i'm going to put seasoned salt the recipe had a bunch of different seasonings but basically all those seasonings are in the seasoned salt so we're just going to season saltine them up i do have this recipe on my website if you want it it's really really good i use redmond real salt which is the salt that's mined in utah and i have a discount code for that if you're interested in that i have padded these pork chops dry you want dry pork chops or dry meat when you put them to sear because that way you're searing your meat you're not steaming your meat [Music] our mushrooms are beautifully sauteed and i was going to go through the effort of making a cream sauce for this but i still have all this leftover cream soup basic the roux basically from the or bechamel sauce i should say from the lasagna and this is basically a cream sauce base so i'm going to use this bechamel sauce as my cream of mushroom but if you didn't have this all you have to do in here is put a little bit of flour some milk and make your own cream of mushroom and i want to thin that out a little bit it's mostly really thick i got to wash my hands i'll be right back it's really only this thick because it's cooled but i do want to thin it out a little bit so this is some of the broth the chicken broth that we made with the leftovers yesterday from cooking the chicken so we're just gonna stir that together and that's our cream soup base i'm gonna go through every spoon i own today but it's worth it because you want to taste your food to make sure it tastes good yum that needs something let's see let's add some onion powder this is why you have to taste because i thought that that was going to be perfect it's not definitely need salt and pepper i'm going to add a little bit of parsley you know what would have been good in this is a little bit of white wine but it's kind of too late for that i just tasted that and it is so good so we're going to pour this over our pork chops this could absolutely be a crock pot recipe you could put all of this in a ziploc bag if you let it cool and cook these in a crock pot until they're nice and tender but i prefer to cook things in the oven because i think you get a better product we have six cups of water in here we're gonna go ahead and get going on our pizza dough because it's really easy to throw together but i want my yeast to sit for a couple minutes before we wrap it up and i want to go take care of my chickens so i have my water my sugar and i'm going to put my yeast in here one i have to count i want this to proof for just a few minutes while i go run outside and do some chores this pizza dough recipe has flour salt sugar yeast and water i used bread flour for this pizza dough i find that bread flour gives you the best chew when it comes to pizza dough the difference between all-purpose flour bread flour and pastry flour is all about how much gluten protein there is in the flour so bread flour has the highest all-purpose has the middle and pastry has the least so when you're cooking you can kind of think do i want it to be really chewy and crusty and things and then you would use a bread flour if you want it to be really light and fluffy then pastry flour might be the one that you want to use but all-purpose flour is in the middle and it's what's used the most but i definitely prefer bread flour for making pizza dough i love having pizza dough in my freezer it thaws beautifully all you have to do to thaw it is either put it in your refrigerator the day before you want to use it and it'll thaw and be ready for you the next day or you can stick it on your counter and it is usually thawed within 30 minutes to an hour and it's ready to go i knead this dough until it's nice and elasticy and then i divided this dough into six individual pieces because the amount of dough i made will make six pizzas some people will even roll out the dough and make the pizzas but i never know exactly what kind of pizza we want so i just put the dough in the freezer and then i can make up whatever kind of pizza i want or have the ingredients for in my house at the time i take the dough and i roll it into a ball i take a ziploc bag and i spray that with just a little bit of avocado spray i roll the dough around in the oil so it doesn't dry out and i stick it in the freezer just like this i don't proof it or anything before it just goes in the oven excuse me the freezer just like this i went ahead and i opened one package of chicken breast i have one more package over there we're going to open in just a second these are the chicken breasts from butcher box this last week i opened some chicken breasts that i had bought a while ago and they were conventional chicken breasts and they were probably two or three times the size of this i personally don't like those frankenstein chicken breasts the ones that are just huge and that's what they were they were in the bottom of my freezer and during pantry challenge i was trying to cycle through those type of things and i was not a fan of the way it cooked up it was the texture of it was weird because the chicken breast was probably three times the size of these ones i went ahead and sliced up our beef for our broccoli beef and i also chopped up more chicken breast this is half chicken breast half tenderloin i didn't realize that i thought tenderloin and chicken breast so you could use even chicken thighs if you wanted this is where things get a little bit interesting we are gonna separate our sauce from our meat and we are gonna coat all of our meat in corn starch or tapioca starch i'm using tapioca starch because that's what i have but the recipe is called for cornstarch this is something i do when i just make a recipe but i've never done it for a freezer meal so i'm excited to try this i'm excited to see how it turns out once everything's nice and coated you need to add a little bit more cornstarch you can you just want it completely coated and this is perfect because there's nice coating and not a lot of ex extra so just to remind you the three recipes we're doing here we're going to do the beef and broccoli we're doing kung pao chicken and honey sesame chicken i did not realize until just now that they all have a little bit of an asian flair to them which is kind of funny that was not intentional that was the opposite of intentional if i had realized i might not have done it that way so i'm going to divide the chicken between four of these bags evenly now we're gonna divide this beef up between the two bags evenly i'm gonna go wash my hands and then we're gonna make the sauces for these so this is where i'm not so sure about these recipes because now i take this bag and i put it in another bag so it seems a little bit wait let me let me re-read the recipe again here yep this is what i do so i don't love using this mini ziploc bags but we're gonna try it i don't mind trying something new one time and maybe hey maybe it's the next best thing that we all need in our life i don't know it said you can use fresh or frozen broccoli i have fresh broccoli so i'm gonna use fresh can you hear my dogs i think there is a fire truck or something that just went by because they are howling like they are wolves i'm gonna take our broccoli and i'm gonna cut it into the desired pieces size that we want this is pre-washed broccoli it said on the package so i didn't need to wash it if i can't get all this to fit in there that's okay we're gonna have roasted broccoli for dinner tonight along with one of our lasagnas is getting to be the end of the day i just broke one of my drawers in my organ this one i just broke it oh man that was only part of the casualty i spilled a whole thing of cream all over the floor and oh man i just don't know if i want to clean that up right now i really want to get this done because we only have to make the sauces we only have to make the sauces and then we have to clean this mess because it is a little bit messy around here not too bad i've kind of cleaned up as i've gone but i think what we're gonna do now i should probably clean that up these floors need to be mopped when i'm done with this let's do this let's finish this let me wash my hands and then we'll make the sauces this recipe calls for is we're gonna make it in a little bowl a separate bowl the good thing is because they're all kind of asian themed they use a lot of the same ingredients red pepper flakes these are korean red pepper flakes or gochugaru so so good if you've never tried these i'm gonna link them they're one of my absolute favorite spices some sesame oil and i can't find the ginger in my house my powdered ginger it calls for fresh ginger which i have but i am not in the mood to peel it right now and i bought this to make kombucha and i'm gonna try this it's called ginger juice so even though i bought it for kombucha i'm gonna use it in this oh wow oh my gosh that is amazing put two little gloves of that brown sugar garlic this is our freeze dried garlic i just minced up in my mortar on pesto we need that for a few recipes and some sesame seeds [Music] now we're going to take this sauce and divide it evenly between two bags and the cool thing about this blog and these recipes is that she gives you multiple ways to cook these recipes you can either cook them now you can freeze them you can use the crock pot there's a couple different ways to cook everything which is cool oh all right friends i got a little too excited there i was so excited for how cute this looks oh man how cool are those i'm pretty impressed with this i think it's super cute the real trick though is how do they cook up i'm going to use my same bowl because it has all the same ingredients basically and this is the honey sesame so we're going to start with honey garlic korean red pepper flakes ginger juice sesame oil soy sauce okay let's see if we can do this now without spilling it we're gonna do the same thing we're going to put our sauce in our two bags we're gonna make the kung pao chicken let me look at the recipe i already am deviating from this recipe this is my mom's recipe and it is really phenomenal so if you want to make this and you want to turn out beautifully follow it exactly but i don't have cookie cherry so we're going to use white wine i googled what you can substitute for cooking cherry and then i also there was two fruit flies in my rice wine vinegar which is gross so i'm going to use white wine vinegar instead this recipe is pretty straight forward my mom usually only makes it for special occasions so i thought it would be fun if we go ahead and we made it as a freezer meal this is that costco four dollar wine i bought and it smells really good okay now we're gonna put some white wine vinegar we're gonna do soy sauce another thing that i decided i'm gonna substitute is i'm gonna use brown sugar instead of white sugar i always like to use brown sugar instead i think we need a little bit more soy sauce this is why i like to buy in bulk because if i run out most of the time i have a backup so we're going to add the rest of our garlic that we crushed some ginger juice i'm going to use red pepper flakes this time not korean red pepper flakes these are spicy we will get this done and we will still be in one piece use some brown sugar sesame oil and last but not least some cornstarch okay so we have our kung pao sauce kung pao chicken has peanuts i'm just going to use these little snack bags i'm basically making what i feel like is a meal kit one of those order meal kits i do have to say these little meal kits are so cute i absolutely think they're absolutely adorable it may have felt like the universe was working against me just a little bit but we got all six of these meal kits all put together into the freezer they go 20 22. we got 23 meals right here some of them are for my sister-in-law some of them are for josh and i and i'm pretty excited about it half of these have been pre-frozen i as i was cooking them and they cooled down uh kind of basically to room temperature i threw them in the freezer some of them as soon as i was done i threw them in the refrigerator so they would cool off you don't want to put all of your meals into the freezer at one time because that will drop excuse me that will increase the temperature of your freezer you want to kind of slowly stack them in there so sometimes it's good to put them in your refrigerator first before you throw them in your freezer before i do anything else i want to get dinner in the oven i'm going to throw in a lasagna and i also roasted up some broccoli as well my friend is going to come back over tonight so we're going to enjoy a nice dinner the way that i package up my freezer meals is i've kind of done a couple different things and i can't remember whose last time or the time before i said that i wrapped them twice in foil and then once in saran wrap well the saran wrap kind of doesn't stay on at least mine didn't it's not like a super clingy saran wrap so i didn't find that to be super helpful so now all i do wrap them in two layers of foil put the date on them put what they are on them because trust me you will forget what they are and then i throw them in the freezer and that seems to work really well if you want to see what the inside of my freezers look like with all these meals and with the you know bulk meat i buy and all of those things i do have a freezer tour video i have two of them where i can link them down in the description box i get a lot of questions about what the inside of my freezers look like after i do these big freezer cooking days i'm taking them all and putting them in the freezer i'm super happy with this i think i told you i had 23 meals but i forgot to count three of the what are they called goodness sloppy joes so i had three more of the meals than were pictured there i went ahead and i just washed everything while i was in the kitchen i tried to clean as i go and i have my dishwasher loaded and ready to go but these big dishes i just washed by hand this is awesome i cannot wait to have this in my freezer like i said i am out of freezer meals and that is not acceptable for me i need these in my freezer for emergency purposes i don't want to cook every night of the week i love to cook but i don't want to have to feel the pressure of cooking every night of the week in order not to go eat out so this is why i do what i do is so that we can have home-cooked meals any night of the week without having to cook every night of the week and we can be intentional about when we decide to get takeout or when we decide to go out to eat i love doing both of those things but i want it to be intentional i don't want it to be out of not being prepared and i do that sometimes too i'm not always prepared but this sure does help me out a lot in that aspect if you enjoyed this video i'd greatly appreciate a thumbs up consider sharing it with anybody that you think might enjoy it if you're new around here please consider subscribing if you're not so sure about subscribing i will put a couple videos you can go watch here where we cook with all these freezer meals and i show you how i incorporate freezer meals and homemade scratch made meals throughout the week and i can kind of decide engage whether i'm going to do a freezer meal whether i'm going to cook all those types of things it was during a pantry challenge so i didn't go to the grocery store that whole time i was filming those videos but it does give a better look of how i incorporate these meals into our daily life i want to say a huge thank you for spending time with me in my kitchen today i don't take that for granted i hope you guys are having a fantastic day and i can't wait to see you next time bye guys you

Channel: Acre Homestead

Views: 1,362,071

Keywords: Acre Homestead, Freezer Meals, Cooking from scratch, batch cooking, Food prep, large batch cooking, cooking at home, scratch made meals, mega cooking day, large freezer meals, freezer meal, easy freezer meals

Id: fdbrfw6amF8

Length: 54min 59sec (3299 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 28 2022