Filling My Freezer with 28 Homemade Freezer Meals All From Scratch!

good morning friend welcome back to acre Homestead we are heading out to the Garden this morning not because we're going to spend any time really in the garden but because we need to harvest a couple things for what we're doing today we are going to spend the whole day in the kitchen we are making I think nine or ten recipes we're going to be doing a big bulk freezer cooking day I haven't done that since the baby was born so it's been over six months so it's time to get some freezer meals in the freezer I should say I guess we've done some marinated meat freezer meals but we haven't done any big meal cooking really since the baby was born so I'm excited we're out here but what we need this morning are some fresh herbs I did a good amount of harvesting yesterday so I don't need to get too many things out here today but I did want to make sure I got fresh parsley for one of the recipes because I didn't Harvest any of this yesterday and I need about a half a cup I think I'm gonna grab a couple Peppers too so now I need to get my herbs washed up I did a little bit of grocery shopping in my downstairs food storage room yesterday I did have to run to the grocery store and pick up four items in order to make this big cooking day happen I had almost everything I needed when I was planning my menu on what I wanted to do on this day I kind of thought what do I already have in my house that I can use to make these meals so that I wasn't going out and spending a ton of money at the grocery store and I was utilizing things that I have on hand and things that are in season my goal for this menu is to plan it so that when big harvest season comes I can just pull these out of the freezer I can throw them on the grill I can throw it in the oven I can get a big salad or saute up or grill up some vegetables from the garden and it's going to make my life really easy coming this summer so let me tell you the recipes that I have planned here we are going to be making this is the one I'm the most excited about one of my friends was telling me she made this we're going to make orange meatballs we're gonna make chimichurri hamburger patties that's what we need a lot of those fresh herbs for parmesan chicken breakfast burritos we are going to make pizza pockets green curry orange meatballs I think I said that Meatloaf and I bought a couple other things that are maybes and we will see if we get to them and we're gonna be making up a bunch of taco meat so that we can have tacos really easily I'm also going to be cooking up a bunch of bacon so that we can have BLTs throughout the growing season when the tomatoes start coming in on homemade bread and some honey mustard with lettuce and maybe a little avocado so good so I want to make sure that I have pre-cooked bacon in my freezer we're gonna make some pre-cooked sausage whatever we have left over for making the breakfast burritos as well because I just like having pre-made are pre-cooked sausage and bacon in my freezer so that anytime I need to use it I don't have to go through the effort of cooking it the first thing I'm going to do is get some of these rolls rising these are frozen I should have pulled them out a little earlier this morning but I forgot about them until just now so it will be okay but I'm just getting to them I'm gonna go ahead and thaw all the ones that I have these are my test rolls and I need to be used up I developed a frozen rolled recipe but I had to test a bunch of them in order to get the perfect recipe so these are some of my test ones that are good and they're not the perfect for rolls but they're perfect for pizza pockets so we're just going to turn these into Pizza Pockets because I need to use them up to get these rolls to thaw and Rise a little bit quicker I'm gonna put them in the oven with the oven white on and that will heat the oven up just enough to prove these a little bit quicker so first thing done I think what we should do next is get the oven preheated to cook some bacon the only thing I did to prepare for today's big cooking day is I unloaded my dishwasher and I still need to empty my garbage can I like to start my big cooking days with a unloaded dishwasher and an empty garbage can so that I can put garbage directly into the garbage can as I go and I'm actually going to leave my garbage can out from under my sink so I don't have to open this cupboard every time I need to throw something away I will also get out a big compost bowl so as we prep veggies we can just throw all the food scraps in the compost bowl and either give it to the chickens or put it in the compost one of the only things I really did yesterday to prepare today was to get the meat out of the freezer and have it thaw and I hope it is thawed yes it is sometimes when I do these big cooking days I do do a little bit of prep like maybe Shred the cheese cook the meat things like that and I did not nothing today so we're just starting basically from Ground Zero except the meat's thawed because it would be kind of hard to do a day like today if the meat was still frozen so first thing we're going to do is we're going to just start cooking some meat because that can be doing that can be cooking while we are doing other things so here I have some bacon that I just purchased from a local farmer and I want to get this cooked up in the oven I'm going to cook it on these cookie sheets the oven to 350 degrees and it's almost preheated the breed of pig is a Kuni Cooney that this came from and so these are very lardy pigs so I've never had this type of bacon before so it should be good so we're gonna get laid out on this cookie sheet I like cooking bacon in the oven because it doesn't then splatter the kitchen and I'm going to get something cooking on the stove while the bacon Cooks in the oven so I pulled out it looks like two four five pounds ish of bacon and I can use this bacon throughout the summer to make quick pastas I can just pull the bacon out and grab veggies from the garden and saute it up with maybe a little bit of bacon grease boil some pasta chop up some fresh veggies and some fresh herbs and we have a beautiful delicious dinner smells really good I did not realize I opened one of the packages that was the bacon ends and so all of these pieces are a little bit funny shape so I might there was a third recipe I was not a third there was a tent recipe I was thinking I might or might not do today and I'm probably going to do it with this bacon I'm not going to cook this bacon in the oven with the rest of the bacon because it's completely different thicknesses and it's not going to cook at the same time as the rest of this stuff so we'll see what I end up doing with that but we're just gonna get in here and see how much time I have and get as much done as we can [Music] this is some of the best smelling bacon I have ever had just from the smell of it I'm gonna Cube these bacon ends up and we're gonna get these cooking on the stove I don't want the stove to be idle so we're going to get this cooking while the Bacon's in the oven and then in this cast iron I'm gonna get a bunch of breakfast sausage cooking this is from the same fog that I purchased a couple months ago a couple weeks ago not months ago a couple days a couple weeks ago a couple other things I should say that I did yesterday is I got out my dishes that I'm gonna freeze my meals in I like using these glass dishes instead of the foil pans just because I don't like all the waste so I got those out and I made sure they were clean and then I did do this is my grocery shopping basket that I did downstairs for today's project so while we've got the sausage bacon cooking I want to get going on making some breadcrumbs because we're making meatloaf and meatballs We need oh and we need it for the chimichurri Burgers I have all of this bread from bread testing and making a bunch of sandwich bread and I had more than we could eat so I just dried a bunch out and I'm going to turn this into breadcrumbs this is a great way to use up old dried up bread this is probably going to take a couple runs through the food processor foreign I just checked on the bacon and that still has a couple more minutes so since I have the food processor out I'm going to get the parmesan cheese shredded that we need for today's recipes and the Swiss cheese we don't really need a ton of cheese today but because the food processor is already out and dirty we're going to take advantage of that I could smell the bacon and I knew that it needed to come out of the oven and I do not want to burn the bacon so I got that out of the oven it is now cooling onto paper towels I don't want to waste the bacon grease that's on these cookie sheets and I already have the oven preheated so what we're going to do is we're going to take some frozen hash browns and this is going to be for the breakfast burritos and we can use these dirty baking sheets to cook our hash browns that already have the bacon grease on it so we're getting two uses out of this one pan and I am going to season these up so I have two bags here and I think I can get them all on just one cookie sheet I'm gonna mix these in the grease so that they get nicely coated and then I'll stick these back in the oven to get nice and toasty I think I forgot to mention that I am making breakfast burritos as well while we are making breakfast burritos those were one of Josh's absolute favorite things that I made right before I had the baby he loves them he said he could eat them every day of the week we haven't had them in months so I thought since we have this beautiful beautiful sausage and bacon and I have eggs coming out my ears I actually have some eggs soaking in the sink right now that I'm going to get washed up so we can make the eggs for the breakfast burritos I thought this would be a great time while I'm in the kitchen I have basically most of the day today that I can dedicate to be in the kitchen I want to get some breakfast burritos for Josh and I in the freezer so here I am now processing all this cheese I started this before I put the potatoes in the oven but I had to take the bacon out and I didn't want the oven sitting idle I wanted something in the oven cooking while I was doing something else now I have all blocked cheese here I've this is some Parmesan cheese that is absolutely delicious it's real parmesan cheese from Italy I buy it at Costco you can get it for the best price there and instead of putting it through the shredder I just grind it up in the food processor and then here is the Swiss cheese for one of the recipes and then we need to shred up some cheddar cheese now you can buy pre-shredded cheese when you're doing these big cooking days to save yourself some time I typically don't ever have pre-shredded cheese in my house and I'm trying to use up the items I already have in my house so I am going to go ahead and shred it up myself now I took those little bacon bits out of this cast iron and I want this cast iron working for me while I'm doing other stuff so this is some Italian sausage that I'm going to get cooked up here so that I've got both of these cast irons going on the stove while I then go do something else so here are our bacon bits and then while that's cooking we are going to get going on processing I think I end up processing like six or seven onions and since I have the food processor out it's already dirty I am going to use the food processor to chop up these onions normally I would just chop up onions with a knife but I might as well use the food processor because I already have it out that is one of the things I love about these big cooking days is I already have the cutting board dirty I already have the food processor dirty I might as well go ahead and get as much done as possible now these are some of the very very last onions that I purchased from that local farmer last September I bought 140-ish pounds I don't remember the exact poundage I bought but these are the last of them and you can see they're starting to sprout but they're still totally good and totally edible my onions are starting in the garden to bounce back they had a little bit of a rough start but they are starting to look pretty good out there so I think I'm gonna get a harvest this year but I don't think I'm gonna get quite enough to last Josh and I for an entire year this has been a very good experiment this was the first time I purchased such a bulk order of onions from my local farmer he is the farmer that I have been buying bulk from for many many years and I do plan to place another order with him at the end of the growing season many of you were worried that I wasn't going to be able to go through that many onions in one year and this has been a great experiment I think it actually takes about 200 pounds of onions for Josh and I for an entire year now our family is larger this year we do have an additional member but he is not eating too many onions yet so my goal I think going into the spring is going to be to try to have 200 pounds of onions in the freezer or not freezer in the basement Cold Storage I I will probably chop some up and have some diced ones in the freezer as well but mostly fresh onions ready to be chopped and used however I would like to use them so let me show you kind of where we are now I kind of just did a reset I got the dishwasher loaded with any of the dishes I washed a couple bowls I washed up a ton of eggs all of the breakfast sausage and bacon is cooked along with our Italian sausage so we've got the bacon bits the bacon slices Italian sausage breakfast sausage our two pans are here and we are gonna get going on cooking some eggs in this one in just a second but we also got our swiss cheese our parmesan cheese our onions and then I did process up some garlic Scapes we'll use along with our bread crumbs cutting board is still out this can go in the dishwasher because we need to chop these but I'm going to do that in a minute I want to get going on cooking the eggs next I almost forgot though before I cook the eggs I do want to get some peppers hooked up because I want to put peppers in the breakfast burritos these are peppers that I preserved up in the summer so that we can have organic local peppers anytime because we're not going to be having any peppers from the garden for a while so these are frozen so I'm just going to stick this in here and get those sauteing and while those are sauteing we'll crack up a bunch of eggs for the breakfast burritos maybe 12 eggs the peppers that I'm cooking up in the cast iron are peppers that I purchased from the same firmware I bought my onions from and that was the farm I was a member of their CSA community supported agriculture before oops it happens before I had my own garden and so I've just built a relationship with them and I can stock up my pantry in my freezer with local homegrown organic goodies that can supplement what my garden does not produce we're gonna need a bunch of eggs for making the meatballs and the meatloaf and all of that so I figured I might as well take that time to get all these eggs washed that I have been collecting over the last however long I'm getting about six to eight eggs a day so that was quite a few eggs there to our eggs we're gonna add some salt I did take the potatoes out of the oven so those are ready for us and some pepper and I'm going to whisk this together our peppers have some beautiful color to them they're nice and sauteed so I'm going to just push them to the side and then I'm going to add a little oh they're popping I'm gonna turn the stove down a little bit I'm just going to add a touch of bacon grease because I have abundance of that now and we'll pour our eggs in here and we'll just cook our eggs in with the peppers so our eggs are nice and cooked so what I can do is I can incorporate the peppers into the egg mixture I'm also going to take my potatoes and get these nice crunchy potatoes into this mixture as well and I'll just mix it all in this cast iron no need to put it all into a bowl to mix it or anything like that we'll just use what we already have you don't have to go through the effort of Browning the potatoes but I do think it leads to a better texture in the end I'm going to turn the stove off I'm also going to add some of our pre-cooked breakfast sausage just until it looks good that looks like a good amount of breakfast sausage so the rest of this I will put in the freezer and I will have pre-cooked breakfast sausage for later when I need to use it I want to let that egg and sausage mixture cool down before we make the breakfast burritos because I want to be able to put them directly into the freezer and right now it's just too hot so what we're going to do is get going on the orange meatballs [Applause] this huge bowl of ground beef this is ground beef that I purchased from a local farmer and we are going to use this to make the orange meatballs I'm just going to go ahead and use this bowl right now because this bowl had just egg salt and pepper in it and we're gonna add egg to our orange meatballs anyway so I might as well go ahead and use this bowl right away so I'm going to double this recipe I just decided to read over the recipe one more time and I decided I am not going to double the recipe because the recipe calls for three pounds of beef and I don't need to make six pounds worth of these meatballs so I think I'm just gonna do a single recipe this is one of Josh and I's favorite kind of meals where we can I can cook up the meat I can cook up some rice for a side and then that one's a little Frozen oh some of these are a little Frozen and then I can just go out to the garden and see what is fresh out of the garden and we can have that veggie for dinner so I'm gonna get three pounds of meat in here to our meatball mixture we're gonna add a half a cup of bread crumbs and I did four pounds instead of three pounds so I just added a few more breadcrumbs half a cup of milk I'm gonna add just a splash more Ginger black pepper salt soy sauce scallions and two eggs the best way to get in here is with really clean hands and just mix it up you could wear gloves if you'd like but I'm just going to get in here with my really really clean hands and mix up this meatball mixture one bummer though when you get in there with your hands if you forget something it does take some time to get them washed but that's okay it's worth it because we forgot to put or I forgot to put some garlic in there so we just put a bunch of garlic powder in there now we get to shape these into meatballs and we are going to pre-cook these meatballs which is awesome sometimes when I make just like a standard all-purpose meatball I don't always cook them sometimes I throw them in the freezer raw and then I cook them when I pull them out but these ones are pre-cooked I did also pull out this morning a ginger shot this is just ginger juice and lemon and I thought I would have one of these to get me through the day because it's a long day in the kitchen I love that spicy crisp delicious so let's get these meatballs made up it smells so good I like to use a cookie scoop because it makes making meatballs so much faster I'm making pretty small meatballs so that when you go to have this for dinner probably four or five of them or so I might be able to get three pans out of this oh I can feel that Ginger warming me from the inside out it's so delicious I do have a video on that if you're interested I was able to get three pans worth of Meatballs out of those four pounds of meat and I just realized I forgot I was gonna add some freeze-dried shredded zucchini from last year's Garden to bulk these up a little bit but I totally spaced it so we're obviously not going to I'm not going to put all of this back into a bowl to remix it after making all the meatballs so I'll just need to remember to do that for the meatloaf we're gonna cook those until they're fully cooked and while those are cooking we'll get going on making the orange sauce which means I need some orange marmalade I'm rereading my recipe and I just realized I forgot to pick up hoisin sauce at the grocery store now I need to figure out if I'm going to run to the grocery store and pick that up I think I'm going to I think I'm going to go ahead and turn the oven off today is a cooking day I've got the time today to do this and I don't want to not make the sauce so we do have a small town grocery store not that far from me which I'm sure has hoisin sauce I'm just gonna probably gonna be more expensive than if I had got it in town yesterday but all is well that's okay okay I'll be right back back from the store and I got the goods so let's go ahead I put the meatballs back on to cook let's go ahead and get the sauce cooking in our pan this is only going to take a second to throw together I'm gonna put just a little bit of olive oil in the bottom of this pan with some sesame oil we're going to saute some garlic in that oil to our garlic we're going to add some ginger fresh ginger would be really good but I don't have any so we're just going to use dried and then I'm going to add some Korean red pepper flakes you could add regular red pepper flakes but I don't want that much heat and Korean red pepper flakes have a little bit of a sweetness to it they're not super hot and now that the baby's starting to explore some foods I don't want it to be too spicy he might not eat this but just in case for Josh and I too I don't want them too spicy I've never made marmalade before so this is a marmalade that a friend made from Tyler farmer Ranch they do have a YouTube channel I met them when we went to Utah and we did the salt tour she gifted me some homemade marmalade from oranges from her Orchard which is pretty special I'm gonna turn this stove off because this is getting pretty warm I do want to this winter try making marmalade myself foreign with some store-bought marmalade and then the last thing we're going to add is our hoisin sauce our sauce is cooked and kind of boiled together so I want to give it a taste test to make sure it doesn't need anything um that is so good we might have this for dinner tonight this is so good so let's pour this over our meatballs the next thing we're going to do is make the pizza pockets because that dough is ready while this sauce was cooking I took the meatballs out of the oven I drained the grease and the meatballs short enough that I could get them in two dishes so I just condensed the meatballs into two dishes I'm gonna make this sauce go between the two so I'm going to put half in each we're going to let this cool completely I'll pop one in the fridge probably for dinner tonight and the other one will go in the freezer these pizza pockets are probably going to be for lunches which is going to be great I'm going to do a very simple filling I'm going to do some pepperoni because that's what I have I could put Italian sausage in this as well because I cooked some of that up but I think I want something a little bit different than what we normally do we normally have Italian sausage pizza and so I think I'm going to do it with some pepperoni some home grown homemade pizza sauce and then I didn't even need to shred any cheese because I had some pre-shredded cheese here so this is how I'm gonna put these together so to make the piece of pockets I just flattened the dough out and then I take about a spoonful of pizza sauce I think I'm gonna add two pieces of pepperoni and a good amount of cheese and then you just fold it up on top of itself pinch the seams and there is your Beats pocket so these are my one hour dinner rolls this was from experimenting making a bunch of different recipes trying to figure out the best way to freeze the dough to then thaw it and make rolls and I have so much leftover dough from all this recipe testing we can only go through so many rolls Josh and I I wanted to think of a creative way to use up all the you know test batches and this is a great way to do it because if they don't fluff up perfectly that you want a roll to fluff up like it's not a big deal it's a great way to get creative in the kitchen and you could put whatever you want in these I just found some sliced onion in the fridge from the other day and so I thought you know what some sliced onion in this could be really good too so in this next few that I make I'm going to add pepperoni sliced onion cheese and pizza sauce the world is your oyster really when it comes to this you could use pizza dough to make this as well just divide your pizza dough into smaller portions and flatten them out into little circles and fill them with whatever you want it really doesn't have to be a specific dough of any type one thing I've learned from all this recipe testing I've done is that bread is really really forgiving sometimes you think of or I used to think of bread as this super super super super technical thing but it is really really forgiving and you can get really creative and kind of just have fun with it so that's what I'm doing here just trying to be creative and use up what I have and make something really delicious these heat up really really easily you can either thaw them first or you can just go ahead and heat them up from Frozen it doesn't really matter you can heat them up in a air fryer a microwave a toaster oven the oven whatever you want and now what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go ahead and get an egg wash onto these little pizza pockets you don't have to do this this is just giving it a nice color that would work kind of in assembly mode Let's get the breakfast burritos assembled so we can get that cast iron off the stove I have just sanitized my counter so that it's nice and clean so we can work on it and make our breakfast burritos I'm gonna grab my cutting board here so we can work on The Cutting Board we have kind of a spot to do this I'm gonna grab out quite a few tortillas I don't know how many exactly we're gonna make but we're going to start with that I've got our cheese here and I'm making a little bit of an assembly line we've got our Saran Wrap here or a plastic wrap and what I'm going to do is get my delicious filling mixture sitting next to me and we're just going to start by putting some of our yummy breakfast burrito mixture I think I have too many tortillas out so I think what I'm gonna do is just take this mini so far start with that and then I'll put some cheese on the top roll it up and I'm going to take our burrito that is nice and wrapped and I'm going to put it back in the tortilla bag so we can just reuse this bag no need to get a new bag out and then I'll keep doing that until I've used all of the breakfast burrito filling mixture oh one of the awesome things about breakfast burritos is you can honestly make them however you want you could make it vegetarian you could make it with all meat and no egg you could make it with whatever kind of cheese you want you can really make it your own and that is the cool thing there's no right or wrong way to do it this is Josh's absolute absolute favorite freezer breakfast type thing that I make and he doesn't know what I'm making these today so he's going to be so happy when I tell him that there are breakfast burritos again the way that we like to cook them the best is actually to thaw them first you take them out of the freezer pop them in the refrigerator overnight they only then take about 45 seconds to a minute to heat up in the microwave if you have a microwave you could reheat them in the oven on the stove if you want to get a nice little crust to it you could heat them up in the air fryer however you like to heat things up you can reheat them from Frozen if you want but they just cook a whole lot faster if you thought them out the night before so usually what I do is I will grab maybe three or four of them out of the freezer at a time and then Josh can have them for breakfast he said that he could eat these every single day he absolutely loved them the last time I made them was right before we had the baby and so postpartum this is what we had for breakfast a lot Josh would warm one up for me he would warm one up for himself and we had a nice hearty breakfast that didn't take any effort or cleanup that was the best thing that I did for myself for postpartum was get a bunch of meals in the freezer my family and friends all were really generous and also did a meal Train but after that was over then I could rely on my previous self's efforts and one of the best things about it and I didn't even think about this obviously until I was in it because that was the first time I'd ever been postpartum was the gift of less dishes because it's a lot less dishes if all you have to do is heat something up and make some rice or something like that and maybe you know open a bag of salad mix or something it just was so nice not having a messy kitchen and dishes okay I'm gonna keep going on this we might be able to use all those tortillas over there [Music] one of these breakfast burritos is plenty for a nice hearty breakfast it'll keep you full for quite some time these are the burrito size tortillas here and then when I get toward the end whenever I do let breakfast burrito prep or anything where I'm doing like enchiladas or something like that and I don't have like an exact number of tortillas to filling then I when I get toward the end I'll just lay a few tortillas out and then I just evenly distribute the rest of the filling between the tortillas so we were able to get 17 breakfast burritos out of what we made here my cast iron if you're wondering that is a 17 inch cast iron so it's a really large cast iron it's definitely bigger than your traditional 12 I think the traditional size is like 12 inches so now that I have all of these wrapped up I'm going to throw them in the bag that the tortillas came in so I'm just reusing the bag just an extra layer of protection in the freezer so Saran Wrap is one bag is the second one we got a total of 17 breakfast burritos which is fantastic Josh is going to be thrilled because the filling was cooled I can throw these right into the freezer right now so I'm gonna go throw these in the freezer and then I think hmm I'm trying to think maybe we'll make the meatloaf next because that'll be easy and that'll feel good to have another win under our belt I think I better leave some in the refrigerator though actually because Josh will want those for breakfast tomorrow okay the meatloaf is going to be really easy because we already prepped everything and the meat should be thawed it was still frozen earlier but it should be thawed now I think we're gonna make the chimichurri Burgers I actually forgot about that that this was one of the recipes we're gonna make now I was supposed to purchase which I guess I could have when I just ran to the store chicken ground chicken or ground turkey for this recipe but in my head I had already decided to make it with ground beef because I have so much ground beef anyway that I was just going to substitute it I could have that's so funny I could have ran to the store and bought it but oh well this recipe I got from Chef John foodwishes.com it's his chimichurri burgers and we're gonna make the patties today and this sounds so good on a summer evening it just sounds so good so got my bowl washed out let's make the Patty mix so the first thing we're going to do is prep our herbs that I harvested I got them nice and washed and I let them kind of just air dry here while we were doing other things in the kitchen which is perfect and I will link this recipe of course down below I've never made this before I am adding just a few mint sprigs just because I thought that you know what that sounds good so I'm going to get all of this chopped up really finely some of these mint pieces a little bit fuckner so the way this recipe is originally written is you make a chimichurri sauce you add half of your chimichurri sauce to your ground meat mixture you make your you grill your Patty and then you top the hamburger with the rest of the chimichurri sauce so I will make up a fresh chimichurri sauce when I make these Burgers like when I grill them because now I have so many fresh herbs in a garden that I'll be able to whip that up so I'm just making the burger patty portion and then I'll make the sauce when I go to make dinner so now I have in here some cilantro this is freeze dried cilantro that is incredible I have some freeze-dried oregano leaves here I'm gonna Crush those up into our mixture I'm going to season this nicely with some salt good amount of garlic healthy amount of pepper I've never added bread crumbs you know what I might skip this because the original recipe was ground turkey and this is beef so I think I'm going to skip the bread crumbs and we're going to add a splash of vinegar that's it I'm going to mix this together as well the original recipe also called for one other thing what was it let me look it up that I'm not adding oh oil a quarter cup of oil and I'm not going to add that because this is ground beef not ground chicken or turkey which I think is leaner so I think I'm going to leave that out and we're just gonna get these herbs and garlic salt and pepper and a splash of vinegar which I think is really interesting into this burger mixture there's a piece in here that's still a little bit Frozen so it's going to take me a second just to get this mixed in and I wish you could smell this because it smells so good oh I think I'm missing cumin shoot I'm missing cumin and red pepper flakes so I'm gonna wash my hands really well really really well get the cumin and red pepper flake in here and then we can shape this into patties I'm thinking that this mixture could be really good on its own and not have to turn it into a hamburger if you didn't want to you could just Grill this up and slice up some fresh tomatoes and make a nice dipping sauce or like sauce to go on the top and that would be really really good too I have four Patties on the lower part of this cookie sheet I added a piece of parchment and then I'm gonna get four more patties and I'm Gonna Keep stacking them on top of each other until I use up all of this meat mixture I'm just eyeballing what looks like a good size for a burger I'm gonna get these patties in a bit in the oven I'm gonna get these patties in izzer Frozen I will put them in the mixer bag and I will cook these from Frozen on the grill just like you would cook store-bought Frozen Patties on the grill so the next thing we're going to do is we are going to get the meatloaf done because I can whip that together in minutes and then we're gonna head back to the stove and we're gonna finish the items that need to be done on the stove I'm gonna put these leftover tortillas away and I pulled out the pizza pockets out of the oven and I was going to freeze these but they kind of exploded and so I think I overstuffed them so what we're going to do is we're going to have these for lunch today and maybe dinner today and I'm not going to freeze these we'll just eat these for the next few days and this is going to be kind of like lunch slash dinner prep for the next few days so those just need to cool they're gonna taste fabulous they just are a little bit exploded which means the cheese just got nice and bubbly and crunchy and crispy and delicious so I'm gonna get this put away and now the meatloaf is going to come together really quickly because I have out almost all the ingredients we need I did wash out the bowl so we can use that bowl again I have the thought I should get my taco meat going on the stove so it can be cooking while we make the meatloaf so here's some three pounds of ground beef to make into taco meat or the meatloaf we're gonna start with some bread crumbs some homegrown parsley this is just dehydrated from last year I'm gonna add the garlic Scapes to this so we use that up and then I'm going to put in some of these onions that we pre-prepped in there and we're gonna add some salt pepper there's some homemade ketchup a little bit of mustard Worcestershire and the rest of the egg from the egg wash and then I'll add one more egg to that and then that is our meatloaf mixture I have before I get my hands in there to mix it up I have a parchment paper lined baking machine and this is what I'm going to pre-freeze this mixture before I put it in before I wrap it up one way I have found to make these big bulk freezer cooking days as efficient as possible is when I'm coming up with recipes that I want to make on these days is I think of recipes that have a lot of the same ingredients so today we did meatballs burgers and meatloaf and we have ground beef cooking on the stove so a lot of these recipes have the same ingredients but they all taste really different and so it just makes it for a more efficient day I have the ground beef on the stove and I wanted to go ahead and just give the kitchen another reset I put away all of the spices and things that we had made the meatloaf with I'm gonna pop this in the freezer and then I'll wrap this up once it's done I want to get the counters clean I want to get this area clean here before I get going on the last two recipes on the stove we're going to make our parmesan chicken and our Curry I just needed I need to get this area tidied up so that I can think a little bit better so that we can just finish strong I could probably get the curry going so that's cooking away while I tidy up but I just need I need this done so that I can think a little bit better and we can finish strong so we're gonna get these eggs in the fridge I also packaged up three packages of well actually I have two packages of breakfast sausage some bacon bits stripe strip bacon for sandwiches and things and Italian sausage I'm going to freeze this flat so I can kind of break it and I can get multiple mules out of this one Frozen back so these are gonna go in the freezer now I have found there are two ways to fill your freezer with homemade meals that you can have any night of the week on nights you don't want to cook you don't have the time to cook and one way to do that is like I did here I set apart about five hours on this day to get all of these meals done or if you don't have five hours to set aside to get this kind of cooking done when you're cooking say meatballs on a Tuesday night instead of making one recipe go ahead and double it and put the doubled recipe in the freezer and you can kind of slowly start to fill your freezer with homemade meals on the nights you just don't want to cook or don't have the time to cook all right we've just given the kitchen a nice refresh it's not perfect but it's gonna let me think now so that we can finish the last two things on the stove the next one we're going to get going on the stove is the curry because I want that to simmer for just a little bit and that's going to be really easy to put together because we already prepped everything we need so that's really awesome so it's going to be really easy I'm going to have a little bit of coffee here we just have the final little bit to do for the curry I'm going to get my Dutch oven out and I'm going to get this on we're gonna put a little bit of oil in the bottom of this Dutch oven and I'm going to start caramelizing some onions well it's probably too many we'll start with what's probably the equivalent of about two and I'm going to add some salt to that now that we have our Curry going and I've got a bunch of the ingredients that we need for the curry we're going to turn our attention back to our ground beef and it's got some nice Browning to it I think what we're gonna do now is we are gonna add a good amount of this onion mixture [Applause] now that we have our stove working for us it's actively doing stuff while we can do something else we are going to get going on our one and only chicken dish this big freezer-backed cooking day you may have noticed normally I do a bunch of marinated Meats when I do these cooking days I didn't do any today because I still have quite a few in the freezer when I found Chicken on sale the other day it was a fantastic price because chicken has gotten super expensive I did a bunch of marinated Meats to go in the freezer so I don't need really any of those right now I need more other tight meals so that's what we're doing today so I have some chicken breast here for our parmesan chicken recipe we're gonna do this was the first recipe I ever made for Josh when we were dating and it's probably one of the reasons he fell in love with me because it is that good what we're going to do is take our chicken breast and we're going to cut them into about two two inches by about an inch or so and we are not going to totally cook these chicken breasts on the stove but we do need to get them browned on the stove and we're going to make a really yummy cheesy sauce to go on top of this and this just makes a beautiful delicious freezer meal and you can serve it over mashed potatoes the way we like to serve it is over egg noodles probably not the most summery dish but I saw swiss cheese in the store the other day and they're swiss cheese in this recipe and it just made me really want this recipe so I thought you know what we're gonna make it and when I make it I will probably make a really really big salad too I am cutting off any extra fatty bits or anything like that our chicken is prepped and our onions are nice and caramelized and they're telling us we need to do the next step here I'm just trying to scrape up any of the brown bits off the bottom of the pan I can also see that the taco meat is ready for the next step as well so I've got some garlic out we're going to add garlic to both of these I'm going to turn this ground beef down because that's almost done I double layer my garlic in the freezer just so that it doesn't get too strong I'm going to add two pucks to our Curry and I'm going to add three pucks to our taco meat to our Curry I want to toast the spices in the oil so I'm going to add some ginger I'm just roughly basting this off a recipe I found online because I didn't have all the ingredients but I have a lot that is going to make this taste really good this is coriander I'm going to let the spices toast in this and then we're gonna get our spices in our taco meat I have not seasoned this taco meat at all so I'm gonna get some pepper there was three pounds of beef in here so I'm gonna put about three teaspoons of salt and then I'm going to use some homemade taco seasoning my taco seasoning does not have any salt in it because I like to know how much salt I'm adding I'm probably gonna put about a third of a cup to a half a cup of taco seasoning in here foreign and then I have some home canned chicken broth instead of using water I need some chicken broth for the curry I'm just going to pour half of it in here to help kind of reconstitute that taco seasoning we'll taste this taco meat before we call it good and put it in the freezer I'm really looking forward to this because of all the yummy veggies that are gonna be coming out of the garden in a serious abundance here shortly hopefully and so I want to have taco meat so that I can just grab all the fresh veggies and we can have a really yummy taco night Josh and I love tacos we love making steak tacos ground beef tacos chicken tacos any kind of taco and so this is going to be really nice you can even make taco pizza out of this I do have some pizza crust in the freezer I've never had taco pizza it's so good it was a staple growing up in our household my taco seasoning I can link the recipe down below it has a little bit of cinnamon in it and I love this cinnamon it adds like the sweetness to it and it's just really really good but if you don't like cinnamon leave the cinnamon out and I know some people are allergic to cinnamon so clearly if you're allergic don't put cinnamon in it okay our Curry is ready for the next step oh you know what I forgot to do I forgot to toast my my curry paste in the oil before with my spices that's normally what I do but I forgot no oh well it'll be fine the cool thing about Curry 2 is any of the fresh vegetables that are coming out of the garden as well we can add to our Curry so this Curry is basically just going to be a base I'm not going to add any potatoes or carrots or anything else to it because I want to know what's coming out of the garden and if we have peas coming out of the garden potatoes carrots green beans whatever it might be I want to be able to put that into the curry I don't want to put any veggies into it now because I don't know what's going to be coming out of the garden and I don't want to purchase vegetables at the store to put into this Curry and then when I go to make it in August I have an abundance of vegetables coming out of the garden I could have used those vegetables instead so I'm going to go ahead and let this green curry paste simmer and kind of toast up in the bottom of this Dutch oven and our taco meat I think is done so I want to give that a taste test because if it's done we're going to move on to Browning our chicken first let me clean up this mess I wish you could smell how good it smells in here it's just intoxicating all the Aromas that we've got going on in here it's delicious okay let's give this taco meat a try [Music] that's perfect I haven't made ground taco meat in a long time that is so good that's gonna be so good when we go to make it for dinner so I'm gonna let this cool so I think what I'm gonna do so it'll cool a little faster because I need this stove top I'm going to move this over here because I can't put that into freezer bags until it's completely cool our Curry's ready for the next step the curry paste has toasted nicely and to reheat this you could reheat this on the stove you could reheat it in a crock pot you can reheat it however is the easiest way for you to reheat I've got a couple cans of coconut milk foreign now we're going to let this simmer on the stove and get nice and infused with all those beautiful flavors we're back at our chicken and I'm gonna season the chicken really well with salt and pepper we're gonna sear these in a stainless steel pan that we're actually going to make the sauce into after we sear the chicken so we do need to get a little bit of oil on the bottom of this pan and warming up what makes this casserole so interesting and absolutely Divine is you take parmesan cheese and you sprinkle it on the bottom of your casserole dish the actual cheese sauce that we're going to make is made with Swiss cheese but the crust is parmesan and that's why we call those parmesan chicken now it is time to sear this chicken now we are not looking to fully cook the chicken because we are going to cook this recipe in the oven to completion but what I'm looking to do here is get a really nice brown color on this chicken because we're developing flavor technically you could skip this step but we're looking to develop flavor and I don't want to skip this step because I want to develop flavor that's what this is all about and one way to have just really yummy dinners is to bulk do it so instead of doing one of these recipes I am doubling it and I'm going to do two because this is a little bit of a tedious process and once I brown one side the side that has the seasoning on it I do go ahead and season the other side once both sides of the chicken are browned we take that chicken piece and we put it on that parmesan cheese in the bottom of our casserole dish now we're going to go ahead and make our bechamel sauce or our cream cheese sauce so we're gonna take some butter quite a bit of butter this is not necessarily a light dish that's why I was saying this isn't really a summery dish but it is so good and we haven't had it in probably a year and it just brings back a lot of good memories when we have it so that's why we're making it today so I'm going to take this butter and I'm going to use the butter to kind of scrape up any of the Fawn that is on the bottom of the pan those brown bits that are stuck that just are so delicious and then I'm going to add some flour to it so this is our Roux we're going to cook the flour in the butter while continuing to try to scrape up any of those bits once the butter and flour are cooked together we're going to add our milk and we're going to stir this and let this simmer until it is thickened and then we will add the goodness is going to be the sauce to put over pasta or noodles or whatever you want to serve it with this is our swiss cheese that we're going to add once our milk and flour mixture thickens I've just been trying to tidy up the kitchen as I've been in here I think what I'm going to do let's see just all this milk so I'm going to recycle this carton yep it looks like our ground beef is cool enough that I can go ahead and package that up I'm going to use three freezer bags I'm not going to use my reusable silicone bags because I think the taco seasoning would stain them and I don't want that so I am going to mark on here what they are though taco meat and what the date is so that when I go to the freezer I know what I'm looking for and I need to taste this Curry because the curry might be almost done and everything obviously needs to cool before we can put it in the freezer so if this Curry's done then I'm going to turn this off and I'm going to let this cool smells good oh my goodness that is so good um I was thinking I might add some soy sauce to it but I don't think I'm going to I think I'm just going to turn that off and then when I go to reheat it I'll put our vegetables in and I'll put whatever kind of meat probably Chicken in it and then if it needs a little bit of salt or something I'll put some soy sauce in there but I don't think it needs it right now and then when I serve my Curry I usually serve it over rice and I like to serve it with some fresh lime juice like you know squeezes of lime and also cilantro I cooked up three pounds of this taco meat so I'm going to divide this between three bags just like when I make my marinated meat I am going to freeze this taco meat flat because that will thaw a lot faster if it's flat then if I put it in like a big chunk at the bottom of the bag so these are cool enough I'm going to go ahead and just throw these into the freezer right now and when I get back our sauce should be ready for the next step you see how nice and thick this is that's perfect that is exactly the consistency we want so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch to a I'm going to turn the heat off first and I'm going to add our swiss cheese three cups so about three handfuls that's probably we'll just go with that probably a little bit more than three cups but a little extra cheese never hurt anyone so we're going to stir this in off the heat or I turn the heat off it's okay if it's still on the stove here we're gonna mix this in and then we're gonna give it a taste test for salt and pepper it needs don't ever be afraid to taste your food and adjust it to your liking okay you all taught me this trick you can use the same spoon just use your stirring spoon to put it on your tasting spoon that's perfect season this at all so it makes sense that it would need to be seasoned now this is a site of beauty this ribbon of cheese sauce so we're going to put half in one half in the other and you want a good amount of sauce this might look like a lot of sauce but like I said this is the sauce that you're gonna put over your noodles so you want it to have a good amount of sauce and it's so good the Swiss cheese really gives it something interesting for a white sauce now we take our homemade breadcrumbs and we're going to top the top with homemade breadcrumbs that's going to give it a nice crunch so you're going to Crunch on the bottom and a nice crunch on the top so we have our meatloaves here and they are almost completely Frozen so I'm just going to cut this parchment paper and we're going to get these meatloafs in a freezer bag here I'm just gonna wrap [Applause] we got 12 Pizza Pockets 17 breakfast burritos two meatloafs 12 chimichurri no yeah chimichurri burger patties two of the parmesan chicken two of the orange meatballs and Curry so that is awesome you got seven recipes done and we doubled at least if not tripled each one of them which was pretty awesome now something like this I call it one meal but this is a meal that will feed Josh and I for dinner and then it will feed us for a few lunches or maybe a couple extra dinners that's going to be plenty same with the meatballs the meatloaf this one meatloaf will serve us for quite a few meals so I call it meals but it's really one dinner and then a ton of extra meals following that so when I cook if you want to see how I incorporate freezer meals into our daily life go ahead and consider subscribing if you're new because I kind of show how I incorporate them just in my daily life and you can kind of see what kind of sides I put with them and things like that and the cool thing is because I use these containers with lids I don't need to worry about like plastic wrap and foil other than for the breakfast burritos so that makes it easy I'm gonna pop these back in the freezer once they're completely Frozen I will put them in a freezer bag so those will be ready to go for us and yeah if you're interested in these recipes I will link them down below below along with you know the reusable freezer bags and any of the equipment you may have seen me use today so just I want to say a huge thank you for being here I hope this is encouraging I hope this inspired you now this is one way I do it where I set aside a few hours in a day and I just get a ton of stuff done but if you are new around here and you haven't seen how I cook as well sometimes what I do if I'm going to cook dinner and say I was going to make orange meatballs and I don't have the time to set aside you know five hours to do all this cooking on one day then what I might do on a Tuesday or Wednesday or whenever I'm cooking dinner instead of making one meatloaf the night I plan to make meatloaf that night I'm gonna make two meatloafs so I can slowly fill in my freezer gently that way or I can just take a few hours get my kitchen completely messy and do it this way I really like doing it this way when possible because I get to keep using the same bowls over and over and over the same cutting board the same knife obviously if I used raw meat then I need to use a new one for produce or whatever it might be but just it's a great way it's an efficient way to fill your freezer with homemade meals on nights that you just don't want to cook I love cooking but I don't like the pressure of having to cook every night and Josh and I try to be very intentional when we eat out when we eat out we want it to be an intentionally planned thing not a oh no I don't feel like cooking or oh no whatever it might be sometimes that still happens but we try to be intentional about it and one way I have learned to save on my groceries and save myself for when I don't want to cook is by doing freezer meals so maybe all this in the freezer I just want to say thank you for being here thank you for being you and I can't wait to see you next time bye friend

Channel: Acre Homestead

Views: 517,292

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, postpartum, postpartum prep, scratch made recipes

Id: djxtqEzaRU0

Length: 71min 22sec (4282 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023