Making Future Breakfasts and Dinners EASY with Homemade Freezer Meals

good morning friend welcome back to my kitchen today is batch bulk freezer cooking day we have 10 or 11-ish recipes we're going to be making today and the first thing I did this morning is I peeled my potatoes so that we could get the potatoes on the stove to cook and I'm going to season this really well with salt I'm going to put the lid on we're starting with cold potatoes cold water turning the stove on high so I'm going to start by making two recipes at a time we've got a caramelized onion or french onion shepherd's pie so kind of a Twist on a traditional shepherd's pie and then over here we're going to do a baked ziti I think all the recipes I'm doing today are brand new to me so I'm excited about this so while we're going to chop some vegetables I have some vegetables prepped over there ready to be prepped I'm going to get some pasta on to boil one of my friends is in need of some freezer meals and I am completely out I have one marinated meat in my freezer and that's it because we had that ice storm we lost water for 8 days and I relied pretty heavily on my freezer meal so we are completely out of breakfast ones oh that's not true I do have some pasties still downstairs in the freezer but I don't have any meals I only have one marinated meat and my friend is in need of some meals so I thought this would be perfect time to not only fill my freezer but to get some meals in my friend's freezer as well so for the French onion shepherd's pie or I guess we are technically making cottage pie because the recipe calls for lamb and I have beef so I'm just going to use beef instead of lamb and I'm pretty sure if you make a shepherd's pie with beef then it's called cottage pie so we need to caramelize up a lot of onions so I want to get this going pretty quickly toward the beginning of this day because this is going to take a good half an hour or so and so while these are caramelizing we can prep and do other things while this is cooking I'm also while I'm here I'm going to chop up some onions for the baked zii that we're going to be making today I do have some caramelized onions in my freezer but those are preserved up and sitting there for a day where i'm not wanting to spend a ton of time in the kitchen that's a convenience item for me and I've got all these onions from last year that need to be used up these are onions I purchased from a local farm and I want to make sure I use them before they go bad so this is the perfect time to get a bunch of these used up while I was peeling potatoes this morning I went ahead and I peeled my carrots these are the last fresh carrots I have from last year's Garden so we did a good job using those up we also need some onions for some of the marinated Meats we're going to be making so I went ahead and I grabbed enough onions from downstairs Pantry hopefully for all the recipes we're going to need them for today these are all the onions we need for the caramelized onions so I'm just going to start chopping them as thinly as I can I did sharpen my knife before we got started you know what I think I should check on my noodles they are not quite done yet I didn't set a timer hey Siri set a timer for 4 minutes I've got a minutes starting now I have a couple goals for today first I want to make sure I get all these meals done and so we're making dinners and breakfast two I want to see if I can do this by keeping my kitchen relatively clean so that when I'm done with this big batch cooking day I don't have a disaster to clean up so I went ahead and I unloaded my dishwasher and I've emptied my garbage can so that I can load dishes and I can throw things away as needed so my sink doesn't pile up and one reason I want to get all of this done today is not only I need to bring some meals to my friend but I just started hundreds hundreds of seeds yesterday and my focus is going to be the garden here coming up and so I want to give myself some convenient meals so on days where I am focused on things outside the kitchen I don't have to worry about cooking I think this is about as many onions as I'm going to get into my pan so I think we're going to call this good even though the recipe called for a few more we will use these onions in some other recipes I can see that one needs to be sliced up just a little bit so let's see if we can get this into our pan without making a mess that was our timer for the pasta so let's yep that's done before I start the onions I want to get that off the stove and I have one of these pot strainers I'm going to go strain this and run this under cold water cuz we're not ready to use these and I don't want these to overcook if I would is making this and baking this right away I wouldn't rinse it these pasta noodles under cold water but because they're going to go in the freezer I don't want them to get overcooked by sitting in here in this warm pot and in my sink I have some sausage and some cold water because I forgot to grab that out this morning and have that thaw for the pasta sauce I'm going to rinse this under cold water one more time and whenever I make a baked pasta for freezer meal prep I always cook them about 2 or 3 minutes less than I would normally because I want them definitely on the Al Dente side because they're going to cook again in the [Music] oven so we'll just set this over here until we need it we're going to turn oh I need to turn the stove off back there turn the wrong one off so we need to get some oil in the bottom of our pan that we're to caramelize our onions in that looks like it was the perfect amount so I'm going to get some salt in here and I'm going to start this on high and then once the moisture starts to release from the onions and they actually start to Brown and caramelize I'll turn that way way down but for now we're going to give it a jump start and we're going to prep some vegetables for some of the other dishes we need for the baked ziti we need two onions diced and I've already got onions peeled here so that's for the baked ziti and then we're going to make some fajitas so I need some sliced onions and for the shepherd's pie I need to dice up these carrots I need some more room on this cutting board so I can prep a few more vegetables and I'm going to try to do this without using a bazillion dishes we'll see if we can do it together so what I'm going to do is get some of these onions in one of my freezer bags for one of the meals so that I can just start putting them where they go instead of putting them in another Bowl so we are going to be making four crockpot SL marinated meats or things that could go either in a Crock Pot in an instant pot or on the grill and these are one of my favorite things to make these are a dinner or a dish that requires a little bit more effort so if I'm going to pull this out I usually need to then make sides to go along with it whether that's a vegetable a starch a pasta whatever it might be versus something like the Bak ziti and well I guess the shepherd's pie I'd probably make a vegetable too so these are convenience items as well but not quite as convenient I guess as a shepherd's pie but they are one of my favorite things to have in my freezer so what I'm going to do is while I'm already marking one of the bags for these onions where they are designed or destined to go I'm going to go ahead and Mark my bag for the rest of the things on the top of my list here I have maple Chipotle beef sliders this would be perfect for crock Potter insta pot I would not put this on the grill because we're going to be using a chuck roast and I'm going to go ahead and Mark on the bag the directions so that when I gift this to my friends the directions are already on here from Frozen it's going to take 10 8 to 10 hours in a crock pot on high from Tha probably six to 8 hours on high okay so I have my first two bags done the next recipe is going to be something that you could put in a crock pot or on the grill and this is mango jalapeno chicken same thing I'm going to write crockpot directions or grill directions the next recipe is honey hares chicken this could go in the crock pot or on the grill or it could be cooked on the stove I guess all of these except for the Chipotle sliders could be cooked on the stove as well and the final recipe that's going to go in one of these freezer bags is fajita chicken this makes a fantastic crock poot meal a great instant pot meal or I really like to cook this in the oven and on the stove top so this one has a little bit more versatility so this one is where the onions are going to their final destination so I'm going to grab out some of my bag holders here and I'm going to go ahead and just get my onions directly into these bags I love these bag holders when doing one of these big days like this got my two bags here I'm going to divide these onions between these two bags if I can get them into the bags I just added a little extra oil and I just turn this down to very low because you can see they're starting to get some Browning on these onions I don't want these to Brown I want them to caramelize so now that I've got this on really low I am going to keep a close eye on it but this is going to take a good 30 35 minutes to cook and caramelize our potatoes are still boiling away they're not quite done yet so let's go ahead and just finish up our fajita chicken this is a recipe I have made before this is the only recipe I've made before out of all these recipes and it's been a long time since I've made it and I love it it's so convenient to have in the freezer so that's why I decided I was going to add this recipe to the repertoire so I've got three Peppers here that I just washed up I've got two green ones and two and one red one you could use whatever kind of peppers you like if you like orange and yellow I went ahead and I bought the green ones because I like the flavor of the green ones they kind of have a little bit more of a not a bite but they're not as sweet but I do like the sweetness that a red one adds plus the color so I went ahead and I'm going to add one green pepper to one bag and one green pepper to the other bag and then I will split the red pepper between the two bags this is just nice on one of those nights where you want fajitas but you don't want to go through all the effort of slicing all the peppers and onions I know that's not always difficult but you know there's some nights where you just need to get something on the stove and not worry about the chopping and prepping portion of it when I do one of these big cooking days I normally don't get to these type of recipes till toward the end so this is kind of nice that we're getting an easy thing checked off the list right at the beginning it's kind of a confidence booster all right so there is that I don't think we have any other real vegetables we have to prep today I'm going to leave this just like this I'm actually going to pop these in the refrigerator and we'll come back to them when we you know process all the meat and everything that's going to go in the rest of them I don't want to get that out quite yet so for now I'm just going to pop these in the fridge what we're going to move on next is getting the baked ziti sauce and meat all cooked so I'm going to grab another pan out we're going to have the shepherd's pie for dinner tonight and I'm actually going to serve the shepherd's pie in this dish if I wasn't going to do that I would probably wait to make the baked zii sauce in that pan so I don't dirty up another pan I need some hot pads I'm going to move these potatoes to this back burner cuz those are just cooking away for me I'm going to get this pan on here and we're going to get our sausage and onions cooking in this the recipe that I found for this calls for ground beef and I have a lot of Italian sausage in my freezer and so I thought instead of ground beef in this one we would do sausage just to add a little extra flavor so that's what I'm substituting here for ground beef so I've got 2 lbs here maybe still a little Frozen on the inside but that's okay we're going to let that cook potatoes have a quite a bit longer to [Music] go [Music] I have now taken the potatoes off the stove I drained them I let them steam a little bit to get any excess water out of the potatoes and then I added some butter and milk and those are sitting my butter was frozen so I'm just letting the butter sit in those hot potatoes to melt and then we're going to mash those up so now what I'm going to do is kind of switch my focus just a little bit since I'm still waiting on the onions to cook and my caramelized onions to caramelize I'm going to go ahead and preheat the oven to you know what I think I'm not going to preheat the oven quite yet because I need to have my oat soaked so we're going to switch gears while these are cooking on the stove and we're going to go ahead and get some of the breakfast items going we have two breakfast items we're going to be making and the first one I need to get started on is the oatmeal blueberry muffins cuz these need to sit the oats need to sit in the milk need to shake this up for 20 minutes so while the oats are soaking we'll get going on our waffles so we can cook the waffles while we do other things we're just going to let these oats now sit here hydrate then we can make the muffins I'm going to get going on the waffle batter here and this way our waffles cuz it's going to take a while to cook all them cuz we're going to make mini waffles I can be making the waffles while we do other things in the kitchen so we're going to start with our milk now I'm going to add 3 cups of whole wheat flour one cup of Home Grown homemade applesauce a half a cup of melted butter baking powder I should have mixed the baking powder in with the flour first before I added the butter and applesauce but I forgot so that's okay I'll just mix it in the side here just like that perfect so now I'm going to add my cinnamon and I'm going to mix my cinnamon in with my flour just a little bit and I just grabbed my mixer because we're going to put our egg whites into the mixing bowl and we actually need to fluff the egg whites we're going to fold those into this batter so I'm going to get my yolks into my bowl we need six eggs whole wheat waffles sometimes can tend to be pretty dense but by separating the egg whites and the egg yolks and whipping the egg whites and we're going to fold those egg whites into our batter mixture it creates the most light and fluffy waffle even though we're using 100% whole wheat flour these turned out fantastic and they will definitely be a waffle recipe I will make again we loved the apple cinnamon and the fluffiness of the egg whites in this waffle I'm going to take this and bring it over here we're going to whisk this together while we mix up our wet ingredients with our dry ingredients whenever I'm doing big cooking days like this I'm always trying to think what can I have working for me while I'm doing something else so we have the caramelized onions and the potatoes and the pasta going first cuz those are on the stove and going to be there for a little bit and then we can focus and kind of switch gears prep some more vegetables now we're going to get the waffles going cuz this is going to take some time to have these go in and out of the waffle maker so while the waffles are cooking I'll get the uin B uin muffin batter done in the oven and those can be baking while we then move on to another thing as well so lots of things going on at one time I used to think whipping eggs was very complicated and difficult it's really the easiest thing to do the kitchen aid does it in minutes and now we're going to fold our egg whites into our batter mixture and this doesn't have any sweetener in the recipe there's no sugar or anything I think I'm going to add just a couple tablespoons of our vanilla sugar just to help with Browning that's one thing sugar does really well that's probably about 3 tablespoons is it helps things to Brown cuz the sugars caramelize and then I added some vanilla that wasn't in the recipe either but I have a hard time not adding vanilla to things so now that I have my sugar mixed in I'm going to go ahead and fold in our egg whites look how beautiful these are I'm going to do about a third at a time this is going to just really lighten up this batter yeah I'm just going to put all this in there so here we have our beautiful light and fluffy waffle batter I'm pretty sure I have this very well combined so now I've preheated my little mini waffle maker we're going to make a lot of waffles this recipe made is going to make a lot we're probably going to get I don't know a few dozen so we're going to start with that see how well that fills our waffle maker and now that we have that done we can turn our attention back to our muffins I'm just going to set this batter right here so that we can keep making waffles while we're doing other things in the kitchen like finish up these muffins oh my goodness look how beautiful these are they're not quite cooked I need those to cook a little longer and the time it took me to get out some of the ingredients for the muffins our waffles are done and look how beautiful and light and fluffy those are especially for being whole wheat so I need those to cool a little bit and then we can give them a taste test but I want to keep cooking these in the meantime I'm using this cookie scoop because it just makes it easier to properly proportion out the correct amount of batter so we're going to close that and get going on this so here to our oats and milk I'm going to add one cup of honey and I want to get all that good honey out of here so I'm going to take a spatula to it and now here I have 1 cup of melted butter going to add two large [Music] eggs I'm going to mix this together before I add the dry ingredients this muffin mixture comes together really easily not that the waffles didn't come together easily but this is just extraordinarily easy so this is why I wanted to get these waffles made now so that I can be doing this while I'm doing other things meaning I can be cooking them and rotating them while I'm doing other things I want to taste this waffle mixture because this one is cooled now I have never made a waffle where I fluff the egg whites and they are so Airy they're not crunchy at all you would wouldn't know that these are whole wheat because they're so light and fluffy I'm happy I added the few tablespoons of sugar we're going to get so many waffles distributed throughout it's not going to be much I probably didn't need to do that but these are good these are really really good I ran out of my flour in my container in my drawer so I grabbed my big bucket out I'm going to add my flour into my muffin mixture and this time I'm going to make sure I mix my dry ingredients into the flour a little bit better that was cinnamon this is baking powder got baking soda here I think my waffles need to be those need to cook for just a minute longer we have baking soda so I'm going to mix that together with my salt and that is our muffin mixture I don't think I mentioned that the type of muffins we're making are a blueberry oatmeal muffin so it's kind of like a mix between a baked oatmeal and a blueberry muffin and they were delicious I really liked the fact that they used the honey as the sweetener it added something a little extra special to these muffins and we will definitely make these again they were fantastic now I'm going to add my blueberries that I've already washed and picked out any sort of stems or anything in there and I'm I'm going to use my spatula to fold these in so I don't crush the blueberries this smells so yummy I love anything with oatmeal in it and I've never made a blueberry oatmeal muffin before and you know this recipe did not call for vanilla either and I can't help myself I'm going to put a good splash of vanilla in there probably should have done that before I added the blueberries but I didn't quite think about it this is the first time I've ever made blueberry muffins without using frozen blueberries and it's not leaving a bunch of blue streaks with the fresh blueberries which is kind of nice I normally buy frozen blueberries out of blueberry season but when I went to the store yesterday to pick up a few items I needed for today that's not quite done yet I'm going to put a couple things away they were going to sit in my car longer then I was comfortable cuz I had a couple other errands I needed to run and they would have completely melted so I went with fresh and that's really nice I like that all right I'm going to get a couple things put away we can get these packaged not packaged up we can get these scooped up into our muffin tin and then we can get these baked off but I want to clear some space in my kitchen I've got a big bucket of flour down here that's why I'm maneuvering around it I think before I put this bucket away I'm going to go ahead and just fill my flour container up with flour and then I'll put my big bucket away I already have to clean these counters I might as well do this while my counters are already messy perfect I'm going to go put this away and then we're going to get these muffins in the oven we do have a lid for this I'm not going to put it on quite yet cuz we're going to use this flour a few more times today I am doubling both the muffin and the waffle mixture because one recipe is going to be for my family and then one recipe worth is going to be for my friends so let's go ahead and just keep on rotating these waffles through I am going to use muffin tin liners for my blueberry muffins just for easier cleanup I'm going to have enough cleanup to do when today's over I don't want to worry about cleaning a muffin tin I didn't make muffins for a long time because scrubbing a muffin tin liner was one of my least favorite things to do and then I made cupcakes for something I don't remember what and of course I used cupcake liners and I thought why have I not been using muffin tin liners this whole time so now I like to make muffins and I like to line the tin because it just makes life a little easier so that's what I'm doing here getting these lined up two recipes worth should make 24 muffins I'm going to lightly spray these liners and I'm going to use a cookie scoop or an ice cream scoop I should say to scoop out the batter so hopefully I can get it kind of even throughout this batter is very thick I don't think I've ever made a muffin batter this thick before I am going to take a second to wipe the rims of each one of my muffin tins so that it doesn't bake on there and it just makes clean up again a lot easier it's always easier to clean up not baked on batter than baked on batter okay into the oven they go I realized I never pushed start on my oven for the other one to preheat and so I went ahead and just preheated this one cuz it preheats a little faster these are going to bake for Wow only 11 to 13 minutes so I need to set a timer I'm going to kind of reset my kitchen because it is a little bit messy we are back at the stove and our caramelized onions are done they look absolutely beautiful and we need to get these caramelized onions out of this pan so that we can cook our ground beef and our carrots in here this is done as well I had turned this off because it was getting a little dark I think what I'm going to do real quick is actually add my garlic to this I need to get garlic out for the shepherd's pie as well this is some home chopped up Garlic that I put in these little pucks and then I freeze so we're going to get that in there let that sauté for a minute and I think what I'm going to do is go ahead and just take my caramelized onions and I'm going to put them in this bowl pan is a little bit hot but that's okay going to get this back on the stove the ground beef that I am going to cook is very very lean so a little extra oil is going to be good this is a little Frozen still which is fine we'll just go ahead and brown this up and thaw it all at the same time and before we do anything else our blueberry muffins are done and my goodness do these look absolutely incredible I love a large muffin tin like this because you can cook you know what I think there's actually let me get a tester I've got a tester right here let's see if these are done oh yeah those are done uh I think I'm going to give them a minute longer they're pretty dense so they're going to take a minute to cook I'm going to get the lid on this ground beef so it Cooks a little bit faster since it has to thaw I'm going to cook this garlic in here I just need the garlic to kind of melt a little bit oh this smells so delicious I need to get my marinara sauce in with my meat so I've got two quarts of homemade homegrown marinara sauce going to get this in here here once the sausage was cooked I did add my two onions to the sausage mixture and I sauteed those onions until they were soft then I added the garlic now I'm adding the marinara sauce this baked ZD is going to come together really quickly basically the the hardest part of the baked ZD was just cooking the sausage and the onions together so not hard at all that marinara sauce is already flavored how I want it to be flavored it's got basil and onions and wine and it's absolutely delicious with homegrown tomatoes and so it doesn't need any more other than just kind of heating all of it through and we're just going to continue on with our waffles if you wanted those waffles to go a lot quicker use a full-size waffle maker I like the little ones cuz they're more personal size but they are taking a long time especially because I double that re so we are almost done I H well we're probably about 34 the way done with that I did take some time to clean the kitchen I got the dishwasher started our ground beef is now thawed and so we can add some of the rest of the ingredients to our ground beef we need to cook the carrots first I grabbed some of the ingredients we need but before we can add those I need the carrots to cook hopefully I can get everything to fit in this pan I can go ahead and season this now cuz I have not added any salt to this so I'm going to season this with salt now remember this has four lounds of meat in it so I put three very healthy pinches of salt in there our red sauce is done so we can actually go ahead and make our bake ziti once we have room on the counter now I'm going to add two teaspoons of pepper remember again we have a lot of meat and carrots in here I'm going to get this stirred together and we're going to cook this until the carrots are tender I thought that was a lot of carrots but now that I'm mixing it in with the ground beef doesn't seem like it's probably the perfect amount I probably could have done a few more okay so we're going to let that cook for a little bit I am still making waffles but I needed this counter space so we could finish up our baked ziti cuz we basically can assemble this and then we can check something off the list for officially being done so here we've got our red sauce I have two dishes one for my friend that is a foil pan because I don't want her to have to worry about dishes I don't want her to worry about having to return it back to me and then one that's in a glass dish that's for me cuz I don't mind washing this so we've got our red sauce here the first thing we need to do is take some of our red sauce and just put it on the bottom of our baking dish just to help prevent the pasta from sticking I do have one more thing I need to prep and that's some fresh basil and I'll do that in just a minute you know what I didn't do I didn't taste this sauce for salt and pepper oh that's delicious that doesn't need anything my friend has two young kids so I don't want to add any spice cu it was just me I probably would have added some red pepper flakes to that but that's perfect just the way it is nice and garlicky the marinara sauce that I use for this was very flavorful that's why it doesn't need a lot of seasoning so now what we're going to do I think I'm actually going to set this over here for just a minute and I need to I'm going to move this cuz I don't want to get sauce on that I need to pour my sauce in with my noodles put that there want to get every last bit of this sauce cuz it is delicious stuff the best marinara sauce I have ever made I'm going to make it exactly the same way this coming growing season this is probably one of the easiest recipes we're making today we're going to add roted cheese and I'm going to stir all of this together until well combined I think I was supposed to stir the noodles in with the sauce and then add the the ricotta cheese but this will work it's kind of like a lazy lasagna almost I'm using rigatoni noodles I didn't say that earlier because I prefer rotoni noodles I like the ridges in them true zi pasta is just a a smooth long tube and doesn't have the ridges and I find that The Ridges hold better to the sauce so it might not be traditional but it's what Josh and I prefer so that's what I used I can see that my Waffle is done I need to put a new set of dough or batter in my waffle maker this is my new waffle station over here we're almost done with these waffles I don't actually want to put all the pasta in here cuz what we need to do is actually add a cheese layer so this is parmesan cheese and then I have some mozzarella cheese here I'm going to put some of that on and now I have some fresh basil I didn't want to chop this until right before use just to make sure it doesn't turn brown on me and now I'm going to cover it with cheese I'm not going to add any more basil to the top cuz I don't want that to turn brown so I'm just adding it to the middle the sauce and the cheese and the noodles will protected and it's going to cook up beautifully we officially have two recipes completely done and we are almost done with a third and we have other ones on the way so here I've got my meat and carrot mixture I had to separate it into two bowls cuz we now need to make the sauce portion and I didn't have enough space in this one pan I'm going to serve dinner in this one pan so I went ahead and rinsed out my pasta sauce pan and we're going to go ahead and use that one to finish off this sauce so I'm going to do the exact same thing to both of these pans to finish this we're going to add just a couple tablespoons of flour in here we're going to cook that along with a couple tablespoons of tomato paste in each one I'm just going to finish this jar between the two try to make these exactly the same now I'm going to add some good dces of moer Shire sauce probably about 1/4 cup a good blob of garlic in each one parsley I'm going to stir this together and cook this until the garlic is cooked the flour has cooked and the tomato paste has cooked now we're going to add some chicken broth to make our sauce I'm going to add two cups to each pan we're just going to simmer that until it thickens and then we're going to give it a taste test and see if we need need to adjust any of the seasonings I'm going to scrape up any of the fond that's on the bottom of the pan and now the secret ingred ingredient we're going to add half of our onion mixture to each one of these we're going to add excuse me a quarter of our onion mixture to each one of these so I'm going to stir this in I need the onion mixture in here so that I can give this a taste test the onions are going to add a lot of sweetness so I want to make sure that's Incorporated well before we taste it to adjust any of the seasonings all right give this meat a taste I did get to take out the final waffle so we finally have all of those waffles cooked up so let's give this a try that's really good it's super super Savory I think it needs some sort of acidity or something to counterbalance that I think we need to adjust the seasonings just a little bit this wasn't in the recipe but I think I'm going to add maybe about a teaspoon of mustard to each one of these cuz that's going to add some brightness to it a little bit more salt and I think what I'm going to do to add some more acidity is maybe about a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar let's stir that in and try that that's all it needed my recipe that I normally make for shepherd's pie I add about 1/4 cup of red wine and that kind of gives you that acidity but using the balsamic vinegar worked just perfect if you wanted to add peas this would be the perfect time to do so I normally add peas to my cottage pie but the recipe this one did not call for that so I'm going to go ahead and skip it I don't even have peas in my house right now if I did I might add them but it's going to be just delicious with without it so here I've got my dish for my friend we're going to have dinner tonight and this is what we're going to have so this is what I'm just going to serve it in here we have our mashed potatoes that we started but I have not finished them so we need to keep mashing them and probably adjusting the seasonings and things in here because I haven't tasted them since I added the butter or the milk and I haven't added any salt to this either the recipe this is the only ingredients it says to add to this but I'm going to taste it and see if it needs any Pepper or anything don't be afraid to taste your food and adjust the seasonings as needed one you might have a little bit different preference than a recipe or two it just might be missing some acidity or some sweetness or a salty flavor oh this isn't hot M those are good but they are not they're not there yet so let's see I'm going to add some salt and pepper I like to make sure every aspect of my dish is nicely seasoned and delicious on its own so there's pepper and salt let's see does it need any more liquid I think I'm going to add a splash of half and half cuz the only thing I added in this was milk earlier add a splash of that I'm going to grab a new spoon we're going to taste it perfect perfect so now we have our mashed potatoes on our pie mixture we're going to take the rest of our caramalized onions and we're going to put these on the top and then we have one more amazing ingredient we're going to add so it's going to get even better again this is where I'm going to play with this recipe the recipe states to add cheddar cheese to the top of this now I think that would be delicious but we're making a french onion shepherd's pie so I substituted Grier cheese because Grier is a little more traditional when it comes to french onion soup so now we get to take our shredded Grier cheese and this is going to make a crusty topping for our cheesy beefy cottage pie I'm using cottage pie and shepherd's pie interchangeably so I had two I think they were about 4 oz blocks I probably well we'll see I don't know if I'm going to use all of it my friend who I'm bringing this one to I know she loves cheese maybe I will use all of it the ones in the foil pan you can see the foil pan is soft so once this cools down a little bit more toward room temperature now that I just put my hand on the bottom I can tell it's very very warm I do not want to put that in my my freezer but the pasta one was cool enough I went ahead and put that in the freezer before I covered it I just need it to freeze solid so that I can wrap it in foil and write the directions on it and everything and I need them to be frozen completely before I can stack them because they're you can see how it's bowing at the bottom they're not rigid like you know a cast iron or one of my glass baking dishes okay wow okay we have 1 two three four recipes just completely done now we have another recipe that started and a few recipes that are really easy they're basically dump and go recipes so let me put away the things that I got out for this and then we'll move on to those recipes now we're going to make some cranberry meatballs but before we do that I had to run downstairs to grab some things and I saw my jar of cranberry juice that I made probably about 6 weeks ago or so and I haven't tasted it yet and I'm thirsty so I thought let's grab this and give it a try this is just cranberries water and sugar that I put in a jar and Jarred it up and canned it oh wow that is delicious that is pretty sweet I think I put I'd have to go back and look and see what I did I think I put a half a cup of sugar or maybe a third of a cup of sugar in that I only did two jars because I wanted to taste it first before I did a bunch of it I will definitely do that again but I will probably just do 1/4 cup of sugar I have some carbonated water here I'm just going to use this kind of as a flavoring little bit more cheers now that is delicious speaking of cranberries we are going to be making a cranberry jalapeno meatball so I need to grab a bowl out now I was planning to make a double batch of this but you know I did not Tha enough meat so I'm just going to make a single batch and that's going to be just fine I'm going to start with 2 lb of ground beef that cranberry carbonated water beverage is perfect for a little pickme up halfway through this cooking day so I'm going to get this in here I'm going to get my hands washed really well and we're going to finish making our meatballs I do have the oven preheated to 425° this is the second time today I thought I preheated the oven and I didn't so I'm going to get that preheated I got inspired by a meatball that I saw at Costco and it was a cranberry jalapeno meatball and I thought I could make that at home so that's what we're doing so we have ground beef garlic black pepper Ginger salt bread crumbs soy sauce and an egg I'm going to mix all this together I almost forgot the part that makes this cranberry jalapeno is the jalapeno so I need to get this diced up and I'm going to dice this up very very small get this in the meat mixture and then mix it all up and I'm going to take the seeds out just so that it's not quite so spicy but you could absolutely leave them in if you want to okay now we can get this mixed up now I think this recipe I just grabbed a container I'm not going to freeze this one this is going to be meal prep for later this week so I'm going to cook the meatballs make the sweet and sour sauce and then let it cool put it in the fridge and this will be meal prep now if I can get enough for two then I'll make one for my friend and I'll meal prep it and put it in the freezer just depends on how many meatballs I can get out of this now the way I was inspired by this recipe is I saw the cranberry I think it was cranberry jalapeno chicken meatballs at Costco and I thought that sounded delicious well I don't have ground chicken in my house but I have a lot of ground beef so I thought I would just use beef instead and then that didn't come with a sauce because it was just some pre-cooked meatballs from Costco that you could reheat and I thought I've got cranberry sauce in my house we could make a sweet and sour sauce to go over the top of this because the way I envisioned serving this would be with rice and steamed broccoli or green beans or something like that and I thought we need a sauce to go over the top so that we can put that over rice so awesome it looks like I'm going to get enough to make two of these so there's one so we're going to kind of combine two recipes I found one recipe for the meatballs but then I found another recipe for the sweet and sour sauce so we're going to make up our own recipe here and I didn't even follow all the directions for the meatballs I kind of made this up that's how I cook a lot I find recipes and I use them as kind of outlines for making up my own thing so once I get all of these like pre-portioned using my cookie scoop I'm going to go back in with my hands and I will round them out my oven is now preheating but this just sounds really good so I think I'm going to enjoy this this week so that's the nice thing about when I do these big cooking days is I always get a bunch of things prepped and then I don't have to cook for a while that's my oven it's nice and preheated now now we can go ahead and get the sauce made on the stove to pour over the top of these I'm going to start with some flour now I'm going to put brown sugar in here vinegar cuz this is a sweet and sour this is white distilled I have a can of pineapple juice we're actually going to use this in another recipe later a jar of homemade cranberry [Music] juice I'm going to put the whole jar in there and soy sauce I'm going to use my whisk to whisk this together I need to turn the stove on and I'm just going to cook this until it's kind of all come together and that flour has dissolved and thickened this just a little bit and while this is cooking we can move on to our next recipe now that we have our meatballs in the oven and our sauce on the stove we are going to get going on our crock poot meals or Stove Top meals or grill meals whatever you want to call them this first one for sure is a Crock-Pot meal for me this is maple sliders and the last time we did a b bulk cooking day I did two chuck roast ready to go in the crock pot one of them was Korean beef chuck roast and the other one was a Chipotle honey chuck roast and they were some of my family's new favorites it's the first time I had ever in bulk freezer cooking fashion done marinated chuck roast my family loved it so we're going to do two more today or one recipe but two one for me one for my friend and this is Maple and there's also Chipotle in this and it's going to be fabulous so the first ingredient is one cup I just have one jar this is 8.4 flu oz so that's a cup a little over a cup pineapple juice and then each one of these is going to get you know I'm worried that this is going to be too spicy cuz the next ingredient is Chipotle and adobo let me see how many Chipotle are in here one two three one two I'm just going to divide this can between here with the sauce and everything this is about a 3 to 4 lb chuck roast this is chuck roast that I got from my local farmer and when I ask my butcher what I want for the cutting instructions I like my chuck roast to be between 3 and 4 lbs and there is usually a bone in my chuck roast so that adds to the weight I'm going to add a couple tablespoons of Tom tomato paste in each one of these a little bit of oil not much about a tablespoon and I just relooked at the recipe that was supposed to be 3 tablespoons per each one of these so I think I'm just going to use this whole jar now we're going to add 1/4 cup of maple syrup so these are to be turned into sliders so I have some Hawaiian rolls in my freezer so when I go to cook these I'm going to put this in the crock pot I'm going to pull out those Hawaiian rolls and then I'll probably make up a coal slot to go along with it and that is going to be this Maple it's kind of like a maple Chipotle slider which is going to be delicious and I kept those jalapenos the Chipotle whole so that they can be picked out in in case they're too spicy Chipotle sometimes are one of those things just like a jalapeno cuz a Chipotle is a smoked jalapeno you never know how hot they're going to be so if they're hot ones you can just pull them out and they don't end up in the whole sauce okay two more well two more Meals one more recipe down this next recipe is inspired by when I made those football appetizers I made this mango sauce to dip fried coconut shrimp in and I thought that would make a fantastic marinade on chicken so that is what is inspiring this next recipe I have one bunch of washed cilantro I'm going to add in there about a cup and a half of mangoes about a half a cup of soy sauce one jalapeno diced a tiny bit of sriracha a knob of fresh ginger garlic and oil I need a little bit more oil in here now we're going to get the lid on this okay I want to give this a taste test one of the things that was a little different in the dip that I made is that instead of using oil I plan to put this on the grill so I needed a little oil I used mayonnaise and sour I think it was mayonnaise and sour cream as a creamy agent but that makes for a better dip that is good it's got a little bit of heat to it little bit of sweetness from the mango but not overpoweringly sweet fantastic fantastic fantastic just checking my recipe oil cilantro mango soy sauce okay that's everything so I'm going to put this on chicken thighs but before I do that our sauce has thickened up and I think my my meatballs are done yeah they're done I'm going to drain some of this grease off of them cuz I don't want that in my final recipe I have my meat you know what I should do I should taste this don't want to spill that I should taste this sweet and sour sauce oh that is so yummy with the pineapple juice my goodness so I'm going to put half of this sweet and sour sauce over half the meatballs and the other half over the other half I definitely could have made a few more meatballs but that's all I had thought so that's all I made but that'll be really delicious on rice and on vegetables so I'm just going to let that cook while we finish up our marinated recipes all right we've got another recipe down I usually like to have six chicken thighs in each one of my bags so that we have dinner plus some for leftovers two more down so we're back to our faita chicken so we've got our two bags here and these are chicken breasts and they they're still a little frozen so we're going to get these sliced up thinly this you can throw in the grill you can cook in the oven no the grill would be hard unless you had a grill pan this you can throw in the crock pot or on the stove so I'm going to get three chicken breasts in each bag it's easier to cut when they're still partially frozen I just thought it enough to get it out of the bag now this comes together really really quickly once you have your chicken and peppers cut up I'm going to add taco season seasoning two big spoonfuls and a splash of oil and two more checked off the list we're getting started on the last marinate we're making today and that is honey h chicken this is going to be so delicious served with some sweet potatoes a jalapeno yogurt sauce I already can taste it I'm so excited for it so I have a really large Lemon so I'm putting half the zest in each one of these bags just like that get all that beautiful zest out of there then I have a jar of hares and I'm going to put half the jar in one bag and the other half in the other bag I had already used some out of this jar so I'm just using the rest of it I have some thyme leaves and my honey is downstairs and it is completely crystallized and so I think I'm just going to substitute maple syrup I think that'll be delicious and I need a/4 Cup in each one I'm just going to finish that bottle some oil lots of garlic and sweet paprika and last but certainly not least salt and just like that we have another recipe done these have been in the freezer for quite some time they're not fully Frozen at all but they're pretty close to it and I'm going to cover these and I went ahead and I typed up the baking instructions for my friend that I'm bringing these to cooking is not her favorite thing to do at all and so I was pretty detailed in the cooking instructions what I like to do is take a piece of foil and fold it in half and go ahead and get that covered on top here get this wrapped around I was specific with each individual one and I also put recommendations for possible sides because the meatballs I thought would be good with some specific things so I went ahead and just put that down but of course my friend can have it however she would like and you know what I better so I can't tell what each of these are once I cover them so I better go ahead and just cut here to think about this okay this is the French onion shepherd's pie so that's there this one is the cranberry sweet and sour jalapeno meatballs and this one goes here and this one is the baked Z so here I've got Saran Wrap so now that I have my two layers of foil I'm going to put my casserole on top of the Saran Wrap I'm going to put my cooking instructions on top of that I'm going to cover that like this and I'm going to cover this with two layers a plastic wrap I don't know when she was going to want to cook these so I just want to make sure they're protected in the freezer for her so there's one I'm do the same thing with the second one you know I put on here how to cook this and reheat this in the oven but these meatballs probably could have been put in a freezer bag and probably could have been reheated not probably they definitely could have been reheated in a crock pot as well but I didn't really think about that until just now get this one on here and then once I have these covered I'm going to pop these back in the fridge and I'm not going to stack them on top of each other until they're frozen solid which they are not frozen solid quite yet the reason I like to use my glass Tupperware for me the ones with the snap Lids which I'll show you in just a minute is cuz then I don't have to worry about going through so much plastic wrap and foil pans but when I'm bringing them to somebody well this is very light these are the meatballs I can go ahead and stack that up there I don't want them to have to think about returning my baking dish so I don't mind using the plastic wrap and the foil but just for my own use I prefer not to go through this much so let me show you my baked well let me show you everything we did today cuz we got a lot done before I can show you all of what we made today cuz I got to go grab a bunch of it out of the fridge and freezer I can't even remember how many recipes we made today but it was a lot for my friend I'm going to put her waffles in a zip block back so she can just enjoy them and pull them out of her freezer when she wants to freeze them when she wants to eat them for me I'm going to put them in this reusable silicone bag I love using the reusable silicone bags for things like this because it doesn't make the bag messy so then it's not annoying to have to clean the bag they work really well I haven't had any problems with freezer burn we'll go through these well before that I don't like to use the these reusable silicone bags for anything that has any sort of strong odor like garlic or onions or raw meat and so this is the perfect thing the silicone does hold on to the smell of garlic and things like that so I've just learned for these bags this type of application is absolutely perfect so here I've got my waffles I'll probably keep one of these smallish bags worth of waffles out so that I don't have to freeze them and thaw them we'll just eat those for the next couple days I still have have some precooked bacon in my freezer so on the day that we want to have waffles if we want bacon I can thaw some of that and warm that up I have pre-cooked sausage in my freezer usually when we have something like waffles or french toast we like to have a protein with it and of course my chickens are now laying again so I can absolutely see how many I can fit in this bag start relying on my homegrown chicken eggs so we were able to get 24 muffins and I didn't even count how many waffles it was so many waffles 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 48 waffles plus a bunch of them have already been eaten probably six or seven of those waffles have already been enjoyed perfect I did double this waffle recipe so if you want to make that many waffles I doubled the muffin recipe too so if you want to get that many waffles just go ahead and double the recipe that I link down below okay I'm going to go grab all the other stuff so I can show you all we got done today here it is in all its Glory so we got two fajita chickens one for me one for my friend two of the maple Harissa chicken this is the maple pork sliders the mango jalapeno marinate I've got two of the baked zitis one for me one for my friend I am going to put this in the freezer so this is the container that has the lid I just like this because it's easy less to have to even manage than this but I'm excited to have both of these done I have dinner in the oven which is oh my goodness look at that that is the shepherd's pie I have one more shepherd's pie for my friend we've got our jalapeno cranberry meatballs with sweet anded sour sauce this one I'm not going to freeze I'm just going to pop this in the fridge I'll bake this up sometime this week and we will have that with probably broccoli and rice and then we have all of our breakfast what a fantastic fantastic day I have the dishwasher running and and we got a lot done today we got a lot done for meal prep for Josh night plus I'm able to not tomorrow but the next day I am going to go drop all these meals off for my friend so she doesn't have to worry about cooking for a couple nights whenever she needs that little bit of Grace for her so I will again type up for the maple truck roast so that she knows kind of the intent of that is to have that with sliders and maybe whole SLO and then how to cook up the fajita chicken and the other two the mango jalapeno or mango cilantro and the hares Maple I'm tired I feel like I'm rambling now it was a long day it was a fantastic day one of my favorite days is to get in the kitchen and do a bunch of meal preps so that my future self doesn't have to think about meals quite so much and so thank you so much friend for taking time out of your day to spend time with me these recipes will be linked down below some of them I did tweak a little bit but that's how I cook I have a hard time getting in the kitchen and not doing any sort of tweaking even to my own recipes I hardly make anything two times in a row I am going to go put these back in the fridge and freezer and everywhere they go so that they will be ready for us next time we need a meal so friend thank you for being here thank you for being you and I can't wait to see you next time bye

Channel: Acre Homestead

Views: 419,247

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Id: GcgfbVgxPmc

Length: 74min 17sec (4457 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024