Freezer Meals Update

A couple of months ago, I blogged about Once a Month Cooking/Frozen Assets. Since then, our stand alone freezer (that Leo chewed the cord on but was quickly fixed) has started to fill up with individually frozen dinners, as you can see:

We have not done any special mini- or mega-cooking session to do this, but have made a point of doubling a recipe when it is the kind of thing that will hold up well to freezing - casseroles, mostly, but a few other one-dish meals as well. I am crazy for one-dish meals so this works out very well for me. I have also been doubling my muffin recipes. It is a commonly observed but surprisingly true fact that doubling a recipe takes almost no additional time - much of cooking is a fixed time cost, with the only small marginal time costs in chopping up extra vegetables and such. In some cases, like when the recipe calls for half a pound of meat (an inconvenient size to buy, so we always get a full pound), it is actually easier to double the recipe and freeze the half that we don't want to eat right away. This approach has also had the nice side benefit that when Robert and I make two lasagnas, for example, we can customize our own dish to reflect our preferences (in my case, for extra vegetables; in Robert's case, for extra cheese).

Since we have yet to jump into the full-blown OAMC process, we have not seen any of the cost savings from buying ingredients in bulk. However, the time savings alone has made this a very worthwhile process for us. And I like it that with our big freezer, when we make one of our larger dishes that makes 8 servings, we can decide to eat 4 servings this week and freeze the rest for another time. That helps mitigate the burn-out we can get after eating the same dinner four nights in a row.

Just now when I went in to take the freezer photo, Leo came to investigate and found a stray piece of lettuce left over from his dinner last night, which he proceeded to eat right in front of the open freezer door. Technically, I could have moved him out of the way (since he is, for all his luxuriously kingly girth, a mini Rex who weighs under 6 pounds, and does not actually go for the jugular as our "Beware of Attack Rabbit" sign would suggest), but instead I took his picture and then moved him out of the way with the closing door when he was done.