This frugal tip is about small batch freezing and meal starter freezing. This saves money because you cut down on waste and also it can help cut down on eating out and extra trips to the grocery store when you need a meal and its getting late.
One of the easiest things to freeze is rice. I love to be able to pull a bag of rice out of the freezer both for meals at home or for my lunch to take to work. You can use any kind of rice, but its especially handy for brown rice, since it takes longer to cook. When you have a little time, you can cook up a large pot of brown rice and freeze a few bags.
This is a recent bag of rice I took out of the freezer for a side dish for supper.
It heats up well in the microwave.
Bell pepper is a good thing to freeze. If you buy them from the grocery store or grow your own, you know they won't last too long in the fridge. I go ahead and cut them up, spread them out on a cookie sheet to flash freeze and then put them in a freezer bag. When you need some bell pepper for a recipe, its easy to just pour out what you need. If I do this, it really cuts down on the waste of finding a mushy bell pepper in the fridge!
I use a lot of tomato paste, but even the small 6 ounce can is too much for most of my recipes. So, when I open a can I use what I need for the recipe I am cooking, and freeze the rest. These blobs of tomato paste are from a 12 ounce can. I let them freeze for an hour or so on this plate and then after they got firm, I transferred them to a freezer bag. The next time I make a pot of soup or chili I can just add one of the blobs to it directly from the freezer.
We didn't have a very good tomato harvest this year, but I froze a few bags, one bag at a time. It was no big deal to put a few in a pot to simmer while I was doing something else. I think I ended up with 5 bags. This kept the few tomatoes we had from going to waste, since they tend to ripen faster than we can eat them.
Another great meal starter I love to have on hand is browned hamburger. After I get the meat home from the grocery store, I like to go ahead and brown some of it and freeze it. Just last night I had no idea what we were going to eat for supper. Then I remembered a bag of frozen browned hamburger in our freezer! Chili! It was so easy using the frozen meat and a frozen tomato paste blob along with some canned tomatoes and beans. I love to put sour cream and some shredded cheese on top of mine.
 |
| Vegetable Soup is good to make from frozen browned hamburger. |
I also want to tell you about another blog I have started called, "Homemaking Dreams Deals". I hope to share deals that I come across and also I feel it is a more appropriate place to blog about Swagbucks. I hope you'll check it out and become a regular reader. Thanks!
1 comment:
These are great ideas; I especially like the brown rice and tomato paste idea. I will check out your new blog. It's about time for an Angel Scraps update....... hint, hint.
Post a Comment