Ep 40: Empty Nest Freezer Magic: Tips for Smart Meal Prepping
Get ready to learn the tips and tricks for efficiently freezing meals tailored for empty nesters. You can simplify meal prep and avoid repetitive meals, and still have great food!
We're talking about the science of freezing, selecting appropriate containers, proper cooling techniques, and foods to avoid freezing, as well as proper portioning and labeling for convenience and food safety.
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Oh, happy day. Delighted to be here with you. So if you subscribe to my email newsletter, you know that every week I put out helpful hints, tips, and tricks to make cooking not just more fun, but easier for us now that we're empty nesters. And one of the things that I am asked about the most is freezing meals.
Speaker 3:0:48
I'm super lucky right now to be teaching a class for the Osher Institute through Johns Hopkins University in Columbia, Maryland. I have had a couple of them come up to me and say, I am cooking for one person. What do I do? Because I am so tired of this. Because what tends to happen, if you are even cooking for yourself, you know that cooking for one or even two people, you're putting a lot of effort in. Right. So one of the things that I like to do is first of all, my meals have gotten much more simple as I go through. I'm not doing these big, huge productions. Listen, there's still a chicken and dumplings night when it's chilly out there always will be. But I'm focusing in on faster meals that are still gonna satisfy us, but don't take quite as long to prepare. But one of the other things is I like to make things so that it's not like I cook it Monday and then I eat it Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday because nothing makes you sadder than that fourth day of chili. Right? So what we want to do is we want to make sure that the foods that we're making, that a lot of them can go into the freezer because not everything freezes well, but I have a couple of tips and tricks so that you're not stuck eating the same thing night after night. After night. So let me introduce you to the empty nest freezer revolution, because instead of eating the same date meal days in a row, now we're going to eat it once, freeze it once, and then we're really creating almost like a dinner menu for our freezer. So first, let's talk about what freezes. Now, I'm sure you all remember this from sixth grade science class, but what happens when water molecules freeze is they expand, right? So if you fill up an ice cube tray and you fill it to full, they will expand, and then all the ice cubes kind of stick together, and it's harder to crack them out of the tray. When you're freezing your food, the water molecules that are in your food are expanding and then they shrink when you thought out. So that can make things go mushy on you. So we want to be really careful about what it is we're freezing. A lot of times, of course, we all know soups and stews and all of those good things freeze well, but anything that's a high water content sort of vegetable or anything just isn't going to give you as much success. I know it sounds silly to freeze a cucumber because Ooh, who would ever? But think about how high, how high in volume cucumbers, watermelon, zucchini are in water. And those just are things that we never want to freeze. Now, can you put a little chill on your watermelon if you're using it for some kind of a smoothie? Sure, sure, sure. Do what you do. But anything that's high water content, I avoid also potatoes. Oh, and I know this pains you and you're probably saying, no, I buy hash browns already done. Yes, you do. And those are already cooked. And a lot of times those will come through okay for you. But potatoes, when I worked as a personal chef, if I was doing mashed potatoes, I would have to doctor the bananas out of those. And I would have to add. Egg in addition to the milk. Usually I would use something that had a little higher fat to it, maybe sour cream or cream cheese, but I needed something in there to stabilize. Just regular mashed potatoes. They're not going to come out great for you. And I know we are the generation of the hungry man dinner and you remember those potatoes weren't that great. I still liked them, but they weren't that great. So that is just a little tip for you there.
Speaker 4:4:54
So now when we're actually going to freeze something, we're going to make something and freeze it. I want you to think about the techniques that you need to do to properly freeze something. When you freeze something. First of all, I love those glass storage containers that you can get now that they're totally see through. I know they're not disposable, but they wash up really easily. They don't stain. They're so good. You can find them at Costco there. You can find them everywhere, but those are so great thing you want to be sure you're doing is using them. The proper sized container, because let me tell you, air is the enemy of all things frozen. You know when you get ice cream and it has that little bit of freezer burn on it and it's just not as delicious? Well, that happens to food all the time. Think about it. If you ever get a frozen meal, and don't shoot me. I We'll always get the little frozen Indian things for lunch at Trader Joe's. Are they authentic? No. But are they quick? And do I have them right here? Totally. But when you open those, they have that film of plastic on the top, right? And usually, it's close to touching the food. It's not a giant container. It's sized perfectly. So you are going to want to do that for your own freezer items, right? You want to make sure that you have as little air in there as possible. That means don't use the gigantic container for a little portion. As empty nesters, we really want to make sure things are sized right for us. And it may be time, and I know times are tough right now, but it may be time to get appropriately sized containers for cooking for one or two people. I had to downsize from all of my giant containers that I had for when, you know, I had the kids here at the house. I just don't need that anymore.
Speaker 5:7:00
And since we're all into having the right size containers, let's make sure we're labeling everything. I found this awesome thing. It's called a kitchen stick them and it is basically it's a holder for blue tape and blue tape. Colorful tape is really important in a professional kitchen, but it's for blue tape. It holds a sharpie and it's got a place where you tear it off. And I tell you why I have never labeled everything so easily in my life. And personally, as a professional cook, I really like having that sharpie around. You can ask any pro. They are going to have sharpies everywhere. I have them all over the house. But I don't hesitate to write the date on any product that I open. Right? Now I'm not writing with a sharpie on my nice glass containers, but I am when I open a bottle of spaghetti sauce. I know, I know, a jar of spaghetti sauce. You think I wouldn't, but sometimes I do. I just slap the date on it, on the mustard, on the Oh gosh, on the Gojujang, on anything that I'm using, I do that. And with this kitchen stick in thing, it's right on the side of my fridge. So I just grab it and rip that tape right off. It comes off super easily. You don't want to put it in the dishwasher. But if you do, it won't be that big of a deal. It'll just pull that tape a pull right off for you. I am telling you, it's so good. I'm putting a link to it in the show notes and you know if I'm putting a link in it's a good thing. So make sure that you're dating everything because food in the freezer does have kind of a shelf life And it's not so much that it's going to poison you. It's just that the quality degrades over time, right?
Speaker 6:8:53
An easy Google search will give you charts and lists of how long everything is good to freeze, but it really is a quality issue. It's not so much a food safety issue, but you all know the trick about putting the coin on the ice cube. Summer's coming and we always lose power at some point during the summer, but if you can put a coin on top of an ice cube, Put it in your freezer and it is a great way if you lose power to see how warm your freezer got because if it does thaw out, the coin will drop to the bottom of the package. Does that make sense? But you know, just, I mean, just as a tip, don't open your fridge and freezer if your power goes out. Leave them closed. Anyway, when it comes to freezing things, we want to make sure not only that we're packaging it correctly, that we're choosing it the right way, that we're eliminating any air, that we're labeling, but one of the really big things is
Speaker 7:10:03
Don't ever put anything hot into your fridge or your freezer. I know that you package things up and as part of our freezer strategy here, one of the things we want to do is when we make our dinner we're going to make our dinner for us and we're going to immediately, and when I say immediately, I mean as I serve it on my plate, I also plate it in the container, right? I'm not waiting till after the meal. I do it right away. Then. I take it, I have those cooling racks, everybody has those cookie cooling racks, the little wire grids. I always put whatever I've made on top of that because this allows air to circulate the whole way around. the container. But in addition to that, I always make sure to move the food. I think they call it disbursement. In the food safety stuff, but basically a super stew, it's always going to have that hot. Center, right? It cools from the outside in. So instead of putting this container of chili in the fridge to cool down, first of all, never with the lid on. Thank you very much. Number one, that's going to cause condensation, which is introducing more water into your dish. And we already talked about how that's a no, no for us. But it also keeps the heat in. So a really simple thing to do is pull out one of those cooling racks, put your container on top of it. And then if it's a soup or a stew, I come back after I'm done eating, stick a spoon in it and give it a stir. You will see the steam come up from it. If you put this in your fridge or in your freezer immediately, it's not that it's going to cool down. It's that your fridge or your freezer. are going to warm up. And that is something we want to avoid. From a food safety standpoint, it's really important that you're not warming up the items in your fridge or freezer. There's something we call the danger zone. And it is the temperature where bacteria can thrive. Okay. And I know it's like a two hour window. This is why I always avoid mayonnaise salads at any event ever. If it's not. On ice, but there's this two hour window and you just don't want to mess with that in your own fridge. You really don't so proper cooling technique where we're going to put it in the container. We're going to put it on the rack. We're going to leave the lid off. We're going to come and stir it. Even if I've done like a couple of pretty chicken breasts and a nice little sauce for it, I'll make sure I come in and move the chicken breasts a little just in case if they were touching the heat can still dissipate. So that's a really important tip or trick for you as you're doing freezer food.
Speaker 8:13:07
Now let's talk about some things we just don't ever want to freeze because there are limits. You don't want to do anything crispy. No crispy anything. Fried foods, they just don't. Freeze well, and I know you can buy things that have been fried and you're going to keep them in your air fryer. Go ahead and do it that way because I'm going to tell you if you have a fish fillet that's already been fried, it is just not going to freeze well. Any kind of cream sauces, listen, Alfredo takes very little effort to make so you don't ever want to freeze that. Cream sauces tend to separate in the freezer. raw veggies with that high water content, the cucumbers, the zucchini, the lettuce, those also, let's avoid that. And I will say though, if you saute zucchini, that can come out okay. But I just, I don't know, I think of zucchini as a fresh one. And then whole eggs. Don't ever pop a whole egg into the freezer. I know we're very cost conscious with our eggs right now, and I totally respect that. But no whole eggs in the freezer if you want to scramble eggs. But come on, it takes less than five minutes to scramble an egg. We're gonna do those fresh. So, these are the basic tips, tricks, and hints. Let's recap, just so I know sometimes I'm like a squirrel on crack here. But, let's just recap what we're doing, alright? We're gonna make sure that we are cooking appropriate sized portions, but we're going to also cook once, eat twice. By packaging our food. immediately. Just do it right away. I always say it's just as easy to cook two chicken breasts as it is to cook one or I love and when I say love, I mean, I eat these way more than chicken breasts. I love the boneless skinless chicken thighs. Oh my gosh. And in the air fryer, I kid you not. One of my very favorite things. Heck, I think I might make that for dinner tonight. But that is one of my very favorite things and it's just as easy to cook two or four as it is to cook one. So do that and package it. Number two, you're gonna label everything. Number three, you're gonna make sure that you have got right sized containers for where you are now. It's okay to splurge a little and get a good Container. I love these glass ones. They don't stain. They don't smell. You can see right through them. They're so so good Number four, we're going to make sure that we are not throwing hot things into our fridge or freezer We're going to cool things down properly And that's all you gotta know make sure number five you're freezing things that freeze well for you We love that and you are going to be All set. This is so great to have food in the freezer for those nights. You don't feel like cooking because you know, I always save it. Say it. I don't care if you're cooking for one or two. You deserve. to eat well. And if you'd like to cook, just double it up, double it up and package it right away. That is such a game changer for me. I kid you not. That is such a big deal.
Speaker 9:16:34
And that's it. Easy freezer tips for the Empty Nest Kitchen. And let me tell you, if you want to get tips and tricks and hints like these every week, you can go to EmptyNestKitchen. com, sign up for my email list. I even have a top 10 cool tools for the Empty Nest Kitchen little freebie for you. But I'm sending out really helpful information every week and I'd love to send it to you too.
17:02
So thank you for joining me and as always I'll see you back here next week and if I'm lucky I'll see you in the kitchen.
