@Sacrosanct
Freeze the rainbow, taste the rainbow!
Freeze the rainbow, taste the rainbow!
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NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
Cookin again
- Thread starter Dannyalcatraz
- Start date
Beleriphon
Totally Awesome Pirate Brain
The same process NASA uses to make space ice cream right?
Back when my wife and I were both working office jobs, we used a break maker once or twice a week, because lunch sandwiched made with fresh bread are tons better than making with store-bought bread.
But that gets old and repetitive. We eventually went to the bento solution. And now my wife doesn't work in an office, so making lunches to take to work isn't so much a thing.
Yeast breads are, as noted, a real hassle. In most modern kitchens, just keeping the dough at the right temperature for proofing is non-trivial.
My wife is not fond of repetitive meals - making a large batch and then eating it several times in a week doesn't work very well. If the original recipe is made to serve 4, we are okay, but if it serves 6 or 8, it is not getting finished....
If I had room on the first floor of the house for another large appliance, maybe that would be a good strategy. But, as it is... nope.
I'm not fond of dinners that are too much alike, myself, but my breakfast is pretty close to exactly the same every morning, and I don't mind having leftovers for lunch for a week. That's a weird specificity, now that I think about it.
Vael
Legend
I do quickbreads all the time, I have a horrible tendency of sleeping in and then dashing out the door. So I make large batches of ... healthier muffins (half whole wheat flower, add flax seed, reduce the sugar, stuff like that) and freeze them. I can grab one or two and munch on them when I get to work.
On yeast breads ... I haven't made this myself, but my mom makes a fantastic no-knead bread, and it's shockingly easy. The important part is a good dutch oven and the long proofing time, but compared to other yeast breads, this is an easy one to do.
I am used to it from my days living solo in law school. Cooking big batches and eating leftovers was a way to save tim I needed for reading those dusty tomes.
But Mom?
Mom hates leftovers. 9/10 times she brings something home from dining out, Dad is the one who kills it. With home cooked meals, I can usually get her to eat leftovers 1-2 times, and they’d better be something she absolutely loved.
Which is where the freezers do some of the heavy lifting.
If I’m doing greens, prepping them is a tedious process. So, for maximum efficiency, we do greens in big (10qt+) batches, eat some and freeze some. That way, we clean greens once, we chop onions once, I dirty & clean my knives, boards and pots once, etc. A real time saver.
And whatever greens go in the fridge are stored in bags of @3-6 servings, so we have enough per bag for 1-2 meals. Which means our “cloned” meals can be spread out over months, or even shuffled around to avoid that feeling of sameness.
That habit also let me essentially cook 2 holiday meals at onCE, as noted.
Right now, I probably have some gumbo bricks, a few hot sausage chubs, and 4 bread puddings waiting to be retrieved from deep freeze. We also do likewise with smoked/BBQed meats, so we can enjoy the when nobody wants to be cooking outside in the hot sun, winter cold, torrential downpours, or mosquito swarms.
When I was a kid, Mom used to make things like zucchini or banana bread in either muffin or loaf pans. If she made loaves, she’d slice it up into about 8 pieces or so, and individually wrap the slices (or muffins) and freeze them.
Then, when she’d pack my lunch on school days when I was carrying my own, she’d always include a muffin or slice, right out of the freezer. As the day passed, the frozen bread would thaw...but in the meantime, it had been keeping my SANDWICH nicely chilled.
Edible chill packs. Clever, Mom!
Oh, yes, for myself, especialy in grad school, this was key to making life work.
And when my wife goes away to a convention or something, I generally make a big batch of something, and then eat it for a while - because when I'm alone, my cares about esthetics of food drops considerably, so repetition is fine.
One thing I do for the sake of convenience & efficiency is maintain a Master Grocery List on my cloud, which enables me to keep track of what we buy most often AND- for certain things- where we buy it.
It also lets me share that info with anyone who calls and says they’re stopping by a grocery on the way to our house, volunteering to pick some stuff up. A quick copy/paste/text and we’re in buisiness.
I don’t track the stuff we buy in tiny amounts because only one person in the household consumes it, UNLESS it’s somehow crucial to obtain on a regular basis. So, for instance, I don’t list the ahi poké I get at one grocery since I’m the only one who eats poké at all. My Mom’s favorite sliced bread, OTOH, is in the list, as is Dad’s deodorant.*
In writing this, I realized I need to update the list, including adding the particular vendors I frequent at our local Farmers’ Market.
* he’s allergic to most of the brands on the market.
It also lets me share that info with anyone who calls and says they’re stopping by a grocery on the way to our house, volunteering to pick some stuff up. A quick copy/paste/text and we’re in buisiness.
I don’t track the stuff we buy in tiny amounts because only one person in the household consumes it, UNLESS it’s somehow crucial to obtain on a regular basis. So, for instance, I don’t list the ahi poké I get at one grocery since I’m the only one who eats poké at all. My Mom’s favorite sliced bread, OTOH, is in the list, as is Dad’s deodorant.*
In writing this, I realized I need to update the list, including adding the particular vendors I frequent at our local Farmers’ Market.
* he’s allergic to most of the brands on the market.
