I'm trying to do some cooking in advance of an upcoming extended trip in order to leave a few extra homemade meals for elderly MIL as well as to avoid having to cook on the road. Things like grilled burgers, smoked sausage, etc. I know will be good frozen, but can anyone advise about how well the following things would freeze?
Sweet & Sour Pork (ol' blue's recipe) with rice
Chunk chicken salad (contains onion, celery & Monterey Jack cheese)
Crescent cheese cake squares w/apple pie filling
And would they be better frozen in plastic containers with lids or in vacuum sealed in bags with a Reynolds Handi-vac?
Thanks for your input!
"Time passes but memories remain"
Fulltime since Jan. 2004
40' Allegro Zephyr
Cruzgal, I use to freeze a lot of my left over dishes for my dad and I found most main dishes that do not contain pasta freeze well. Pasta tends to get mushy when frozen.
Fruits get a little mushy when frozen too, they are good to add to blended drinks though.
Here are a couple of web sites that cover freezing meals that you might find helpful.
What Cindy said. Not only will it be a mushy, runny mess, but it can be positively dangerous for food poisoning unless kept at 0* temps, defrosted quickly and eaten immediately. Chicken salad is a hotbed for bacteria; all those cut surfaces and handling.
For the pork, make the meat and freeze it ahead of time; for the meal, make the rice fresh. It will be much better.
Beef stew freezes fine if you leave out the potatoes; likewise spaghetti sauce without pasta. Except for bread, most starches do not freeze well. But they are relatively easy to fix at mealtime.
There's a Yahoo Group devoted to freezing food - Friendly Freezer. You might want to consider joining that group. I'm a member, but I can never find the time to read it!!
Thanks, everyone! I especially appreciate the links to the other sites--I've already printed some new recipes for future use.
Looks like my previous old stand-bys, grilled meats, spaghetti sauce, chili & pulled pork bar-b-q are still my best bets for freezing ahead. All my one-dish meals have some kind of pasta (or potatoes), so unless she's up to cooking that part of a meal, there aren't many things I can put in her freezer. Oh, well--there's always Swanson's and Banquet!
Rice freezes great. I always keep some brown rice frozen to make stir fried rice dishes, soups, and a brown rice bread.
I would not freeze and sweet and sour pork and rice together. I would not thicken the pork until was ready to put the final dish together since sauces made with cornstarch seem to separate out and get watery.
I have always made pasta ahead and frozen it to cook in the microwave, absolutely no problem with mushiness. I don't freeze it by itself, it is always made into the dish it will be at the end. We always take frozen pasta dishes with us.
I don't know about the cheese cake squares except that I think the crescent base might get soggy. Terry
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