We now own a freezer which means I cannot stop stuffing it with meals, breads and bars. Also milk? You can freeze milk, I’ve learned and I’m trying the whole “once a month” grocery shopping so I bought extra milk and there it sits in my freezer.
The aluminum pans aisle at the grocery store fears me … they can’t keep the round pans or the 9X13’s with lids stocked fast enough. I will buy them all. Every week.
What’s really nice is that lately I’ve been doing a meal swap with some of my small group lady friends – where we all cook/bake or prepare a large quantity of one dish and then share the spoils.
Here’s a great place to start if you want to meal swap (Thanks to Staci for finding it!).
We were sharing two different CSA’s from our farmers market this summer as well – so every week I’d get a box of in-season vegetables and after a few weeks I was running out of room for places to store them.
Or when strawberries went on sale this summer (before I had a freezer) … oh man, that was tricky.
So if you were to look in our garage (my happy place! I literally dance to and from the freezer, it’s novelty just delights me.) you’d see:
Breads and muffins, a couple dishes of Shepards Pie, Bags of diced berries (strawberries, blueberries), bags of sliced peppers, onions and huge bags of diced potatoes. There’s a couple pans of a pasta dish (spinach with mushrooms), chicken enchiladas, marinated chicken breasts, different cuts of meat (roasts/london broil), sauces, frozen corn … and on and on.
I love to be in the kitchen and I love love love not having to think about dinner on busy nights. Some times it feels great to be lazy and pull something I made out of the freezer. It’s easy to sign up to bring new parents meals, or friends who just moved/are going through sickness … etc. I love feeding people.
I freeze an awful lot of recipes off Pinterest but also stick to my childhood favorites and what I know my kids will eat.
Someday I’d love to run a bed and breakfast, or just have a pop-up cafe in my backyard where people can come to eat and sit, to be served something. To engage all their senses and happen to leave with a full belly.
Most of what I make and freeze are meals I can’t necessarily eat (my little pancreas needs pampering). I bake cinnamon rolls and extra batches of breakfast foods (pancakes etc). I make rolls, and pasta dishes and all that home cooked comfort food … and there are variations I can make for myself but mostly I just want to make it and plate it.
I just want to feed people with my heart.
For some of my favorite recipes you can always browse the recipe archives.
This makes my heart sing! 🙂 Preparing and cooking food is an art form all its own! I never expected to love it as much as I do (my own mother was the queen of canned veggies and microwaved food) – but cooking whole, real food is so fulfilling – not to mention delicious & healthy! 🙂