Freezer Fun Time

I, like many bloggers, have a day job to pay the bills and keep my cats alive.  My work day starts at 6:30AM and ends at 4:00.  This means my day gets going way before I am anywhere near ready to eat breakfast which is why I wind up eating at my desk halfway through my morning.  Now, that the boring part of this story is out of the way, let me just say I love breakfast burritos.  That’s what this whole post comes down to.  The lobby of my building has a food cart that sells breakfast burritos that I want to devour every single day.  However, at $3.50 a pop, the cheap side of me just couldn’t shell out the cash.  

So I decided to make my own.  And it was amazing. Made the burritos at home, froze them, and pulled one out of freezer the night before I planned on eating it.  Two minutes in the microwave and I was in breakfast heaven at my work desk.  Doing this got me on a freezer food kick and I started prepping other foods to be frozen so that I would have a steady supply of grub that was ready to go after a little reheating.  One or two days a month now, I’ll spend a few hours cooking and restocking my freezer. 

This month I made a new batch of breakfast burritos, black bean quesadillas, turkey meatballs, and a huge batch of spaghetti sauce.  

My staple go-to food for Freezer Fun Day is spaghetti sauce.  It is my go-to Sunday dinner when I’m feeling lazy because it’s Sunday and that’s what Sundays are for.  Pull a bag of sauce out of the freezer and throw it into a pot on low.  Let it reheat as I cook up some whole wheat pasta and broccoli.  Dinner’s ready to go in 20 minutes.        

 

The recipe for this spaghetti sauce came from my Grandpa and is very simple but flavorful.  It consists of tomato sauce, an onion, some wine, a little ketchup, and then brown sugar and spices.  No meat, no other veggies, just a great minimal sauce.  This is one of those dishes that my Grandpa never needed a recipe for and didn't even know the actual proportions of the ingredients.  He just eyeballed everything and it turned out great every time.  My mom managed to preserve his delicious concoction by watching him make it a couple times and figuring out everything he did.   

Saute the onions in a little butter until translucent.  Add remaining ingredients to pot and simmer on low for 2-3 hours.  Done and done.  When I'm doing a freezer cooking day, I always start the spaghetti sauce first.  By the time I'm done fixing all my other food, the sauce is done and ready to be bagged up. 

Once the sauce has cooled down, I measure out 2 Cups and transfer it into labeled freezer bags.  

One of these bags will be enough sauce for dinner and leftovers for lunch for both my husband and I.  Those with more than two people (not including our cats, they don't like Italian food....I think they may be racist) in their family will probably need to adjust their portions so you may not end up with five freezer bags but either way, this is a great time/money saver.

Also, little trick I found, when freezing sauces or soups, lay them flat in the freezer until they're frozen.

Once the bags solidify, they can be stacked upright in the freezer for easy viewing access and it saves space.

I am unashamedly proud of how organized my freezer is.

After my sauce was simmering, I started in on my next freezer food, Chinese Style Turkey Meatballs.  This was a new recipe found on Pinterest (seriously, where else?) and I was super excited to try it out because meatballs freeze extremely well and turkey is one of my favorite meats to cook with.  I find it absorbs flavors much better than ground beef which is usually why I end up substituting ground turkey for beef in most recipes.  The original recipe called for cilantro which I opted to leave out.  Mainly because I didn't have any and didn't want to go back to the store.

Mix all the ingredients together and portion out into meatballs.  To keep the size of the meatballs uniform, I use a tbsp cookie scoop to portion out the balls (hehe...balls) and then roll them into adorable little meat spheres. 

After 20 minutes in the oven at 400 degrees, we have these.  Yum!

Once the turkey meatballs had cooled, I divided the whole batch in half and put away in bags.  One bag is enough for dinner and lunch the next day.  Cook up some brown rice and a vegetable (steamed peas?), mix together the sauce for these, and dinner is ready to go in an hour but that's only because rice takes forever to cook. 

While the turkey meatballs were cooking in the oven, I assembled some black bean quesadillas that I could easily take into work for lunch.  This is another Pinterest found recipe but I was surprised I hadn't thought of making these before.  I make quesadillas at least once a week.  Most leftover meat (like steak) ends up in a quesadilla.  In conclusion, quesadillas are awesome. 

Drain and rinse the black beans, chop up the onion and garlic, shred some cheese, mix everything together, and divvy out the mixture between tortilla shells.

Once all my tortillas were stuffed, I wrapped them in parchment paper and filled up some more freezer bags.  These could easily be made with your favorite kind of meat as well, just cook it up and toss it in with the rest of the ingredients.   

Now, for the feature player in our freezer food party, the breakfast burrito.  With six simple ingredients (tortillas not pictured, they're camera shy), an awesome ready-to-go breakfast is only a few moments away.  Well, more like 30 minutes but that's still not very much time.    

Cook up the sausage until all the pink is gone, drain meat to remove excess grease.

Wow, half cooked pork looks pretty gross close up....don't eat your sausage if it looks like this....

Next, dice up the red potatoes and onion and cook in a skillet, covered, for about 10 minutes until the spuds are easily pierced with a fork. 

While the potatoes and onions are cooking, I whisk together a dozen eggs with a splash of milk plus some salt & pepper. 

Once the potatoes are done, I dump the already prepared egg mixture directly over them and cook.

Once the eggs have cooked, I turn off the heat and mix the sausage and around 3/4 cup of cheese into the potato and eggs combo.



Before burritoizing the breakfast mixture, it helps to wrap the tortillas in a damp paper towel and microwave them for 20 seconds or so.  Helps loosen everything up so the shells are less likely to tear as they're being folded up.

This one batch produced 12 burritos that cost under a dollar to make.  Compared to the $3.50 burritos at my work, that sounds like a good deal to me.  Plus, my burritos are better.  Fact. 

Prior to freezing, let the burritos cool, and then wrap them individually in paper towels.  When you feel like having some breakfast burrito goodness in the morning, pop one of these out of the freezer the night before and let it defrost in the fridge.  Without removing the paper towel, microwave for two minutes, flipping the burrito over after one minute, and then enjoy!

So there we have it.  For around $40 in groceries and a couple of hours time, I ended up with five bags of spaghetti sauce, two big servings of turkey meatballs, 10 black bean quesadillas, and 12 breakfast burritos.  Spending $40 to get the bones of over 20 quick & easy meals is pretty satisfying.  Eating breakfast and lunch at work just got way better. 

Aside from you know, eating two meals a day at my desk which is kind of lame.  Plus side, it does allow me to catch up on Batman comics so it could almost be called a win.