Sweets and I take a certain amount of pride in keeping our freezer stocked with homemade, pre-made meals that take the place of the old “heat and eat” style of junk we used to get from the grocery (Healthy Choice, Amy’s Organics, etc). Typically during the week we’ll cook dinner with the intention of having enough left over for lunch the next day, but sometimes that doesn’t work out and I end up having to figure out another plan. Time was, I used to keep a stock of the ready-made meals from the store, and just grab one of those… but not long after Sweets moved to our shores, we started weaning ourselves off of those and just occasionally making a large batch of something that we can divvy up into meal-sized portions and freeze.
Common favorites of ours are lasagna, chicken pot-pie, pasta and homemade bolognese, soup, slow-cooker chicken with gravy and veggies, the occasional fricken chickasee… and beans and rice. Red beans and black eyed peas are our staple (and let’s face it, I’m a Southern boy, so that’s what I grew up with). Our freezer was getting a little low, so we decided to pull out the big pot, and re-stock.
We cooked 2 lbs of black-eyed peas in the tradition that I was raised with… with more meat by weight than beans — a combined mixture of tasso, sausage and ham. Now, 2 lbs is a hell of a lot of peas, so we had a few folks over to have a relaxed, casual visit and help us eliminate a little so we wouldn’t overflow our freezer later on. All told we fed five people and divvied up two lunches for me this week, and we put into the freezer nine individual portions with rice, a portion for two with no rice and a portion for four with no rice. That’s a hell of a good job, and considering the total cost of ingredients was around $20, I’d say it was a fantastic deal.
Oh, and breaking slightly with the bean/peas tradition, I added about a pound of sliced mushrooms to the mix near the end of the cooking. It was a nice change-up, and added a slight earthy flavor to the dish. Plus, Sweets and I just really enjoy mushrooms, so we put them in everything.
In addition the the black eyed peas, Sweets was on a mission to fix a dish from her side of the Atlantic, steak and kidney pie (and I have since decided that for the most part, English cooking is the same as Southern cooking… it may not always be the best for you, and you may not be able to — or want to — identify everything in it, but by Jeebus it tastes good). Since kidney isn’t a popular organ for the average (Anglo, Caucasian) grocery shopper, she settled on steak and ale pie. Beef cubes with onions were slow cooked for hours in a rich dark base that contained a dark mexical ale and beef stock, and was allowed to reduce down and condense it’s flavors. Mushrooms were added near then end. It was thickened a bit, then poured into a glass dish and covered with a crust and baked slow and low. It was rich and powerful, the ale giving the dish a deep base note, and the beef was tender and delicious. Definitely a winner, and it’s added to the list of things to make large batches of to divvy and freeze.
Sweets also baked two loaves of bread, experimenting with a new sourdough recipe she found. The recipe was a bit of a flop, and the bread didn’t rise very well or have any tangyness at all (both problems owing to calling for not near enough sourdough starter). It was dense, but straight out of the oven it was actually tasty with a bit of butter spread on it. Not a complete failure, but the recipe didn’t give her any reason to keep it in her arsenal.
Not a bad way to spend a Sunday, all things considered.