Imagine my shock-surprise to find the Photo Challenge: Create!
Sometimes it helps to be somewhere, anywhere;
then you end up in the right place at the right time.
😉
Here’s the inside scoop on really neat tricks to make you fall in love with your freezer even more:
That Exquisite Dish
1 chicken, cleaned and skinned
2 qt. Pure water
½ c. fresh sage leaves
¼ c. fresh lemon basil leaves
2 stalks celery, chunked
1 onion, chopped, divided
1 T. salt
1 cayenne pepper
2 c. brown rice
½ stick butter
½ c. whole wheat flour
salt to taste
8 oz. mild cheddar cheese, grated
1 pt. “rotel”, mashed in juice
Simmer chicken in 2 qt. water, sage, basil, celery, ½ onion, 1 T. salt, and cayenne, until meat separates from bone. Drain, reserving broth. Refrigerate broth until fat congeals. Remove fat. De-bone chicken. Chop meat slightly, to make bite-sized pieces. Chop cooked seasoning vegetables finely. Mix with meat. Do not mix meat until it disintegrates – just stir some.
Bring one qt. broth and rice to boil. Cover and simmer until tender.
Cook remaining onion over medium heat, in butter, until clear. Remove from heat. Add flour and stir. Mix in carefully over medium heat with wire whip, enough broth to make medium thick sauce. Add water if necessary, salt to taste.
Layer in 9×13 glass casserole as follows:
rice
chicken
sauce
cheese
Repeat.
Pour jar of mashed Rotel over all. Bake at 350 degrees until lightly browned and bubbly. Or cover tightly and freeze no more than 3 months. Uncover, place in 350 degree oven, bake until brown and bubbly, about 45 minutes.
Serves 12.
Watermelon Ice
½ leftover watermelon
1 lemon
honey
other fruit (opt.)
milk or condensed milk (opt.)
Remove seed from melon. Puree fruit in blender. Add other pureed fruits or milk if desired. Add juice of lemon. Add honey to taste. Freeze in shallow glass pan or bowl. Stir twice while freezing. Or try freezing in sealable bag, kept upright in freezer, and mashing instead of stirring. Serve as sherbet.
Frozen Dampened Laundry
1 bu. assorted shirts
1 c. powdered soap
2 tubs water, divided
1 unpredictable day
1 unbelievable week
Mix shirts, soap, and 1 tub water. Heat and stir well. Drain. Place shirts in second tub water. Stir well. Drain. Hang shirts to dry outdoors in sun. After 5 hours, condensation will form and fall from a small cloud immediately above shirts. Remove laundry when only slightly damp. Fold and roll as for French pastry, bag, and freeze. Keeps indefinitely. Calories: minus 560.
So, what else can we do with a deep freeze? Plenty.
My favorite trick with it is freezing hamburger meat.
Cooked.
That’s right, I cook ground beef and then freeze it.
Whenever it is on sale, I buy however much I can afford, stir and fry until crumbly, huge pans of it with onion, salt, and pepper. Drain it well, box it, and freeze. One pint fried is about one pound raw.
This serves a couple of wonderful purposes.
First it is a money saver, in that it allows me to cash in on sales.
Second, it is a time saver if I want to make spaghetti or chili in a hurry. While the liquids are heating, I put in a box of frozen, cooked ground beef and once all is hot, the meat is thawed. Or pour a dab of water into a small pan and add a pint of this meat to warm on low until thawed, while you do other things. Then stir in your favorite sloppy-jo ingredients and serve. Fast and easy.
Actually the deep freeze is great for saving money, stocking up on many sale items such as meat, bread, flour, and garden seed. It saves money on ice if you make your own ahead and store it there. It saves money on bulk foods, because you do have room for it all.
We have a diabetic friend who must eat wild meat, so he hunts. When he bags a deer, he hires the meat all ground. His wife then makes it all into patties which he spends a whole day grilling to “near done”. They freeze these and have instant grilled burgers all year. They say to warm them takes only a few minutes and the taste is like it was just off the grill.
Probably everyone has heard of cooking casseroles on a monthly basis to save cooking time, but if you even make one extra or double entre whenever you cook, you can reduce your kitchen time nearly 50%.
The freezer certainly saves much frustration by allowing you to prepare ahead the food for guests and have it ready to pop into the oven so you can enjoy visiting in a relaxed manner.
I have cooked ahead when I knew I’d have no help after childbirth. It was so easy for my family to dip into the freezer while I was resting.
I’ve cooked ahead when my best friend’s mother was coming for dinner – an exquisite dish that takes hours to prepare. It was no hassle, because I prepared it a couple of days earlier, when I had the time to spare.
I have cooked ahead when my husband invited his best friend for supper the same night I had to be gone. My teenagers baked that big dish with a teenage flair that brought delight to the guest and joy and pride to Dad.
However.
Did you know your freezer needs a little tender loving care? More tomorrow.
As I said, yesterday, you do not put that much corn in jars in the canner. That would take roughly 15 hours just in the jiggling, plus heat up and cool down times, and the other processing of shucks,silks, etc.
Nah. Not that.
We freeze it. Frozen corn tastes better, anyway, and for us, frozen off the cob is best, most like fresh from the garden.
Here’s how we did it.
My husband went to the garden with a wheelbarrow, picked the corn, shucked it right there, and placed it into the wheelbarrow. When one was full, he started on the other one. If it filled, too, he took out laundry baskets and buckets until all was picked and shucked. Later he would till in all the debris.
Meanwhile, I sharpened knives, heated water, and covered countertops with towels.
Once the first wheelbarrow came to the house, I began trimming, de-silking, and washing all that corn, over a sieve to catch the garbage for the chickens.
Whenever a found a totally perfect ear, I set it aside for the Pastor. That was one very important aspect of teaching children how to harvest that we never wanted to omit.
After the washing, the blanching could begin. I put seven ears for 4 minutes into a 16-quart pot of boiling water. Then I transferred them to a cold water rinse to stop the blanching action. While I blanched, all older family members carefully sliced the top 2/3 off the blanched and cooled kernels and then scraped the pulp from the remaining one-third, all over big wash pans or large bowls.
Some people do the cutting indoors, but that is messy to clean up. Others do their cutting outside, but that is buggy. A screened porch solves both problems if you can hose it off later.
I know people object to blanching because it is a warm job, but I’ve learned it’s easier if we aren’t overly dependent upon air conditioning. We do perspire some, but it is summer, after all, and I have found it doesn’t hurt a thing to do so. What makes it so warm is that the water will not boil with a fan blowing on it, so only exhaust fans will work.
Once the corn is cut, I pack it into the trusty ol’ boxes, label, and freeze.
What happiness to notice the boxes piling up on the countertop! What awe to watch your daughter learn to count while she sits beside that ever-growing stack of boxes! What fun to take the Pastor three dozen absolutely perfect ears of (you know it’s the best) corn! And what excitement each time you eat it, all the long winter, as wonderful as the day it was picked!
So the freezer has kept our harvest for us for years. Can it do anything else? Yes!
And we’ll talk about that tomorrow!
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photo credit: amcdj
When our firstborn was about two years old, we bought a brand new deep freeze, on sale, for about $100.00. That was a large sum for us, just starting out, but through 40 years of service it has never caused us one moment of grief and has quietly kept literally tons of food rock-hard, safe to eat, and almost-like-fresh.
That’s at $2.50 per year.
It has had a place of honor in most of our homes, either in the kitchen or in the baby’s room. (It did double duty as a wonderful changing table.) I also bought several sets of rigid plastic freezer cartons, to save the waste of plastic bags. They were also on sale but nine dozen or so cost me around $50.00. Most of those dear little boxes are also still chugging along just fine.
That’s around $1.10 per year.
Every year I froze 75 quarts of blanched corn-off-the-cob, 75 quarts blanched spinach and/or beet greens, and all the fresh blackberries I could get my hands on.
We also tried freezing applesauce, whole carrots, whole peppers, whole apples, whole tomatoes, halves of beef and pork, bread, cookies, cakes, flour, dried beans, corn meal, excess fruit juice, chocolate chips, dog biscuits, dampened laundry, and more.
Oh, I forgot chickens, turkeys, fish, and the last snowball of each winter.
Oh, yes, there was leftover garden seed, too.
And ice cream.
Are you getting the picture?
(We won’t discuss the pheasant skin.)
I am not the type to throw everything into the freezer just because it’s too much work to pressure can it. Yet the freezer is always packed.
Our garden has varied from a tiny, pitiful mustard patch, to a beautiful 50’ x 75’ plot of perfectly fertile sandy loam. In the big one, we planted 17 rows of corn each year. By the Fourth of July, those 17 long rows were ripe and ready. We’d hurry to get it all put up before nightfall and the huge fireworks display in the park.
Now. To get ¼ mile of corn put up in a hurry, you do not pressure can it for an hour per each ten pints! No! The only expedient way, given the necessary elements, is to blanch it briefly, slice it off the cob, and store it in boxes in the freezer.
— Hal David, 1963 (renewed, 1991)
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Photo credit: Wikipedia
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