Curry Chicken Buns

I have long been a fan of Asian dumplings.  Unfortunately, they can be hard to find in many places across the US, which means I have to learn to make my own.  I love these curry buns, and they are one of my favorite meals.  Spicy curry chicken is wrapped in a soft, light bun and then brushed with a honey glaze, that little bit of sweetness contrasting to the spicy filling within.  They are amazing.

Nashville Hot Chicken

A couple years ago I visited the Nashville, TN area.  I love to learn about and try the local specialties of places I visit, so in Nashville I discovered hot chicken  It was incredible.  I had to learn how to make it.  This isn't it exactly, but it's close.  I'll keep experimenting with it.  I think the flavor might be improved by making the spicy oil the day before to give the oil time to really absorb the flavors, but for now, this is pretty darn tasty.

This is a part of my series on making and using frozen breaded chicken cutlets.

Korean Fried Chicken

I love this spicy and sweet fried chicken.  It's one of my favorite meals.  It's a part of my series on making and using frozen breaded chicken cutlets.

So Much Fried Chicken

Chicken Milanese is one of the first meals I posted to this blog, and it's one that we have continued to enjoy.  Over the past couple years I've come to realize that I can do much more with a breaded chicken cutlet than just this one delicious meal.

It started when I ran across this recipe for  Korean Fried Chicken.  It looked incredible, and I had to try it.  Looking at the recipe I noticed that it started out very similar to the Chicken Milanese above with breaded chicken, although there were some minor differences in the breading mixtures.  After the chicken is breaded and fried it is dipped in a sweet and spicy sauce.

Then I visited Nashville, TN and tried its amazing hot chicken (spicy fried chicken).  I was sad that this deliciousness was only available in Nashville.  I resolved that I had to learn to make it.  When I looked into recipes for it I learned that chicken was breaded, fried and dipped in a spicy oil afterwards.  I realized I could make a generic, breaded chicken cutlet and use it in a variety of ways.

Thai Chicken Patties

Between the gyro patties, black bean burgers, Southwest chicken patties, falafel and now Thai chicken patties my summer freezer meals are becoming a variety of patties.  I'm okay with that.  As evidenced by the list above, patties come in a variety of flavors and proteins, so even though the shape is the same they can be vastly different meals.  Patties are also easy.  They're easy to make.  More importantly they're easy to cook.  They require no thawing and can go straight from the freezer to the frying pan.  Plus they cook quickly.  I'm even thinking the next time I make meatloaf I will try making meatloaf patties, so they won't require a long thaw and cook time like meatloaf.  I can also cook just a couple patties for dinner instead of having a large meatloaf we eat for a couple days.

Anyway to these specific patties.  They're delicious.  I made a quadruple batch and wished I had made more.

Difficulty: Easy
Category: Freezer to Pan
Recipe Column: DU

Final Days and Summary

I've done a full week of cooking before, and I generally start out strong and then lag at the end.  This is definitely the case this time.  On day 8 I made the souffle and SW chicken burgers.  All that was left was the falafel and some vacuum sealing.  The falafels are easy, but I took me almost a week to get around to making them.  I took me a few more days past that to get around to vacuum sealing the last of the food.  Also my notes are getting sparse, and I have fewer pictures.

Days 5 & 6: Veggie Crepes Continued and Thai Chicken

Day 1: Shopping
Day 2: Chicken and Brisket
Day 3: Jambalaya and More Brisket
Day 4: Veggie Crepes, Potato Tacos and Gyros
Days 5 & 6: Veggie Crepes Continued and Thai Chicken
Day 7: Pierogi, Lentil Joes, and Black Bean Burgers
Final Days and Summary

Sunday

Day 5 was on a Sunday, and during the day I didn't do much other than go to church and take a nap.  All this cooking is tiring!  In the evening I got back to work.

Day 3: Jambalaya and More Brisket

Day 1: Shopping
Day 2: Chicken and Brisket
Day 3: Jambalaya and More Brisket
Day 4: Veggie Crepes, Potato Tacos and Gyros
Days 5 & 6: Veggie Crepes Continued and Thai Chicken
Day 7: Pierogi, Lentil Joes, and Black Bean Burgers
Final Days and Summary

Friday

Onto day two of cooking.  I spent the majority of Friday out with my kids.  We went to a free magic show in the park and to the playground.  In the evening we went to our town's ice cream social.  Both were very fun, and I love that our new town has lots of family-friendly events going on.  This type of thing is also a big part of why I do freezer cooking.

Day 2: Chicken and Brisket

Day 1: Shopping
Day 2: Chicken and Brisket
Day 3: Jambalaya and More Brisket
Day 4: Veggie Crepes, Potato Tacos and Gyros
Days 5 & 6: Veggie Crepes Continued and Thai Chicken
Day 7: Pierogi, Lentil Joes, and Black Bean Burgers
Final Days and Summary

Thursday

Usually on my first day of cooking I do all the slicing, dicing and mincing on the list in the "Prep" tab of my macro.  Today I decided to do things differently. As shown yesterday, my fridge is packed and I decided to start by using up some of the items that are taking up the most space, specifically the 2 briskets, 9 lbs of chicken breasts and 10 lbs of chicken cutlets.

11:05 - I started with the brisket.  I have 2 large briskets, and half a brisket will fit into my crockpot at once to make French dip sandwiches.  I am making 3 batches of French dip and saving 1/2 a brisket to cook in my smoker at some point.

Lemon Chicken and Gnocchi Sheet Pan Dinner

I haven't had a freezer for the past few months, so I've been exploring other quick and easy, but still tasty, meals.  Sheet pan dinners have been really popular online lately.  I admit that I have been skeptical of them. Generally sheet pan meals have potatoes, vegetables and meat all cooked together on one tray, and some of the ones I see seem like the meat would be way overcooked before the potatoes are tender.  However, I do love this sheet pan chicken tikka, and it convinced me to take a look at more sheet pan dinners for quick non-freezer meals.

Previously for the chicken tikka I have put the chicken in the marinade and frozen it to simplify the process and make it a freezer meal.  Lately I have been just making the marinade and putting the chicken in it a day in advance since I didn't have a large freezer to do bulk freezer cooking.  In this way it works as an easy meal when you don't have freezer meals, or as a freezer meal where marinading  and portioning a bunch of meat in advance does simplify things.  Really any meat in a marinade in the freezer is an easy and common way to do food prep in advance.  Look at your favorite marinaded meat dishes see what you could prep and freeze to simplify your life.

Roasted Chicken Tikka

Life has been crazy busy for us lately.  In October my husband learned that his company would be closing down in December and began job hunting.  A new job for him meant a move would be likely for our family.  We started packing, and I stopped adding freezer meals to our freezer.  He received a job offer and left for New York shortly before Christmas.  We already had plans to go on a cruise for Christmas, so he flew back to join us for that.  After the cruise we drove back to Mississippi to get the rest of our stuff and then drove on to New York.  We had a month of relaxed packing followed by a month of frantic packing followed by an awesome and relaxing cruise and ended it all with 4 days of driving through 9 different states.

As soon as I learned about his company closing I stopped adding meals to my freezer and switched to a focus on eating what we had.  It was great to not need to cook on top of everything else we had going on.  We didn't quite make it through all the meals we had in the freezer, and I gave the last of them to a woman I knew who had just had a baby.  Now we are in temporary housing while we wait to move into the house we are in the process of buying.  That means no freezer meals for us right now.  I miss them.  Life is much simpler when dinner is ready and in the freezer every day.  I do have a couple recipes that I made in my last batch of freezer cooking that I haven't gotten around to posting yet what with all the frantic packing. So I have something to post while I wait to get back to my freezer cooking.

This isn't a chicken tikka like you might be thinking about with chunks of chicken in a creamy tomato sauce that is served over rice, although I do have a freezer version of chicken tikka masala if that is what you are looking for.  No, this is chicken marinated in a yogurt marinade and roasted with potatoes and cauliflower.  It is delicious.  I served this to guests a few months ago and one in particular raved about it continually.  

Jambalaya

I see that I haven't posted since July! Ack! As much as I'd like to say I'm going to start posting regularly from here on out, I've said that before, and I've come to realize that I'm going to need to accept that, for me, posting about freezer meals is irregular by nature.  After all, the whole reason I started to do freezer meals was because I didn't have the time and energy to make a decent meal for my family every day.  It stands to reason that I would also struggle to find the time and energy to post blog entries on a regular basis.

When life gets really busy and tiring, like it did for the past couple months, I don't add a lot to my freezer or experiment.  I depend on the meals I've already made and frozen to get me through.  This means I don't have new stuff to write. Plus as I've mentioned before, the development of freezer meal recipes can be long.  Sometimes it's a year or more between my first attempt and the final recipe.

So while I can't promise regular posting.  Hopefully these recipes can still be helpful to you as they come.  It is certainly helpful to me to have a freezer full of delicious food when life gets particularly busy.  Please be patient and keep coming back!  I have several new recipes to post.  Plus I'm going to do a Thanksgiving series!

Coconut Green Curry

I have been working on this recipe for about a year and a half now.  The first time I made this it was very tasty, but I wasn't fully satisfied with the proportions of the different ingredients to each other.  I wanted to try again but still had five batches of the original in the freezer that needed to be eaten first.  When we finally did finish eating all of them it took me a while to get around to making it again.  So, here we are a year and a half later, and I am finally posting the recipe.  This is why posting here is so irregular.  The development process for freezer meal recipes is a long one.  This curry is delicious though.   I think it's worth the wait.

Difficulty: Moderate
Category: Simple Side
Recipe Column: CF

Chicken Fajitas or Tacos

It's summertime which means once again I have smoked,shredded and frozen several chickens for convenient summer meals.  When I started doing once a month cooking a couple years ago, these chicken fajitas were one of the very first meals I tried as evidenced by its location in column L of the 'Recipes' tab. They turned out all right.  

I combined the marinade with the sliced, raw chicken in one bag and froze it.  In another bag I combined the pepper and onion slices and froze them separately.  I thawed the chicken, cooked it and then cooked the peppers and onions from their frozen state. The fajitas tasted pretty good, but the vegetables were a little mushy. If I were to try to it again I might consider using a frozen veggie mix from the grocery store as the flash frozen vegetables may not be as mushy.  Or I would just go with fresh vegetables like I did for this newer rendition.

I realized with my frozen, pre-cooked chicken I can make fajitas or tacos fairly easily and this replaced having dedicated fajita meat in the freezer.  It is fairly easy although it does require prepping the peppers and onions on the day of.  You may be able to save some time with pre-cut peppers and onions from the produce section or salad bar at your grocery store.

Chicken Potstickers

I love potstickers and now my daughter has declared them one of her favorite meals as well.  They are a bit time consuming to make, but they cook quickly straight from the freezer.  They'll definitely be a regular in our freezer meal rotation.

Difficulty: Difficult - They aren't difficult to make, but they are time consuming.
Category: Freezer to Pan
Recipe Column: DM

Yields about 50

Chicken Cordon Bleu Casserole

As I mentioned the last time I posted, I recently had a baby.  I'm still doing my freezer meals.  After all it's the easiest way to stay on top of feeding my family.  But since I currently have a needy, helpless and unpredictable little person to take care of those freezer meals need to be easy in every sense.  They need to be easy to put together before freezing since I have little time and energy for cooking right now.  They need to be easy to cook or reheat on the night that I'm serving the meal since the baby is most likely to be fussy right when it's time to start making dinner.  They even need to be easy to eat since I will most likely be eating the meal one handed while the other snuggles a tiny baby who doesn't want to be put down.  Oh and they need to be delicious.  Fortunately this casserole meets all of these requirements.

Adapted from: Joy Filled Eats
Difficulty: Easy
Category: Simple Side
Recipe Column: DL

Chicken Tikka Masala

My freezer meals have come in very handy lately as I just had a baby two weeks ago.  I am very fortunate to have wonderful family and friends that have helped us with meals since the baby was born, but the freezer meals came in very handy during the last months of my pregnancy when I had no energy to do anything let alone cooking.  I haven't actually cooked in months, and I've been totally coasting on my freezer meals.  This has been great for me but not so great for my blog.  I do have a few new things in the freezer that I still need to post about.  I hope to get to them soon and then start generating more freezer meals.

I have recently discovered another advantage to freezer meals besides being able to eat a delicious dinner when I don't have energy to cook.  I have three young children now and like many young children, they are not always the best about trying new things or eating their dinner.  However, young children become more open to trying foods with repeated exposure, and it turns out that having multiple batches of the same thing in my freezer means repeated exposure.  After the same meal has made enough appearances my kids will generally try it.  After more appearances and trying the food, sometimes they even like it.  Chicken Tikka Masala is the perfect example.  My daughter was initially reluctant to try it, but after several exposures she has declared it her favorite meal.  It's one of my favorites too.

Chicken Soup Three Ways

These chicken soups are warm and comforting on a cold day  They would be particularly nice to have when sick.  I plan to keep one batch in my freezer on a regular basis just to have for that reason. It's nice to make a very large batch of this that can be divided into meal-sized portions.  Then we can have it with dumplings, noodles or matzo balls depending on which we want that day or how much time we have.

This recipe turned into quite the project.  My initial plan was simply to create a freezer meal for chicken and dumplings, which we have always enjoyed and eaten regularly.  The chicken and dumplings freezer meal turned out well.  It consisted of two parts, the chicken soup and the dumpling dough that were frozen separately.  I realized the chicken soup part could be used to make other kinds of chicken soup like chicken noodle soup and matzo ball soup.  I decided to wait on posting the chicken and dumplings until I could post all three variations of the soup together.  This took a while as I needed to try all the variations and we didn't want to be eating chicken soup all the time.  There is often a long development process in creating freezer meals.

Green Chile Chicken (or Turkey)

We stayed home by ourselves last year for Thanksgiving.  Our family consists of me, my husband and our two small children.  I bought the smallest turkey I could find, but at 14 pounds it was still way too much turkey for our small family.  Having too much turkey after Thanksgiving is a common problem and generally people still have plenty of turkey left even after all the sides are gone.  It makes sense instead of trying re-purpose turkey for days after Thanksgiving until everyone is sick of it to instead turn your carefully prepared, leftover turkey into freezer meals that will save you time and work in the months to come.

I'm sure there are many freezer meals that could be made from leftover turkey, like soups, stews and pot pies.  You could even freeze shredded turkey by itself and use it in a similar manner as I do my pre-cooked, shredded chicken.  I came up with this recipe last Thanksgiving and it provided six dinners for my family in the months following.  I don't just like this meal because it uses up the leftover turkey and is delicious.  It is is also incredibly fast and easy.  I don't know about you, but I don't really feel like cooking any more right after Thanksgiving.  Once the turkey is cooked and shredded, all this dish requires is opening some cans and jars, mixing everything together and dividing it up for freezing. No more cooking or chopping!  I have also made this when I don't have leftover turkey to use up.  I smoke a couple chickens (or you could roast them), shred them and make it the same.  Either way, it's delicious, easy and inexpensive.

Chicken Strips

These chicken strips were tasty and a big hit with my kids.  They gobbled them up, which is unusual for them.

Adapted from: Once Upon A Chef
Difficulty: Moderate
Category: Freezer to Pan
Recipe Column: AC