What’s for supper? A question I often call and ask my big sis when toying with the possibilities. (See why I function so much better with meals in the freezer?) Last night I asked her her opinion of Sloppy Joes, and we both agreed: highly overrated. Yuck. I ended up making Pop-up Pizza…essentially an upside down pizza with the dough on top and cheese in the middle. Loved it!

Cream-cheese frosted cinnabuns are cooling on my counter currently. Nothing better on a frigid Sunday afternoon, or more guaranteed to ruin your appetite for supper…

So to keep it light, I’ve got potatoes baking in the oven. Once they’re roasted, I’ll halve them, brush on a mixture of melted butter/taco seasonings and sprinkle shredded Colby-Jack cheese on top. Back into the oven to sizzle and melt and then out to enjoy with fresh fruit and sweet rolls.

If you like this idea and want to go the whole she-bang rather than my “quick and easy version”, scoop out the potato “pulps” into a bowl, add a little sour cream, melted butter and flavor with a bit of taco seasonings (or bacon!). Beat it all together till smooth and refill the empty halved skins. Top with grated cheese and return to oven for ten minutes.

Did you know you could freeze twice baked potatoes? I have, with great success. Let the refilled potatoes cool, package them and freeze. When needed, stick the frozen potatoes into the preheated oven and bake. If I remember right, they only took around 25 minutes to heat up nicely, even from frozen.

What are you having for supper tonight?

A friend who reads my blog asked me to give more info on mega-cooking. One of my favorite subjects! (I’m always out to snag someone to join me for a morning or afternoon of doubling and tripling meals!)

In years past, several other homeschool moms and I borrowed a huge, well-equipped church kitchen in which to mix and assemble our family-sized meals. The kitchen we used had four ovens, two sinks, every utensil/bowl/baking necessity, and best of all a queen-bed sized island in the middle that made for some exceptional female bonding while we worked! (Wink…)

Armed with the grocery sales ads and our favorite recipes, the six of us would gather after a homeschool day meeting and quickly map out our strategy. This would include decisions on whether to go with ground beef or chicken dishes (whichever was on sale), whether to triple two recipes or double three recipes, and what steps we’d do at home in preparing to assemble. Sometimes, when we were feeling really conscientious, we’d plan an activity for the kids to do while we cooked. (One mom would have kid-duty while the rest of us assembled her meals.) But most of the time, we just let them run hog wild in the gym. Hey, we could watch them while we worked!

When you’ve mega-cooked for awhile, you gather a repertoire of family favorites. I’ve assembled mine in a binder. Each recipe is written or typed out on typing paper, and I have three columns as follows:

3x 2x 1x Ingredient

Under the “3x” I put the tripled amount of whatever ingredient is first on the recipe. “2x” stands for the doubled amount, and “1x” is the normal recipe amounts. So for meatballs, it might look something like this:

3x 2x 1x Ingredients

6 lbs 4 lbs 2lbs ground beef

And so on, listing each ingredient’s amount in its column. It makes a handy reference when shopping list time rolls around.

Also, there are a couple ways to go when deciding how to freeze your meals. You can line your 9×13” baking dishes with foil, freeze, then pop the frozen lasagnas or casseroles out and store in 2 gallon Ziplocs. Or you can buy foil pans at Dollar General, sometimes 3 for a dollar! If you go the Ziploc route, seal the zippered line all the way up against a drinking straw, and then suction the air out of the bag by inhaling on the straw a few times. This wards off freezer-burn, and the bags stack better in your freezer. Don’t forget your Sharpie pen to label everything as to its contents and the date!

We always cooked our meats prior to our cooking sprees, and usually were at the clean-up stage after two hours of work. On a chicken day, we’d come home with two 9×13” pans of chicken-veggie lasagna, two 9” chicken shepherd pies, and Chicken Tetrazini or Chicken Crescent Bundles. On a beef day, we’d do bierocks, meatballs or mini-meatloaves, and two pans of beef lasagna. Pretty good to have six meals to show for two hours of “friend time”. Especially when you think that most of us spend anywhere from 45 minutes to 1 hour on meal prep/baking each evening for supper!

You needn’t limit it to main dishes either. Sometimes, we’d make 8 dozen cookies, or frozen fruit salads.

Our homeschool group meets at a different church now (smaller facilities), and we haven’t mega-cooked together in ages. I keep thinking I need to put out feelers at my church, to see if any of the other mommies want to dig up their favorite recipes and gather together to share the cook-load.

By the way, I do have a few other posts under the mega-cooking category over on my sidebar. I’ll try to add to them here and there, so if you’re wanting a particular recipe that I mentioned, let me know in comments!

In 2004, I discovered this wonderful recipe! Made some adjustments, and ever since, I’ve “mega-cooked” my apple pie fillings. The following recipe truly does store in the freezer for up to a year…in fact, just the other day I thawed one that I’d put up last September and the resulting pie was super!

Apple Pie Filling

• 24 cups sliced peeled baking apples (6-7 lbs)
• 3 Tablespoons lemon juice
• 4 ½ cups sugar (I use half brown sugar, half white)
• 1 cup cornstarch
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 10 cups water

In a large bowl, toss apples with lemon juice; set aside. In a Dutch oven (large kettle works) over medium heat, combine sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, salt and nutmeg. Add water; bring to a boil. Boil for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Add apples; return to a boil. Reduce heat; cover and simmer until apples are tender, about 6-8 minutes. Cool for 30 minutes. Ladle into freezer containers, leaving ½ inch headspace. Cool at room temperature no longer than 1 ½ hours. Seal and freeze; store for up to 12 months. Yield: 5 ½ quarts (enough for about five 9-inch pies).

Okay, here are my tips. Instead of quart jars, I use gallon-sized freezer bags. Let the filling cool a bit before filling the bags (one quart per bag) and then flatten the bag to freeze it. This way, you can stack the “boards” of filling in your freezer and slide one out when needed. Less space needed, and the thawing time is shorter. After thawing, I heat mine up on the stove or in the microwave before putting it in my pie crust, and dot it with butter before sealing the top crust.

Along the same lines, you can stack and freeze your pie crusts. Roll them in your 8 or 9″ circles between wax paper, and stack them together in one of those two gallon freezer bags. Thaw in the refrigerator overnight before using!

For a whole lot of fascinating information on making pie crust, and several recipes for “the perfect pie crust” go to Simply Recipes.

My pastry recipe is an old family one–tried and true–that uses butter-flavored Crisco. In light of that, here’s something I learned, that I’ll pass on, from the above site:

“The problem with shortening is that until recently, Crisco shortening contained a lot of transfats. Fortunately, they’ve come out with a new version, in a green can, that has 0 grams of trans fats.”

Now go make some pie!

Do you own a cookie scoop? You should. I love mine. For one thing, it makes cookie sizing a breeze for my young girls, not to mention practically mess free. And my favorite use for it? Meatballs!

Below I’m posting the best recipe I’ve ever tasted/used/found for BBQ Meatballs. I make these in large quantities to freeze for future meals. Mega-cooking is a mama’s best friend! Lightly brown these in the oven, not cooking them completely, then cool them on a rack. Once cooled, fill freezer bags in nice stackable layers…when ready to cook simply empty bag onto baking sheet and bake! My whole family absolutely LOVES these. We are blessed to get our meat from the feedlot where dh works, but in past years I would stock up on hamburger whenever our grocery store had a meat sale…I hope you have a large Tupperware fix and mix bowl!

BBQ Meatballs (a triple batch of these yields 253 mini-meatballs)

2# lean ground beef, 1# ground turkey,1 can sweetened condensed milk (or make your own:1 cup dried milk/3TB melted margarine/two-thirds cup sugar & one-third cup boiling water), 2 cups oats, 2 eggs, half an onion chopped, 1/2 tsp pepper, 2 TB chili powder, 2 tsp salt

Mix all together well. Form into balls with cookie scoop if you have one! You can freeze these on a tray before dumping them in a freezer bag, or follow procedure I mentioned above.  When ready to cook, place the frozen meatballs onto a baking sheet and bake at 350 till slightly pink in center. Coat with sauce, bake additional ten minutes to glaze. These can also be cooked in the microwave.

BBQ Sauce

2 cups catsup, 1 cup brown sugar, 2 TB liquid smoke, 1/4 tsp garlic powder, 1/4 tsp. salt, 1/2 tsp onion powder

Boil together. Cool. Store in labeled squeeze bottle or other containter in the fridge until needed for meatballs.

Mega-cooking has many advantages other than the obvious. Filling the freezer with meals means less spontaneous dining out expenditures, more time for other things, more money for other things (cooking in bulk means buying in bulk which often shaves money off your groceries) and one of the best things: if someone needs a meal in a pinch, you’re prepared to drop one off. Our favorite recipes to triple also include burritos, chicken lasagna, pizza pockets (calzones that you dip in pizza sauce), chicken tetrazzini, shepherd’s pie, croissants, and peanut butter choc. chip cookies that thaw in a few minutes for a quick lunch addition or daytime snack. Get a few friends together at your church kitchen and have a cook-fest! It’s a blast and your family will thank you!