#134 – Freezer Meals: Ancestral Foods for busy days, post-partum, and make-ahead food prepping

Whether it’s anticipating busy days between work and school, heavy project days writing or working in the garden or canning, postpartum or surgery recovery period – there are many reasons why having a stocked freezer supplied with ready to go meals and ingredients is an enormous benefit to living an ancestral, locavore style life. For many reasons – financial, ingredient concerns, sourcing concerns, access – many of us are not able to rely on the fallback of quick easy prepared foods from a grocery store or restaurants, and many of us don’t have a village around us that can supply emergency meals in time of need, much less meals that would comply with our sometimes complicated or weird dietary requirements.

Building the routine of freezer stacking has been invaluable for our family, and in this episode I hope to share some of the ideas, meals and ingredients that have been helpful for us. Of course I thought of many more as soon as we finished recording, but there is plenty here to work with!

There is a bonus download for this episode available to all listeners, where we included recipe links for many of the foods we are going to discuss. If you are in our supporter community, we look forward to hearing your freezer ideas and contributions in our discussion boards on Discord. Let’s get the ideas flowing and keep those freezers stocked!

What we talked about:

• Leah’s business, which relies on freezers!
• The free bonus download for this episode
• Why and when freezer meals can play an important role
• Ideas to consider when planning your freezer meals
• All-in-one prepared meals and casseroles
• Sidekicks, or parts of meals that can be paired with more
• Prepped ingredients, meant to be use in a dish
• Containers and storage solutions

The personal views and opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect our own personal views or opinions. We recognize that our guests are whole persons and this may include views we or our audience actively disagree with; our guests are invited to the show because we feel they have something valuable to share with us all, and we do not ask them to censor their personal views on air. Our sharing of their work is not necessarily an endorsement of their personal views.

Resources:

Ketchikan Sam’s podcast link or go to Ketchikan Sam’s and use code ANCESTRAL26

For more recipe links and our working notes, check the download here

Industrial Sharpie

Non-Gummy Masking Tape (I use for everything in the kitchen)

Souper Cubes

Spaghetti Sauce

Swedish Meatballs

Enchiladas

Mexican Lasagna (not Mexican, and not lasagna)

The Pastured Pork Cookbook

Meals at the Ancestral Hearth Cookbook

 

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Transcript:

Andrea:
Hello, good afternoon, Leah. How are you?

Leah:
Good afternoon. How are you? I didn’t catch myself.

Andrea:
It’s usually morning when Allison and I record, but we actually get to meet this afternoon, which is lovely.

Leah:
Yeah, our time zones are a bit more accommodating.

Andrea:
Yeah, we’re not that far apart time zone-wise. So Leah has been on the podcast before as a guest on the, well, two episodes actually in the private podcast. So you did a solo episode with me where we talked about meal planning and then you and kirsten and rachel, um am i missing somebody i’m not sure um rachel kirst i can’t my brain i feel.

Leah:
Like we might be missing somebody but i’m.

Andrea:
Not sure who fire me for my job anyways i do.

Leah:
I try to collect more shout outs than anyone.

Andrea:
Else on this podcast well you’re racking up a list so everybody knows leah leah and sam her husband um they own catch a can sam so you guys started that company, i guess it’s over a year ago now and um the link is in the show notes for you guys sam made all our listeners a discount link thank you sam for that that’s awesome, we love it and catch a can sam’s is ironically i did not even think about this when i asked you if you’d do this episode with me leah but you guys ship frozen fish, so it’s on a freezer theme so uh speaking of fish i’m i’m just gonna throw a guess out there but what’s the last thing you ate leah.

Leah:
It was indeed smoked salmon. I had to bring our little retail stand where we sell to tourists coming off the cruise ship. The stand, it’s like it’s flying off the shelves today.

Andrea:
Oh, that’s awesome.

Leah:
And so I had to go help our guy. So I was dropping off fish and I’ve been embezzling from my husband. I ate it.

Andrea:
She’s eating the product off the table. Wow, you moved so much salmon today.

Leah:
I didn’t make it the king salmon, though. I took the sockeye. so it wasn’t so bad.

Andrea:
You were you were gentle on the customers well that’s good i had hard boiled eggs which is super exciting but that was a little you know driving home from church snack situation for me, so we’ve got our exciting food over here um leah and i are often busy in the discord, so if you are one of our podcast supporters you are familiar with our discord server it’s just a place to be able to talk but not have social media noise, and share um i don’t know everything from pictures of what we’re making to book lists of what we’re reading and, it’s a fun space so um you’ve probably seen leah’s name pop up if you’re in there, and i’m going to read a review leah we got a five-star review wasn’t from you sorry to say but i don’t.

Leah:
Know you have left a review on my website, but I’m not sure I’ll return to the video.

Andrea:
Anyways, this is from Erin D82, and they titled this review, The Real Deal. Ancestral Kitchen is my all-time favorite podcast. This review is long overdue, as I have been a fan for a while. There is so much noise in the online realm of nutrition, and it often leaves me feeling confused, overwhelmed, and discouraged. This is not the case with Allison and Andrea. I not only learn new things with every episode, but I also feel encouraged, hopeful, and inspired. I might have shouted out loud in the car when I heard the first Charlotte Mason quote on an episode. Combine that with the history lessons literature references and the tips on how to align our lives not just our food to the ancestral way of life and i knew i’d found my people have a listen you won’t be disappointed, that is awesome that is awesome and so perfect that aaron mentioned charlotte mason and you’re here and you’re like a charlotte mason acolyte.

Leah:
Yes me with my six-year-old.

Andrea:
Yeah. I know everything.

Leah:
I’m ready to write my curriculum.

Andrea:
You should start writing curriculums anytime now.

Leah:
I’m ready. I’m ready.

Andrea:
That was awesome, though. Yeah, you know, I like having the history lessons and the literature references in there because I feel like food is more than just a one-dimensional experience. This should be multisensory and, well.

Leah:
And connecting us to the past and to everything. It’s not all separate.

Andrea:
Yeah, I agree. So in this episode today, you and I are going to be talking about putting food in the freezer. And this is going to be fun because you said, I don’t put food in the freezer, so I want to learn how. But I was like, you guys have walk-in freezers. Like, you have more freezers than anybody I know.

Leah:
I was trying to think of how many freezers we have because we have… I think we have at least seven in our freezer room because my in-laws have a literal freezer room. And there’s, yeah, there’s the halibut freezer. There’s the salmon freezer. There’s the bait freezer.

Andrea:
There’s the venison freezer.

Leah:
As one does. There’s the freezer of like elk meat and stuff that people give us when we give them fish. There’s like, there’s so many freezers.

Andrea:
I thought I was getting pretty fancy by having a basket dedicated to fish. But now I realize I need a freezer per.

Leah:
Freezer dedicated to fish.

Andrea:
Are they breeds? What do you call fish? Like a breed of fish? I don’t even know.

Leah:
I’m not going to say because Sam will correct me.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah. Because I’ll say it wrong. Maybe we can have him on the show one day and he can correct us on all the fish misunderstandings that we have. Well, I wanted to talk. You and I were actually having this conversation and that was where the idea of the episode came from. Was I was just talking about how it has been really good for me to be able to fall back on frozen food that I’ve got in the freezer prepared for those emergency days, which do happen. So today I was thinking, we’ll first talk about some ideas about why we’d be freezing food. Then I want to talk about the actual foods that I like to put in the freezer, which is a long list, but can spark ideas for other people. And then I want to talk about containers and storage type things. So for this episode, I also had a ton of recipes referring to things that we’re going to talk about in the episode. And by the time I started putting all the links in the show notes, I realized I just needed to make a PDF download. So there’s over 30 links and other resource links as well. And I made all of that in a downloadable PDF, which you can find at ancestral kitchen podcast.com forward slash downloads, or just go to the show notes for this episode on our website. I put the link in the podcast notes for this episode. So let’s take a quick ad break and come back and get started on freezer ideas.

Andrea:
All right, Leah, I know that I can lure you into any conversation if I speak in terms of literature or romance, poetry or nursery rhymes. Am I wrong?

Leah:
We’re not wrong.

Andrea:
Okay. So when I was thinking about putting food in the freezer, I was thinking if we, are on a quest feeding and loving our families, then when we visit that homely cottage on the edge of the forest and we ask the wise old woman for a magical helper, the freezer is what she will give us. This is my magical helper.

Leah:
I like that a lot.

Andrea:
So I, in my life experience, which is being a mother right now.

Andrea:
Um, which other people could be experiencing maybe different stages of life or whatever. But for now, for me, it’s being a mother, but this can happen for anybody at any point in time. We come to the end of ourselves over and over again. And I feel like I always just kept thinking that future me was going to muscle my way through something and I was going to definitely not be lazy tomorrow.

Andrea:
So I always felt like I was going to be better and stronger and not as lazy, more disciplined tomorrow. And there’s a few things I wasn’t factoring in, which was sometimes not being able to get anything done has nothing to do with laziness, and it has nothing to do with being stronger. Sometimes there are just forces outside of our control, and as superhuman as you try to be, you might not actually be able to do everything on the list that you hoped you would get done in a day. And the day that I admitted to myself what the end of myself actually is, and to know that again in the future it will happen, then that was the day I began to realistically plan my freezers a little better. And I feel like to me, having prepared food in the freezer is just me accepting that future me is going to run into hard days.

Andrea:
Does that ever happen to you guys, Leah?

Leah:
Yeah. You know, what happens is every month I have, um, you know, cause I get like hormonal migraines and it’s like every month it’s a surprise, um, where I, you know, I am basically completely out of commission and the kids are, you know, foraging in our all over. And then I’m laying in bed and I’m like, why didn’t I have something that i could quickly feed them or someone else could come feed them right um it’s possible and so but it’s like it happens all the time and yeah that accepting that um, this does happen and yes as much as i like to think oh yeah next time i will be, stronger healthier on top of it capable uh i i try to do that without doing the prep work so learning to do the prep work in accepting. I think I liked what you said there because it does kind of start with accepting. You know, there’s a book I read where she talks about how in improv…

Leah:
Is it’s the rules are saying yes and, yeah uh which means first if you’re you know if we’re telling a story together, and you start and then I have to tell the next section the first thing I have to do is say yes to everything you said right like I can’t try to change it it’s not going to be a good story unless I fully accept the story I was given, but then when you say yes then you can say and.

Leah:
But if you don’t say yes, your and’s not going to work. And that is what I feel about this is like fully accept your limitations, fully accept your ingredients, fully accept everything about where you live and what you have to work with. And then when you do that, there’s a lot of room for creativity and flexibility. But as long as you’re fighting saying yes to it, you’re just going to run into problems.

Andrea:
I love it. I agree with that.

Andrea:
I agree completely. And so I’ve got a couple ideas to consider, well, five ideas to consider when you are looking at preparing food for the freezer. So the first one, it dovetails in real nice with what you just said. Number one is what are your family’s standards and what will they actually tolerate and eat?

Andrea:
So in our family, we’re accustomed to not having a fallback in town. We don’t have anybody that would deliver food out here. There’s, we don’t have like a commute home from work or school where we would have a chance to pick up food. And all the food is ridiculously expensive anyways. It’s even worse where you are, Leah, which is hard to imagine, but it’s like really expensive where you are. And so as the ultimate bottom of the barrel fallback, scrambled eggs and rice, and a pulled together fast meal like that is acceptable to my family and it is not unknown to them but it isn’t preferable, and what is not acceptable as a quick pulled together meal is little fast platters of like cheese and crackers type things that would not go over very well and um, Also, I’d have to already have crackers made, and I’d have to have cheese made or available, which is not always a consistent thing. And just generally speaking, my family tends to prefer a hot meal. They really like casseroles, so that tends to work really well for us. And I know you have some similar limitations where you are.

Leah:
Yeah, crackers here are so expensive. And the first time that my daughter accidentally made them by making her creations in the kitchen, And I was like, wow, this is really easy. Why in the world would I buy these? But do I actually make crackers? I mean, hardly ever. But I will say my kids do love that kind of snack plate. Like, oh, let’s slice up some cheese and some apples and some summer sausage. Or, you know, we have access to smoked salmon. So that is a really quick thing. I mean, that’s the one nice thing is if I’m not well, I can just say, Sam, when you’re on your way, or dropping by again, can you please bring some smoked salmon or smoked black cod? And that will thaw, you know, within 20 minutes of being under cold water. So that’s always available to serve with something or by itself in a pinch. That’s kind of our like fast food option.

Andrea:
It’s helpful because you know a guy.

Leah:
It’s I know a guy.

Andrea:
The other, the next idea to consider is what is the life phase you’re looking at ahead? So as you’re planning what goes in the freezer, Leah, for instance, you mentioned monthly hormonal headaches or migraines. And… That would mean you need something that literally your oldest can go and get out of the freezer and or you could get out on the and set on top of the stove to thaw before you just collapse. Or like you said, somebody could walk over across the street and pop it in the oven or something. So looking at what is actually driving why the food needs to go in the freezer, are you going to be recovering from a surgery or is it a postpartum recovery? Or is it just going to be normal busy days like for us we get home from a choir particularly late but I know that’s going to happen every week, and you just need a kind of a regular work day frozen meal this is all going to affect the kinds of things you put in the freezer so, like you could yeah or like first trimester you know when everything smells terrible.

Leah:
To you and it’s gonna make you throw up but you still have to feed your family.

Andrea:
We don’t know what that’s like.

Leah:
That’s even more critical than postpartum.

Andrea:
For me yeah 100 yeah and you’re you’re very similar to me in that, um if everything in your freezer needs to be yeah the all-in-one thaw and baked casseroles or if you just need to do if you’re just feeling like there’s just not quite enough time each day to pull together a meal. Maybe you just need to do pieces of a meal or ingredients. Yeah, Leah, my standard for postpartum, the way that I evaluate what I’m putting in the freezer is I say, can Gary or one of the kids get it out and while I’m asleep, take care of it and cook it and like know how to thaw it and bake it without me being involved because I’m unconscious. That’s my standard.

Leah:
This is where I should make a confession though.

Andrea:
Oh, please do.

Leah:
Because I love casseroles. I love lasagnas. I’ve had yours in my freezer and I’ve been able to put them in. I have never cooked a casserole in my life.

Andrea:
We are here to help.

Leah:
That’s why you need help.

Andrea:
You are the perfect person for this episode because you have, you’re going to have all the right questions because you’re not used to doing this. The third idea to consider is, if you are preparing food, to go in the freezer, for instance, because you keep running into those busy days where you’re working away from home, or you’re driving the kids home from school, or if you’re just working outside on the land, or like Sam’s crazy work schedule, or whatever it is, you need to honestly ask yourself, how much time and energy do I have realistically in my life now? And don’t imagine that the future you is suddenly going to be more organized, more zealous, more disciplined, stronger, better, faster, more moisturized, all the things. Just know that the way things are right now is what we’re working with. And if you get to that future point and the future you is moisturized, blessed, rested, all those things, then yay. Okay. You’ve got more time on your hands. You’ve got extra stuff in the freezer. But I feel like my biggest leap came when I just said, Stop lying to yourself, Andrea, and, just make realistically plan for the condition that, you know, health is today. And.

Andrea:
And if, if I get better between now and then, that’s a good thing. But this is what we’re working with.

Andrea:
Alright, number four, when, this is just something to think about, when are you going to be doing all this freezer work? So if you’re willing or able to work longer in the kitchen a few times a week, while preparing normal meals, that’s a good thing. That’s usually how it happens for me. Do you have access to big chunks of time? I don’t hardly ever have just like a swathe of time or a whole day or something where I can just work on one food project. So, usually what I do is, like when I made fish cakes the last time, I intentionally thawed a ton more fish than I needed, thanks to you guys, and I cooked a bunch more potatoes than I would need for a batch, and I made like, a hundred and some odd fish cakes. And then before we even served dinner i went and loaded everything into the freezer that i was planning to freeze that does take extra time i, take umbrage to the people that you hear online who are like just plan extra 15 minutes to make a little more it does not take 15 minutes it takes a lot more than that but but it’s still less time than planning a whole separate day to work on something. And then I’m also washing the bowls and the mixers or food processor or whatever all at once.

Leah:
But I’m amazed that you made that many. You’re a better Alaskan than I am. I’ve never made that many fish cakes, but I should. The fish cakes are my number one goal of things to put away for fast food. And it just doesn’t quite happen.

Andrea:
Those are my favorite thing to take out of the freezer, honestly. Because you can just have it on its own. Or you can have it with something. It doesn’t matter. It is an all-in-one meal, but it also can go with a meal or just put it on top of a salad.

Leah:
Or throw an egg on it. Put it in a breakfast sandwich. Yeah, it’s so good.

Andrea:
But you can lay it on a piece of bread or whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Leah:
Yeah. What I do is whenever we have had fish the night before when we bake it, then I just have a little extra baked and leave it in the fridge and mix it into fish cakes the next day. And I will make all of them. And sometimes I’ll leave a couple in the fridge, but they never quite make it to the freezer. So that is a goal of mine.

Andrea:
You were the one who you had told me that that was how you did it. And so I was like, oh, OK, good idea. I just have to plan for it. But also like when you said they don’t make it to the freezer well that could be because you’re not making you know a million at once but also, if you are hoping to double or triple the usual amount of food you would serve and then after everybody eats freeze what’s left over I will just burst that bubble right now what’s going to happen is everybody eat twice as many fish cakes, and you won’t have any fish cakes left to freeze so um, when i make larger portions and with a family of six including a teenager and an almost teenager, that means like a lot then i pack up and freeze the extra food before we even sit down to eat because there would be nothing left otherwise.

Andrea:
And five, my last but most obvious big consideration before going down your freezer food path is what are the health needs and goals of the family members? And can everybody eat this and feel good? Does it need to be gluten-free, dairy-free, low histamine, whatever it is? And can you mark the things? Like I don’t only make gluten-free food for the freezer, even though I myself on gluten-free, but I do mark all the gluten-free things and put them in a separate basket section of the freezer. So I know what, like what I can eat and, and I’m happy to heat things up for everybody else.

Andrea:
So in summary, the ideas to consider are what will people actually eat? What is happening in your life that is causing the need for freezer food? So you can determine what the food needs to look like. How much energy and time will you actually have honestly? and when are you going to be doing the freezer work and then what are the health needs of your family so you can plan for that. And I don’t know, you guys do a lot of butchering, fishing, et cetera, Leah.

Andrea:
Um, but a note on freezing yearly supplies of things, cause you know, we tend to live on sort of cyclical seasonal type situation. I always now did not do this in the beginning, but now I take the ingredients as far to prepared for use as I can. So for instance, immediately freezing huge chunks of tallow is usually necessary right away during butchering just to stall any, you know, decomposing or something and get them frozen. But then as rapidly as possible I get that tallow right back out and I render it down and have it ready for use even if I can grind it before it goes in the freezer that would also be ideal, but then I get it rendered and then frozen in block sizes that I’m actually going to use and take out of the freezer instead of you like one enormous 20 pound cake of tallow that I can’t do anything with, so not only does this typically save freezer space but it does help ensure you’ll actually be using those delicious harvests rather than still rushing over to the grocery store or something because like you have food in the freezer but it’s all hours and hours of labor away from being usable, that definitely stands in the way of using up your harvest so, just just a note for everybody who’s doing like harvesting butchering cyclical type things get the food as far down the road to prepare it as possible, all right let’s talk about some actual freezer food ideas after this ad break.

Andrea:
What is actually going in the freezer today? All right, Leah, this is time. It’s time.

Leah:
Okay, I’m ready. I’m ready to learn.

Andrea:
All right, we’re going to start at the top with the Apex freezer meal, the totally prepared dish. I don’t even know why that name is cracking me up somehow, but totally prepared dishes means, somebody can thaw this and feed it to the family. Maybe with like your normal sides like greens or something like that but it isn’t a complete dish, it’s not a piece of a dish and before we go in I’m gonna say a word on freezing dishes with pasta in them so you’ve had the lasagna Leah um.

Leah:
It’s still good.

Andrea:
So I do not love freezing pasta except lasagna I do love freezing lasagna and the reason is because pasta absorbs so much moisture So as it’s thawing out, it can absorb a ton more moisture and it can make your resulting dish pretty dry. However, as somebody who has thawed many a frozen casserole during postpartum time, I would say this is still a better solution than having scrambled eggs for the 14th time in a row. But if you can make like, say all the spaghetti sauce and the meatballs and freeze it together and then add pasta at the moment of cooking it. I do prefer that. That just isn’t always an option though. Sometimes I need, you know, a kid to be able to take it out while I’m asleep and heat it up. So in order to counter this dryness, when I freeze pasta dishes, I usually make them like as much as twice as saucy as when I prepare and serve it fresh. So just a note, I don’t necessarily specify that on every single recipe that I have linked here. Most of what i’m about to say i have recipes for it linked in the downloadable pdf okay all right easy meals to put in the freezer that we love spaghetti and meatballs you can leave the spaghetti noodles out and add them after.

Andrea:
Swedish meatballs and gravy. This can be, again, just the gravy and the meatballs, or I did do a fair number of pans of this with pasta or rice underneath the gravy and the meatballs.

Andrea:
Rolled enchiladas, which can be corn or wheat tortillas. Got a link for this. You just shred meat and cheese, roll it up in the tortilla, line it up in a pan, pour enchilada sauce over the top. easy to make at home, and those freeze really well and they thaw quickly and they bake really nice.

Leah:
Yeah i’d like to get into doing um like a whole bunch of halibut enchiladas because we don’t have chicken um but we have halibut halibut is our chicken.

Andrea:
Yeah i would love some of your chicken, that sounds delicious that would be really good with a salsa verde type.

Leah:
I was wondering what kind of cheese would you think would go well with halibut because when i think about making um either fish tacos or fish enchiladas i never know quite what to do, for like sauces and things i mean we do use like when we do halibut um, halibut and cheese we do i think mostly cheddar so i guess you could do that but i feel like it It needs to be like an elevated cheese. I don’t know.

Andrea:
Okay, Megan. It’s a Megan Markle joke for those who don’t know. But I don’t know. I break a lot of cheese rules because I just either use the cheese I have or the cheese that I have access to, the cheese that I can easily make.

Leah:
Right. And I always have cheddar, but that’s basically all I have.

Andrea:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leah:
Usually.

Andrea:
I don’t think your kids will be complaining about that. Yeah. And if they do, you can just mail it to me, and I will not complain.

Leah:
My kids already know what I’m going to say if they don’t like their food. Because we’ve said this. I say, that’s okay. It’s all for me. You can go outside and roast some slugs.

Andrea:
Oh, gosh. Savage. It’s what it’s like to live in Alaska, guys.

Leah:
They’re pretty ready to eat after that.

Andrea:
I would be. Although, I wouldn’t be shocked if I came and found your kids roasting slugs. It wouldn’t be outside.

Leah:
That wouldn’t surprise me either.

Andrea:
Um okay another dish this is probably one of my absolute top favorites to freeze which is mexican lasagna it is not mexican it is not a lasagna but that’s the name i don’t know why, um it’s basically you layer and i put the recipe link for the one that we’ve made i’ve made it for years and years um, my friend carmen is the one who gave me the recipe originally and you may you layer.

Andrea:
Uh well we put a little enchilada sauce in a pan then you layer in tortillas that can be corn or flour and then you sprinkle in some cooked meat could be, alaska chicken or whatever you sprinkle in i like to sprinkle in some cooked beans you can sprinkle in rice, you can sprinkle in shredded cheese i say you can because you can do whatever you want i’ve done it all manner of ways with or without certain ingredients you layer in a little bit more sauce and then you just keep making layers until your pan is as full as you can possibly stuff it, and then you top it with the last of the sauce and you can put shredded cheese on top i usually don’t when i freeze it just because then i it sticks to the foil on top of the freezer pan and, weird but um, I made like 15 of those when I was pregnant with Jacob. We basically lived on it. The sausage and rice recipe from the pork cookbook, the pastured pork cookbook. Link in shout outs. It’s a pretty good book, if I do say so.

Andrea:
That freezes up pretty well, so you can freeze that. Tuna rice casserole, which is kind of like the pork except with tuna or I guess Alaska chicken. Now that I think about it, it would be really good. Tuna noodle casserole remember the noodles will soak up the gravy so you got to use a lot of extra gravy you can use rice or, make the gravy make all your fish and your peas and everything that goes together and then freeze that in a container and pour it over pasta if you wish regular lasagna, stroganoff the topping or all in one freezes pretty decently cheeseburger casserole, I feel like cheeseburger casserole also you got to make it I put in tons of broth, I linked a recipe but please know that I do whatever I want and I don’t really ever follow recipes very well, Um, and then I think I sent you a cottage pie once, Leah. So shepherd’s pie, fish wife’s pie, swine herds pie, cottage pie, those all freeze really well. The, the free frozen food Leah and I are referring about sending back and forth is when people fly up and down from here or there, and then she brings fish boxes. So we can send frozen things to each other, which is really fun.

Andrea:
Chicken soup or any soup these freeze gloriously and they thaw even better beef stew I love having frozen beef stew any stew and if you want to you can do serving sizes of these which we’ll talk about towards the end like if you want to be able to just cook yourself a bowl of chicken soup for breakfast and then when the kids get up they want oatmeal or eggs that’s fine you can just have your chicken soup thought you don’t have to be like I thought a gallon of chicken soup anybody wants them. Picadillo, which is a Cuban and gluten-free meat and rice dish. You can freeze that. Tinic tac, which is, uh what did that recipe come from was that from britney.

Leah:
Yeah it’s not me i don’t.

Andrea:
Know what it is um it’s absolutely delicious it’s like a coconut milk and, and meat broth gravy with vegetables and meat in it it’s divine and it freezes, oh gosh it freezes so well so you can just freeze a giant i I mean, when I make it, I make as much as I can pack into a giant, pot, and then I freeze pans of it, and we eat it for dinner, and it is amazing. Fruit pies freeze really well. They thaw. Quiche and frittata. Frittata, I’ve literally… So, Leo, before Kenton was born, my mom came over and we made a ton of frittatas. We just packed them with vegetables and eggs and all kinds of things. It was spring, so it was a perfect time for it. And we froze them and then um like dumped them out and vacuum sealed them so, those were amazing and they thaw so quickly so, and i have not frozen a prepared pizza but i do want to try that tilsha in the discord was talking about trying that i don’t know if she’s done it yet but, i would love to hear if she has, and then uh breakfast casseroles like the blueberry oatmeal casserole I linked in the show notes that freezes really well too.

Leah:
That sounds yummy.

Andrea:
It’s so good it’s so good so that’s just a list of some totally prepared dishes that we freeze quite frequently, Any of them sound, well, lasagna, I know. But I feel like you could put fish in most of these.

Leah:
Yeah, we do. And we do, like, I get, I go through a phase of doing, like, a lot of smoked salmon quiches.

Andrea:
Those are always good. Well, you have a lot of venison, too.

Leah:
We have a lot of venison. Yeah, I mean, shepherd’s pie, all that. We, yeah, we have a lot of ground venison for hamburger meat.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Leah:
And we have lots of stew meat, and we have lots of steaks.

Andrea:
So, yeah, your venison, Sam brought, you brought, and then Sam, when he came down to, brought a bunch of ground venison. That makes the best meatballs ever.

Leah:
Oh, yeah, it’s so yummy.

Andrea:
And I used it to make the tinic tac, too, like huge pans of it.

Andrea:
So that’s pretty good. All right, here’s a couple sidekicks. So, Leah, these are things that I call frozen magical helpers. So they need to be paired with something to make a full meal, but they’re part of a meal. And I really like having these on hand and the first one is meatballs, so that’s just taking ground meat and getting it as prepared as possible I like to make tons and tons of meatballs, and then I freeze them I bake them and then I freeze them and then I pour them into gallon bags and Jacob loves having these because when he makes his breakfast he’ll just cook like 10 meatballs to go with his egg or whatever, um so that’s, I feel like that’s the number one slam dunk. And part of what really got me doing that was, you know, those meatballs you’re buying that you bought from Azure?

Leah:
Yeah.

Andrea:
I had bought those and then I was like, well, I guess I could make these.

Leah:
Yeah, I love I love making meatballs. And I’ve I’ve told you about my autumn meatball that I make with squash.

Andrea:
Oh, yeah. I really want to.

Leah:
Make butternut squash and beef and sage and a little bit of garlic powder, a little bit of bone broth. Um they’re so good and those freeze really really well and i have only made them and froze them one time and that is when i made them for a friend, uh as a postpartum snack because it’s like a full meal ah yes when you make them but i i was doing it and i was like man like why don’t i do this for us like it would be really nice to have i would do an entire deer.

Andrea:
Like i’m just telling you that’s how to.

Leah:
Like yeah for real place.

Andrea:
An azure order where you’re like okay hey, this entire flat of squash is going to be going into this. And just know, like, it’s going to be monster. There is something to be said for having a meatball immediately when you’re hungry. Such a good protein.

Leah:
Pleasantly shaped.

Andrea:
Yes. It is indeed. Shout out, Rebecca. Meatloaf, speaking of meatballs. Meatballs are just tiny meatloafs, in case anybody was ever wondering. But meatloaf is a giant meatball, and you can freeze it. So I like to make a ton of meatloafs and I just fill like all my baking tins with meatloaf. And I line the baking tins with parchment paper and fill them all the meatloaf and then freeze them. And then I can pull the parchment paper out, get my baking tins back and then put the meatloaf into vacuum sealed bags or just bags or wrapping paper or whatever in the freezer.

Andrea:
And those are so, I mean, unbelievably handy to have because you can make a meatloaf into an entire meal. I dice in tons of vegetables. I grind oats because I don’t put bread in ours. But you can use leftover stale bread that you saved in the freezer and grind it up. Of course, you can do that with gluten-free bread too. And I put in eggs, which is not necessary really, but I usually do. I put in tons of herbs, like fresh herbs, dried herbs. I put in spices. I mean, that thing could feed an army by the time it’s done. So those I absolutely love freezing. So those are really handy. And Mexican rice, which is just an amazing side, you know, you can cook tons of garlic. I put a link in the show notes for this, but you can cook garlic and then you toast the rice, which is amazing, like the dry rice. And then you cook it with, well, I use bone broth, but you can use broth or water and tomato sauce. And it’s just the most delicious. I mean, it really is a meal in itself too, but, um, Mexican rice is a great sign.

Leah:
Yeah, we do so much rice because if you cook it in broth and serve it with butter, any kind of rice, it’s a full meal. That makes my kids so happy if it’s a night where I don’t feel like making anything else. That’s what we eat.

Andrea:
You know, we were talking the other night, you and I, about this whole, I’m not going to a grocery store thing. And I was telling you the one thing that my family is consistently saying that they miss is rice because we’ve been out of it for a minute. So um gary was telling me like, go to the anson mills and like just get some rice because everybody wants it so bad, who knew rice is such a luxury and so special and important to us but i feel like that’s what this grocery store thing is showing us there’s some stuff we don’t have that i was buying before that nobody cares but the rice they care, All right, the fish cakes, as aforementioned. I put a link to our fish cakes in the show notes, which I think is pretty similar to yours, Leah. And then I’ll…

Leah:
Yeah, I make mine different every time.

Andrea:
I mean, fish cakes first. It’s like this is what we have.

Leah:
Fish cakes are like the way, the number one way we use leftovers is like, how can I put this in the fish cake?

Andrea:
Generally speaking, describe a fish cake.

Leah:
Generally it’s going to be fish um usually salmon um a couple of eggs maybe a little bit of mayonnaise or, cottage cheese or sour cream or yo plain yogurt whatever i have on hand or none none of the above sometimes um, a little bit of mustard lemon juice herbs i’ve done it with potatoes and then sometimes I use a little bit of anchorn flour or cornmeal. My kids like it cornmeal because it makes it like it gives it a good crunch.

Andrea:
That’s a really good idea. I love that.

Leah:
And then we just fry them up on the skillet and duck fat. So.

Andrea:
Everybody’s happy.

Leah:
I think that’s pretty much that’s pretty much it. But like I say, I kind of throw things in. Yeah. Depending on what we have or don’t have.

Andrea:
Whatever’s on hand goes in it’s delicious.

Leah:
I’m pretty sure i’ve mixed in leftover rice before too like.

Andrea:
Yeah truly.

Leah:
I will put anything in there.

Andrea:
A carb is a carb uh another nice thing to have in the freezer is properly prepared and cooked beans so you’ve started making beans more recently as i recall, nary but a few weeks ago you said i’ve had beans twice in my life yes this is a new adventure for you she lives on an island guys she literally lives on an island.

Leah:
Yeah, white bean soup has so far been the favorite. We love Brittany’s baked beans. But generally, what I’m making and freezing pretty consistently with Sam is white bean soups.

Andrea:
Delicious.

Leah:
With cabbage, leeks, chicken sausage. I could put some just ground venison in there and that would be yummy too. But anything really.

Andrea:
You know what’s awesome? When you have a big pot of beans and they’re basically ready to go and make sure there’s like a lot of extra broth in there and then just dump in a half gallon bag of your frozen meatballs, they’ll cook up really fast, or they’ll heat up really fast. And then you’re like a rock star. It looks so good. Yeah. I love having meatballs in the freezer because you can take anything boring and just pile meatballs on it. And everybody’s like, wow, you really tried. Yeah, sure did. But if you want Brittany’s baked beans recipe, it is in the show notes on the website for the properly prepared beans episode that we did a couple months back. I exceeded the capacity for podcast player show notes, so it is on the website, show notes only. Another nice sidekick or frozen magical helper is cooked tortillas, and that could be flour tortillas or corn tortillas. I must say that we do prefer them fresh, being snobs at this point. But that being said, frozen and reheated tortillas is better than starving.

Leah:
We do, we get frozen tortillas from Azure whenever we can. We can only do a frozen Azure order about twice a year. So I always load up when we have them. So usually, you know, if I’m feeling good, then I just make tortillas the day we’re making quesadillas or whatever. I just make them right then. There you go. But then I have the frozen tortillas. Like this week I’m going out of town. My mom is here currently to care for the children while I’m gone.

Andrea:
Hence you can record with me.

Leah:
I’m going to pull out a whole bunch of tortillas. A whole bunch of frozen loaves of bread and everything so that she has no prep work to do besides shredding some cheese and she can make a quick quesadillas or other easy meals.

Andrea:
That’s going to be so, so good and also so excited that you’re going on that trip. On the vein of tortillas, flatbreads or gluten-free flatbreads or pitas are really nice to have in the freezer. I do also have a system for keeping dough for those in the refrigerator so that I can serve my habit of only wanting them fresh cooked. But you can make, and they don’t have to be cooked, you can make a lot of these, flatten them like in the tortilla press or whatever, and freeze them raw. You just have to separate them with parchment paper or freeze them on like a sheet pan and then stack them. But be careful when you thaw them because they’ll stick together. Pierogis also freeze really well. And you can make these, this is basically just circles of dough that you piled some kind of a meat or cabbage or meat, cabbage, cheese or whatever combination. Potatoes, please. Potatoes, yes. In pierogis. And then fold it over and seal it up like a little half moon. And you can then just freeze those raw. And then you cook them in broth or hot water and serve to your happy families. Cookies, you know my policy on cookies in the freezer.

Leah:
I benefit from your policy.

Andrea:
Yes, one must always have cookies in the freezer. Ice cream. We don’t always keep ice cream in the freezer, but that’s not for lack of wanting to. It’s just because cream isn’t always available year round. But we do love having ice cream in the freezer. Also, apple crisp filling and topping, which I freeze separately, Um, then you can, when you take out, like I vacuum seal very flat, thin packs of apple crisp filling or topping. And for our filling now, we just do cubed or sliced apples. We don’t add anything into the filling anymore, but if you want, I’ve linked the recipe with stuff mixed into the filling that we really loved before. And then also the recipe that I’m making now, which is a gluten free one, but then you can thaw that on the counter and literally the time it takes for everybody to eat dinner and then just dump the, formerly frozen apple crisp filling into a cake pan and then pour the topping on top of it and bake it again you look like a hero i’m like you really tried, which is my favorite way yeah my.

Leah:
Mom used to always freeze apple pie filling or apple crisp filling.

Andrea:
But we used the same.

Leah:
Recipe it was just.

Andrea:
You know um apples sugar cinnamon.

Leah:
And nutmeg and it froze very and thawed very very well.

Andrea:
Oh we made that when you guys were here i now suddenly remember you and your mom sitting at the table and chopping apples for like an hour and a half. That was awesome. You guys were fast and it was delicious. And the kids were eating them as quickly as you could chop them. Hence why you had to chop for so long. Other sidekicks I love to have always have these in the freezer. Pate, hummus, baba ganoush, and liver mousse. Links to all of, well, I don’t think I linked the baba ganoush, but if you look in nourishing traditions, There’s a recipe in there that I’ve used a million times and it’s good. Sloppy Joe filling is another nice thing to have in the freezer. That is like Jacob’s, one of his top five foods, I would say, is Sloppy Joe’s. So having that on hand is good. Having ground beef on hand or venison is good, but having ground beef and venison made into Sloppy Joe filling that you can just thaw and have is just life a little bit better. Roasted root vegetables. It’s pretty easy, I feel like, to chop and roast a million root vegetables as it is to chop and roast a few. So I chop and roast a lot and then you can freeze those. Mashed potatoes yeah.

Leah:
Yeah we do a lot of roasted vegetables but i’ve never.

Andrea:
Thought of freezing them well see i like to also toss them with a lot of spices and stuff and you know by the time you’ve gotten 30 jars of spices out you might as well do a lot mashed potatoes i remember when my mom was pregnant with, i think the youngest in our family, um my grandma came over and made like she peeled hundreds and hundreds of potatoes. And she cooked tons and tons of mashed potatoes and she froze them in gallon bags, like flattened out. And that was amazing. She also froze tons of pancakes, which I was like, wow, I didn’t know you could do that. But we lived on those things. And that’s where I learned that a bowl of hot mashed potatoes with a spoon of jam on top is amazing. Because my grandma was telling us how she used to eat that. And we’re like, that’s disgusting. saying well we were wrong it’s delicious um, do you guys get potatoes on your azure orders sometimes right.

Leah:
Yes we do um i didn’t know that some people didn’t eat potatoes after they sprout because it’s unless we grow the potatoes which potatoes do do well here so we do grow them also but uh we basically only eat sprouted.

Andrea:
Potatoes well i’m not gonna deny we i my grandma had always told us when we were little to trim out like around where the sprout was because she always told us it was toxic, and so I just always did that so all my potatoes have like gouges in them for me hacking out the, um the sprouts and then I remember a friend was over one time and she just like scrubbed all the sprouts off and cooked and I was like you can do that I didn’t know I thought we’re all gonna this was it but um, yeah in the western price world that is definitely a hot topic, isn’t it?

Andrea:
When in doubt, chop them out, I guess. Waffles and pancakes freeze really well. I froze tons of waffles when I was pregnant with Jacob, which thank goodness I did because I just lived on those after he was born. And pancakes, you know, do freeze them separately on a sheet pan and then stack them together, or you’re just going to have to defrost one glue stack of pancakes.

Andrea:
No-bake bars freeze really well. and I will here insert my little tip on labeling. I made and froze a bunch of individually packaged no-bake bars before I had Kenton and I labeled them lactation cookies. So just a pro tip for the mothers, if you’re putting something in the freezer for your postpartum and you don’t want anybody to touch it, just add lactation to the name and nobody’s going to put their hands on that.

Leah:
I can’t give sam a cup of tea or anything without him asking if it will make him like.

Andrea:
He like like very concerned yeah about what it is well these cookies will definitely do it so back off, uh and then so i’ve complained before on the podcast that i don’t like frozen baked goods like bread and rolls but i will say gluten-free this is where the gluten-free people get to win The gluten-free rolls and bagels and things freeze really well and they thaw incredibly well. So they don’t get dry in that process. But having wheat products that are baked and then thawed is still amazing and way better than having something from a grocery store. So, you know, just in a perfect world, we would have everything fresh all the time and the butler would bring it to us on a silver tray and that’d be fine. But we don’t live in that world. Also, brownies, especially gluten-free brownies. And I wrap, I cut brownies up and I wrap each one in paper and freeze it in bags. And those are a great little treat. Okay, any of those… Things sound good to you, Leah? Obviously, the fish cakes.

Leah:
All of that sounds good to me. You know, I’m making Sam like a lot of no-bake, like, protein oat balls right now. And so I’m thinking, oh, I could freeze those. You know, I’m getting some ideas as we’re going to do this. Or like, I’m starting to make a lot of hummus. And I’m like, oh, I can freeze that. So yes.

Andrea:
Yeah, hummus freezes so well. And hummus is such a production. Not really, but it’s kind of a production because like you know you got to soak the beans cook the beans all the things blend everything and it kind of makes a mess so yeah i like to do a giant batch anything where i got to get out like a blender or a machine i’m just like we’re freezing half of this like make a lot right, um and then i’ll just list off a couple ingredients that are these are ingredients that are partially prepared ingredients that are ready to plug into a dish or a meal and this is you know maybe you’re not you know postpartum or with a migraine laying on the couch, like unable to communicate but maybe you just need to be able to get home from work, or pick up the kids from school and have dinner made a little bit quicker so these are things that would fill that category and that is shredded minced cubed cooked um chicken pork beef mutton duck turkey fish, i don’t know i didn’t put fish on the list but you.

Leah:
Didn’t put venison on the list either.

Andrea:
No i didn’t how could i leave venison not unrepresented you’ve not been represented, at all what can i say um i’m.

Leah:
In like i’m not in your 99.

Andrea:
Percent of.

Leah:
Viewers what i eat.

Andrea:
No although we do like what you eat and we want it um pizza dough you can roll it out i always just freeze it in a big like uh a batch that makes one pizza, So a big dough ball. It thaws out. I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but I just leave it on the counter or I set the bag in a bowl of tepid water. And then whenever it’s ready, I roll it out.

Andrea:
Pizza dough police don’t come for me. Muffin dough raw in muffin cups. I like freezing that. And then when you get it out, let it come to room temperature and then bake it. And if you’ve ever made the cream biscuits from, the meals at the ancestral hearth cookbook then you can cut those out as if you’re about to bake them but just put that sheet pan right in the freezer and freeze them and then when you want them you take them out put them on a sheet pan and bake them frozen at 425 for like 20 minutes, pretty delicious um tortilla and naan dough so do keep in mind, I find with these small batch doughs, the pizza dough, I don’t have trouble with, but also it’s like largely einkorn, which doesn’t fight me.

Andrea:
But wheat doughs sometimes really struggle to roll out after they’ve been frozen and thawed. So keep that in mind. I do still freeze dough for like naan and things like that, but it just doesn’t roll out as large or as easy as if you made it fresh. So some compromises um when you get your azure order if you get azure and you have a lot of cheese grating it shredding it flaking it and then, storing that in bags so it’s ready to go that’s really handy because i find it easier to get a measuring cup and scoop out like a cup of frozen shredded cheese versus like get out the block and then like shred a bunch by hand in the moment. It just takes time. It’s just extra time. And I, now that I have a food processor, not bragging or anything, but I got a food processor. So I’m kind of a big deal. And I just like, I just process five pounds of cheese at a time. When I was buying from Azure, I was. I need to, I haven’t ordered from Azure in a long time now, but I will again sometime.

Andrea:
Also on that vein, shredded tallow. If you take frozen towel, take frozen towels and shred them. If you take frozen tallow and push it through your food processor on the shredder, you get this amazing shredded tallow that stays loose and like you can scoop it. And then I keep just a tub of that in the freezer because then like when I made, the oatmeal bake the other day, instead of having to go get out a block of tallow and like guesstimate how much and melt it, I just opened up the tub of frozen tallow and I took out a measuring cup of tallow and sprinkled it into my eggs and whisked it in and then put in the oatmeal and baked it. So just easy, just making things easier. Spaghetti sauce, enchilada sauce. Brittany said her contribution to the episode is any sauce, freeze sauce. I agree. Adriana said freeze roux. So she lives down in New Orleans area and she makes different like darknesses of roux for different types of.

Andrea:
Gumbo and things. This is all exceeding my skill level, but she makes different types of roux and freezes those. So she has them ready to get out. Also if you’re making your butter or if you’re like you’re rendering your own tallow and lard I like to freeze mine all in four ounce wedges. I was just at my friend Kara’s house today picking up, some farm goods from her and she showed me in her freezer she takes the little silicone measuring cups I think Allison has these and when she makes fresh butter she presses it into the silicone measuring cups because it makes like a quarter cup at a time. And then she freezes those and then she just has gallon bags of this butter. I’m like, what? This is amazing.

Leah:
That’s a great idea.

Andrea:
I know. You don’t really get it.

Leah:
You know, we get the Petaluma butter from Azure, and I really like it, but they’ve changed their packaging. It’s always like a big chunk, but now it’s like a big square instead of the way it was when we had it at your house. And it’s not super user-friendly, and I have it in the freezer now, but it would have been a good idea to cut it into those smaller portions beforehand. Because I just bring one in the fridge and then kind of cut it as I’m using it. But I think I would like it better if it was prepared ahead of time and just in the freezer ready to pull out as a serving.

Andrea:
Yeah, I feel like the downside of taking something really precious like butter and freezing it in large quantities is then once you get it out, you’re like, okay, now we got to rapidly use this up. And versus being like, okay, we’ll get out enough for today and then we’ll have another treat of butter next week or something. I don’t know. Butter is premium. Top.

Leah:
Especially that butter. It’s literal gold.

Andrea:
Yeah, it literally is. Broth, we usually can… Our broth, but I did used to freeze a ton of broth. So that’s handy to have. Broth you always need on hand. And cookie dough, if it’s gluten-free cookie dough, I roll it into the cookie balls and then I freeze those. Sometimes I wrap them in parchment paper and then have a bag of those so then I can bake like two cookies at a time. I don’t have to bake like an entire batch, but you can also just do rolls of cookie dough or containers. I’ve done little tubs of just regular wheat cookie dough as well. And another handy dandy thing to have in the freezer is nests of fresh pasta. So and my final thought would be for this is go walk through a freezer aisle at a store. You can see what all their consumer reviews and watching people’s behaviors and marketing determined would be things that people like to have frozen and available. And.

Andrea:
You can see if any of those are ideas that would work for you that you could do at home. A lot of times at the grocery store, it’s either highly compromised ingredients, it’s a billion chunks of stuff that you don’t want or excess plastic or what have you, and it can also be extremely expensive versus, you know, like Leah, I’m not saying the venison is free, but like the venison is there. So you’ve got access to it. So it’s an easy thing to make into meatballs.

Leah:
Yes, we actually, I, I think we pay more for our food than anyone else.

Andrea:
Undoubtedly.

Leah:
Because, I mean, you have the, I mean, like the equipment and everything, but also like the lifetime of.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Leah:
Learning where to go and what to do and, you know, the butchering, all the equipment we have for butchering, like we have a beautiful butchering space and everything. And then, of course, the fish, you know, the boat, like all of everything that goes into it. But we’ve just sort of made that our lifestyle, and so it doesn’t matter so much. But it is there.

Andrea:
Yeah, and then relying on that more so than also buying in other food is the ideal.

Leah:
Yeah, we never buy meat. I mean, sometimes I’ll get bacon or meatballs from Azure, but we do not buy meat. And we’ve gone years and years where we haven’t even done that. We’ve only used what we’ve had.

Andrea:
Yeah, I mean, why would you when you’ve got a halibut freezer and a king salmon freezer?

Andrea:
All right, let’s take a quick ad break and then come back and talk about containers and storage. So when it comes to putting food in the freezer, I know I’ve said some opinions, like put it in the freezer before you serve everybody or there won’t be anything left to freeze. I wanted to add something to that, which is when you freeze your food, freeze it when it is fresh and delicious and still appealing. Do not wait until the soup or whatever it is has been picked over and sneezed on and is kind of questionably sour, maybe towing the line of not good anymore. And you decide that today me doesn’t want this, but future me will be so hungry that she’ll eat anything and she’ll take this and then just go put that in the freezer, which is now full of food that nobody wants and nobody can read the labels on. And then you’re maintaining inventory that costs you money to store and you’re using up all the room where you could be putting good food away. I’ve never done this, Leah, ever. So that is just a theoretical story.

Leah:
I’ve done that this week.

Andrea:
Okay, I must confess. I’ve learned the painful way. If I don’t want it now, freezing it is probably not going to make me want it later. So facing reality, once again, that’s what we’re trying to do. So a magical token that I want to give you is Super Cubes. So Allison had these for a long time before I did. When.

Andrea:
I really wanted them, but then I thought, is it just going to be another gadget? Is it just going to be another thing? Can’t I technically use a container? I wasn’t doing that. And I guess I could just put something into jars, but those bump and they snap and they crack in the freezer, which I don’t love. Also, they are kind of hard to thaw because you don’t want to pour hot water on them because you’ll break them. And when I finally decided to get the super cubes, I got them from the family that actually sells them rather than there. There’s a bunch of knockoff ones on Amazon, obviously. And I felt good about the purchase. They aren’t cheap. I think a set of two. So each tray, I got two trays and each cup in it holds one cup and there’s four cups in a tray. I think that was $40. So they’re not cheap. But the quality is incredible. I thought they would be like floppy and annoying and I’d have to like set them on sheet pans. Not at all. They’re firm and they can stand up in the freezer. You can carry them, you know, full of soup. You can carry them by the edges of them and they don’t collapse in your hands. And they have lids, so they’re really nice.

Andrea:
But when I make any kind of a delicious stew or if I made tin-tac-tac or beans or something, even if I am freezing a sheet pan of it, I start by getting out my super cubes, which like I said, are the one cup size, and I freeze the soup in servings. And then once that’s solid, then I remove the frozen cubes and put them in labeled bags. And I thought that I would probably be vacuum sealing all of this, but I’m not. And I’m rotating from the bottom up through the stock fairly quickly. So there’s really no point in me vacuum sealing them. It’s not like they’re sitting in there for a year or something, if I was using this to prep food that, you know, maybe it was something we’d be using six months from now, that might be a good idea. But it makes a really nice, easy lunch for Gary, or like I was saying earlier, like a quick breakfast, you know, just a cube of soup.

Leah:
Um, I’m ordering these as we speak on their website. They have a bundle that’s 20% off.

Andrea:
Are you serious?

Leah:
What’s in the bundle? It’s a little bit of everything. I’ll tell you in just a minute because I’m, I’m hitting the pay button right now. I’ve split it into four payments so that Sam doesn’t notice.

Andrea:
Okay. Well, you know, he’s a dedicated fan of the podcast. He listens every, every week.

Leah:
He’s going to hear this. He listens to every episode. Okay. Hold on. And I’ll tell you exactly what’s in it, but it looks quite good. And as I was just telling you, I have no containers. Okay, this is a free-burning table 25-piece set with two two-cup trays, two one-cup trays, one half-cup tray, four rectangle baking dishes, two square baking dishes, lids, and a labeling kit.

Andrea:
My jaw is on the floor. I really want those two-cup ones.

Leah:
I will send you the link. I’m very excited about this because…

Andrea:
I should put that in the show notes.

Leah:
Yes i i could post it in the discord also.

Andrea:
Oh yeah do that we aren’t getting paid by super cubes guys i just really i just really like.

Leah:
In fact what we want you to do is go make sure they sell out before andrea can order.

Andrea:
Hey, um i was gonna add to and this this bodes well for you my super cubes they are rarely even in the cupboard i don’t even actually have a place where they belong in the cupboard because they’re always at work, so often I’ve just got them in the freezer and, shuttling back in in and out from the freezer um so yeah if, someday maybe I’ll be getting more it sounds like possibly if there’s bundles.

Andrea:
And on containers for casseroles, on containers for casseroles, when you’re freezing an entire pan of a dinner, foil pans from the restaurant and supply store, I know, probably not the top pick. Foil pans, you can get like multi, multi-packs of them at the restaurant and supply store they also sell like the big um steam dish type, giant size hotel pans I think they’re called size, if you’re doing like when like when we have done big dinners I really, there’s so much going on in a day when we do really big dinners especially if they’re Sunday dinners and a bunch of people are coming over I may I choose something that I can make way ahead and I freeze it and then the day of I can take it out and it’s literally like been custom prepared for that day but I’m not trying to host guests and also in the throes of like, boiling chickens and shredding meat and stuff like that so um, foil pans can work you can also line them with parchment paper if you like another option is to take if you have glass casserole pans and I know some people go to thrift stores and pick up extras of these. But you can lay like a heavy parchment paper in a glass casserole pan. This doesn’t work super great with really soupy things, I will say.

Andrea:
And also, if you’re doing something like a lasagna, I don’t love this because, well, it could work. But if you bake it with the parchment paper, it kind of shreds into the food that you’re eating sometimes. The only alternative I can think of is if you could peel the parchment paper off when it was frozen but that doesn’t always work so, I don’t know, you might have to mess around with that. For now, I have not messed around too much with that. But it does look really great for pies. So you can freeze pies in your glass, pie pan, but not keep your pie pan locked up in the freezer for, you know, a month or whatever. You can line your pie pan with parchment paper, freeze the pie or the pie crust in it, and then pull it out to enjoy.

Andrea:
And remember that the paper probably will be baked with the food, so I would not use waxed paper in this situation. You could use waxed paper for things like individually wrapping frozen brownies or wrapping balls of cookie dough or something like that, or separating your, tortillas, but I probably wouldn’t use it for something that would be baked. Restaurant supply stores also sell heavy-duty plastic quart and pint containers that I do rely on a bit. Um, those are really awesome for freezing ice cream, especially because they’re quart size and you can also do pint size. Like we, I froze a bunch of ice cream the other day for Memorial day party. And some people just ate like an entire pint container at a time. It was fine. Cause I had a whole bunch made and they were small. So they thawed fairly quickly. Leah, you guys have an industrial vacuum sealer, but you don’t have like a countertop one, correct?

Leah:
No, we don’t. And I would like to maybe, I don’t know, we have so many vacuum sealers that I don’t feel like we need a countertop one, but it would be handy.

Andrea:
I feel like I don’t have a countertop one either. I mean, I guess you’ve seen ours. It can go on the countertop, but it’s not like it’s going to live on the counter because it would take an entire counter. But I don’t I find that I don’t tend to freeze like food that I know is going to be cycling through like you’re probably going to be making meatballs every couple of months depending on how big of a batch you do, so I don’t even bother to vacuum seal that food but if I’m doing something like chopping like we picked a ton of peppers and we’re chopping peppers for, the year’s supply then I will vacuum seal those and then it’s kind of worth getting the machine out. So anything that’s going to be over like six months or eight months or something, yeah.

Andrea:
And cookies, I just put them in a big Tupperware tub usually or in gallon bags in the freezer. And I think I’ve talked about this before, but when we were moving to this farm, I made hundreds of cookies. And that came in so handy. I also made tons of pizza dough and frozen buns and sloppy joes and stuff. And that was just really handy because I didn’t know where half my ingredients were or containers. I couldn’t find anything. So and then there are freezer containers out there like specifically for freezing i’ve never owned these unfortunately, um and if you’re freezing in jars leah i don’t know if you freeze in jars much are you free do you freeze broth.

Leah:
Never sometimes when i’m doing broth but if i’m making broth it’s basically always venison broth um so i’m usually will make it and then put it right into a venison stew. So I don’t even freeze that much broth.

Andrea:
Okay.

Leah:
Because, I don’t have broth year-round. Once we get chickens, then I’m hoping that will change. But I am buying most of our broth besides the venison broth.

Andrea:
Okay.

Leah:
And I should do more fish broths, and I’m planning on it, and I would probably freeze those, but…

Andrea:
I love a good fish broth.

Leah:
Then I could do more fish soups.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Leah:
I thought about you coming and like smacking me with a ruler when I threw away my heels the other day without making them into a broth.

Andrea:
Oh, yes. I am looking for a ruler right now. I will definitely. Yeah. No. All in due time. Only don’t need to do everything at once to start. If you are freezing in jars, if you’re in the U.S. and you’re using ball jars, just do not freeze in the courts if you can at all. Avoid it. Use the straight-sided pint and a half or use the straight-sided wide-mouth pint and then the straight-sided half pint and then, of course, the little four-ounce jars as well work. And if you’re everywhere else, you should have the WEC jars, I’m assuming. And in the U.S. you can get them. They’re just not kind of the norm, but you can freeze in. I don’t think there’s any WEC sizes you cannot freeze in, but I could be wrong, but certainly they’re quartz you can freeze in. So they have the smooth sides. And if you’re in the U.S. and you grab a ball jar and look at it, what we have on the jars is not the shoulder that you need to be worried about so much as the heel on the bottom of the jar. So that’s where your cracks start at the bottom of the jar and work their way up. And then any time we have like a leftover container, like if somebody brings sour cream or something in like a tub, then I use that for freezing soup.

Andrea:
And last but not least, label, label, label. I’m going to link a Sharpie in the show notes that I really like because Gary got it for me because I was just over Sharpies. They don’t write if like your hand was wet that day at any point. The Sharpie is like, I refuse to work under these conditions. But this Sharpie is an industrial Sharpie and it writes on like somewhat greasy or wet, you know, within reason things. I’m also going to link masking tape that I like, which is not gummy. And I use it to label everything, label everything in your kitchen that you, food wise date it put the name on it and then remember if you are planning for postpartum just write lactation on the name and nobody will touch your stuff, and i think that’s all i have leo what are you.

Leah:
Thinking i like it thinking about freezing stuff i’m thinking i should you know especially as i’m making so much stuff for sam like in portions for him yeah um because he’s not usually eating with us, um because he’s usually on the go So I am having to have like a lot of, really nutrient-dense fast foods for him. And that’s definitely been stretching me a bit.

Andrea:
Yeah, that’s a stretch no matter who you are. That’s a stretch. So yeah.

Leah:
Yeah.

Andrea:
And you’ve got all the littles. So I feel like the two-cup container will be really good for you. Because you could freeze him like a cottage pie in that, basically. But like the two-cup container will be really good. because obviously Sam’s going to eat more than you are. He’s like, time to be tall. So he’s going to need a bigger meal. And then if you got some.

Leah:
Yeah, he eats a lot.

Andrea:
Yeah.

Leah:
He eats a lot. So, and I need, and I have, like I said, I have no containers. So I have these new containers. I’ve already ordered them. They should be here when I come back from my trip.

Andrea:
Oh, that’ll be so fun. Come back to like a new kitchen gadget. I love that.

Leah:
Yes. And then my mom will be here for a few days after that. So maybe I’ll have some time to like prep some stuff up while she’s still here. So, yes, I’m excited.

Andrea:
Oh, that’d be awesome. Yeah, just think about before you get back what you’d want to make. You should be able to get your hands on, like, some kind of venison liver, right? Does Sam bring the livers when he butchers?

Leah:
Oh, yeah. We always have the liver. We generally eat it fresh when we catch it, though. Like, the day after we’ve gotten the deer, we usually have heart and venison for—or heart and liver for breakfast.

Andrea:
You can’t beat that.

Leah:
Nothing of a tradition. You can’t beat that fresh food.

Andrea:
I feel like whenever—we don’t—what did you say? Catch? We don’t catch deer. Um but um the few times that we’ve butchered whole like large animals we we always start with the offal because it’s like it’s fresh it’s ready it’s here like this is the time this is the peak, so it’s a good place to begin, well this was fabulous leo it was fun getting to brain dump all my freezer ideas on you for an hour.

Leah:
Yes i appreciate it i need all of your ideas my goal in life is really like every day i’m like what would andrea do that’s.

Andrea:
What i’m in the kitchen my goal is to be able to read 25 as fast as you can, you’re just my reader for now you read things and narrate them to me that’s how i get through books in life right now, the leah program well this is awesome leah um i’ll let you go release your mom from babysitting duty and tell her thank Thank you from me for the quality episode that we were able to record. I really appreciate it.

Leah:
I’ll tell her to come listen to it so she’ll know that it was a worthy cause.

Andrea:
Yeah, I’m very thankful. All right. Have a good afternoon, Miss Leah.

Leah:
Talk to you later.