The Big Chill

freeze it now ❄️ eat it later

one of my favorite episodes of I Love Lucy features a freezer

Everybody I talk to these days is burned the fuck out. After years and years of doing too much, the pandemic required us to do even more with rapidly dwindling resources. 2020 might be getting farther away but the cherry it left on top of our exhaustion sundae hasn’t gone anywhere. I’m not the exception; I’m drowning right next to you. Nothing feels easy these days. From starting this newsletter to tying up the old one, there is a pile of mail, laundry, taxes, and difficult people that never seems to go down. A lot of these changes are for the best, like how much joy I am finding here with Stir the Pot and you all, but that doesn’t mean I have the energy to do any of this. I’m just doing it. There is one small thing that is making my life easier though: the freezer. I have filled it up with meals and snacks over the last couple months and it’s saving my ass at least once a week. There is something so comforting at the end of a long day when you absolutely do not have the energy to cook a damn thing to know that you already did that shit. A freezer full of home cooked meals, snacks, and breakfasts dissolves the guilt of warming up food because damn it, you made that shit yourself. You put in that little bit of extra effort in the past so that you wouldn’t have to do it every single night. Let’s make it a habit to keep helping out our future selves this way. We can’t count on a lot but we can count on ourselves and our freezer. This week I’ll give you lots of tips and recipes to fill up your freezer without too much added effort so that these dark, long days are a little bit easier. We might not know exactly what future us is going through but damnit, we know they need to eat.

What’s Freezer-Friendly

If you walk down the endless freezer aisles at the market, you can get an idea of all the different meals you can cook with your freezer in mind. Casseroles are great, so are thick stews, and chilis. All you want to avoid are dinners that have too many delicate vegetables or meals where soft veggies would be less than ideal. For example, a vegetable stew where the veggies are meant to be small and soft is fine but freezing a stir-fry where the veggies are meant to be crisp, and a bigger cut is a bad idea. It’s intuitive if you take a couple minutes to think it through. You will start to learn what your preferences are when it comes to defrosted meals too. For example, I don’t like to freeze soup if there’s pasta in it because I feel like pasta frozen in broth gets too mushy for my taste when you defrost it. But because pasta is so quick cooking, I just leave it out of a soup recipe I plan to freeze and cook it separately and add it in when I want. A simple workaround if you don’t like overly soft pasta. It’s a rare day that I am too tired to boil pasta but there are plenty of days I’m too tired to make soup from scratch so it’s still a win. If you are cooking from any of the last three Bad Manners cookbooks, I added a snowflake icon to mark all the recipes that are freezer-friendly. In Hungry As Hell, I took it a step further and in many of the recipes I tell you exactly where to stop if you want to freeze the recipe to eat later or if you are prepping stuff in advance. We’re trying to work smarter, not harder here.

Double Up

what can’t beans do?

When I am cooking something that I know will freeze well I will often double the recipe, like these Wintery Baked Beans, and stick that extra portion directly in the freezer. It really isn’t that much more effort to double a recipe, just a little more time chopping. The actual cooking process is rarely made significantly longer, just the prep. That means by cooking one night for an hour and a half instead of just one hour, you can potentially save yourself several nights of cooking from the leftovers and freezer portions. Sounds like a good deal to me. I know it takes just a little planning when you are making your grocery list but the rest of the process is the same and future you will be so damn grateful. Here are some recipes I like to double and stick in the freezer:

Wintery Baked Beans

Pumpkin Chili

White Bean and Green Chili Stew

Hatch Chili Enchiladas

Sweet Potato, Squash, and Black Bean Enchiladas

Bean and Beer Chili

Green Garbanzo and Herb Stew

Grab and Go Foods

Sometimes you don’t want a big ass tray of enchiladas or a lasagna in the freezer, you just want something small you heat and eat as needed. Here is where you have to put the most effort, but you will be repaid with weeks of easy meals for- at most- three hours of cooking. I don’t mean that you will be cooking for three straight hours but making individual grab-and-go type foods takes a little more time by design. My favorite things in this category to make are tamales, burritos, and dumplings.

left: fresh from the steamer right: defrosted four months later for dinner

I cannot stress how perfect tamales are for your freezer. Make a big ass batch and they will be helping you out for months. Last November I shared a recipe in The Broiler Room for some Jackfruit Green Chile Tamales which I promptly stored in my freezer. Well guess what my wife had for dinner on Wednesday night?  Yup, one of those tamales and they were as delicious as ever. All you need to do is cook the recipe as is, let them cool, and stick them in container in the freezer. Done. I think they taste best when you take them from the freezer and steam them for 10-15 minutes to warm them up. Or just toss them in the microwave, you’ve got nothing to prove at this point. The Chipotle Pumpkin tamale recipe in Brave New Meal is another killer to throw in the freezer.

Burritos are even easier than tamales to make if you’re worried about getting outside your comfort zone. I tend to make breakfast burritos for the freezer because then I’ll use them for dinner too and it feels like a treat. I’ll make a tray of roasted potatoes, a tofu scramble like the one in Hungry As Hell, and then a pot of refried beans or the cheater beans from HAH. You could add rice, leave out the potatoes, and add in sauteed onions and peppers. That’s all on you. Once you have all your fixings, just roll them up, staying on the smaller side of burrito scale, and use a little of the beans to seal them shut. You can heat up a griddle and sear them shut on top of the bean-paste situation but that’s just kinda showing off. Then place all of them on a cookie sheet, freeze them, and then put them in a large container in the freezer once they are all frozen. Or you can wrap them up individually in foil, plastic wrap, or parchment and freeze them like that. Regardless, they reheat in the microwave like a dream and will save you from getting hangry over and over again. It’s the same deal with dumplings. Make them all, seal them up, then place them on a baking sheet in the freezer. Once they are frozen, add them to a container in the freezer and pull them out to cook as needed. Looking for some dumpling recipes? Here you go:

Winter Squash and Sage Dumplings

Spring Asparagus Dumplings

Label Everything

not all labels need to be serious to be informative

Once you’ve got your freezer full, just remember to label everything. At minimum, you want to write what’s in the meal and when you made it. Sure, you can try to just eyeball it but lots of things look the same wrapped in foil after a few months. Don’t break your own heart, label your food. Most vegan meals will last you about 6 months at least in the freezer so if you properly label everything, it’s easy to always have plenty of stuff to eat without worrying anything has spoiled. Plus, labeling everything lets the lazier members of your household look for shit to eat without bothering you. Go the extra step to write the instructions to reheat the food on the container or on a paper inside the cabinet nearest the microwave so they can leave you the fuck alone when they get hungry. Or don’t and make them google it. I’m sure they can figure it out.

Filling up your freezer with home cooked meals really goes a long way for a little bit of extra effort. Members of your household can all eat a different kind of food for dinner if no one can agree and you won’t have to do a damn thing. Just point them towards the freezer. Plus, this is a thousand times cheaper than ordering delivery. Hate batch cooking like this? Make it a hang-out. Tell a friend you’ll handle the masa and corn husks if they make the tamale filling then meet up and talk shit while you both make tons of tamales to stick in your freezers. Same deal with the burritos. You can catch up on all the shit going down AND make sure you don’t have to cook at least 30 meals in your future. It’s a rare win win.  So what are you making and freezing this weekend? Let me know in the comments!

Tomorrow, Sunday recipe club subscribers are making a big pot of White Bean and Hominy Chowder that is absolutely freezer friendly. Wanna get on the list? You know what to do.