Smithy

Welp. It's another bust, as far as I'm concerned. I bought this with a mixture of misgivings and hope. On the plus side: citrus! garlic! chicken! easy cooking and disposal! On the misgivings side: black beans and plantain...not that I actively dislike either, but they aren't on my list of favorite flavors. I'm sorry to report that the entire dish was on the gummy side. Did I simply overcook it, so the rice was overdone? I don't know. But I didn't especially like the plantains, and black beans are my least favorite of the legumes, and there was the gumminess of the overall dish. Any pleasure I might have gotten from the chicken and garlic was lost. Oh, and I neglected to gussy it up with cilantro as shown in the box photo, even though I just came from the grocery store and have some fresh. I ended up salting it, to drown out the sweetness of the plantains. I'm sure the sweetness would appeal to a lot of people, but it doesn't to me. On the bright side: here's another dish I tried once, for not much money, and won't need to try again. And hey, cleanup is easy!

I suspect you're very good at making sauces! Matching a sauce to the dish in question may be an issue, and I'm not sure I can help much with that. I need to explain that I'm on a crunchy cabbage slaw kick right now, thanks to @blue_dolphin and to my best friend, so cooked cabbage isn't really at the top of my mind. I think I could cheerfully live on a nice, crunchy slaw (cabbage, celery, carrots, radishes, peanuts or walnuts thrown in) with a good dressing for many days. That said, and given that you're looking at cooked dishes to freeze, thaw and reheat, I'd give some thought to flavor compatibilities and personal tastes. Would you like beef and cabbage together? I don't find the idea especially appealing, but if you do then the demi-glace might be an idea. Is the cabbage supposed to be the star, or a supporting actor? If the star, then I think the first two sauce ideas sound like good ways to gussy it up. I do think the potatoes and Gruyere sound more like a way to hide the cabbage than to celebrate it. There are recipes also for braised cabbage, with or without chicken. If that appeals, I'll post the one I have. It takes the dish into the acidic region thanks to vinegar.

The (black) bear I've had has been very mild, almost sweet.

@TdeV, I have to admit I've been focusing on the hot meals, which in my book means mostly dinner (maybe lunch). But what are you planning to do about breakfast, if you're a 3 meals-a-day person? Yogurt? Cereal? Toast? Or do you need to be considering things like egg bites and muffins? I know both freeze well. Waffles?

Tomato - based (like spaghetti sauce, with or without meat and veg) Herb based - basil pesto, for instance Cheese sauce (might need to investigate how to do this without sauce breaking on reheat) Butter and garlic Soy sauce based...out of my wheelhouse but someone here can help Hollandaise (don't know if it would break) There's a peanut sauce, like you'd find in mafe, that I think would freeze well. Lemon and butter I'm freewheeling here, but I can imagine all those things over rice or noodles, with or without meat and veg, that would take the dish in very different but delicious directions.

Another topic you may find useful is here:

That. Topic. Is. Brilliant! I'd forgotten all about it! Thanks for bringing it up!

i finally tried some of these last night. The texture was a bit firmer than I'd expected: more solid than a good meringue cookie, but certainly softer than a "firm" cookie like an Oreo. The flavor is good, at least for the vanilla and chocolate. I'm no more fond of the strawberry flavor than I am of frozen strawberry ice cream! But that's just me. 😀

I confess, I didn't read far enough to see that she's putting together "meal kits" rather than reheatable dinners. Thanks for pointing that out. I think her Cheat Sheet gives the kind of information @TdeV is looking for to predict behavior of specific ingredients when frozen.

I just took a quick glance at the Freezer Meals 101 site linked above. It may be exactly what you need!

I was all set to refer you to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) but now that I've looked at it, I don't think it's what you're after. It tells about freezing bean curd in one section, freezing milk in another section (basically, freezing ruins the fat globules) but doesn't really talk about how to account for multiple elements, combined, and which will work well frozen and then thawed. I agree with Darienne about time limits, or lack thereof, on frozen meat. In my experience the worst thing that happens to it is freezer burn. The same seems to be true for the meats I've cooked and then frozen for later, although there can be texture changes, say, to a crispy crust. There have to be cookbooks that address your questions, because commercial operations do this all the time: prepare foods that are packaged and frozen for sale. Consider the freezer aisles in the grocery store! Consider Swanson frozen dinners! But I haven't found such a resource yet. Here's hoping someone else can come up with it. In an offline discussion I've been talking about potatoes and whether or not they can be successfully frozen then thawed and remain palatable. The evidence seems to be that if you want the potatoes to hold their form -- for instance, nice chunks of potato in a soup or stew -- you'll regret freezing them. However, I can tell you empirically that twice-baked potatoes, with cream cheese and butter or cream, do very well when frozen and then cooked from frozen. I have nearly a dozen still, thanks to my DIL.

*bump* I'm sure I've done this before, but it's been a while. Tonight I cooked the Pimento Cheese Quiche. This is a VERY forgiving dish. It says to put the additions (cheese, pimentos, more cheese) into the baking dish, then pour the egg / cream / spice mixture atop it. Nope. I wasn't paying enough attention, and I reversed the order of the 2nd and 3rd layers. I admit that when I realized I should have poured the egg mixture onto the cheese, instead of the other way around, I spent some time trying to mash the cheese down into the egg mixture. I'm not sure it mattered. Will I bother trying it both ways? I dunno. This is pretty good without worrying about perfection. Mmm, good. Easy. Forgiving.

How did you get those fritters to be so spherical? They look lovely, but not easy to do.

Woe is me, I've tried to make them last as long as possible, but this is the last pear from a Christmas gift of Harry & David Royal Riviera pears. Juicy, sweet, delicious. The pinnacle of pearness. It nearly melts in my mouth, but it hasn't gone mealy yet. I wish I could have these all the time, but I suppose the ephemeral nature of this wonderful fruit makes it all the more precious.

Face it: if you're the cook in the family and you're having surgery, or if you're the cook in the family and you'l be overseeing someone else's recovery, you'd better have the food prepared in advance. It had better be easy to reheat, serve and eat. It needs to be appetizing. It needs to be easy. Of course it has to meet dietary guidelines for recovery, and that's a wild card for purposes of this discussion. We don't seem to have a dedicated topic for this purpose, although we have a couple of topics that are relevant: Batch Cooking: One large batch, many small meals. Share your ideas! ...and this old one, which takes into account feeding the entire family but got to be rather specific about the surgery in question: Food ideas for friends after major surgery? What are some of your ideas for meal prep and serving when there simply won't be time or energy for cooking? Got any favorite recipes? If you've been through this, what worked and what wouldn't you recommend? Packaging ideas are also welcome.

I respectfully think that statement is too broad. It may be that the variety matters (waxy, starchy or in between) or how much they've already been cooked. My DH and I used to freeze dinners from the leftovers of a meat-and-potatoes dish (ham, pork roast, beef chuck roast for instance, with potatoes) and had no trouble with the reheated dish. It may also be that they need to be thoroughly cooked first. I'm working my way through a 5-gallon bucket of Russet potatoes given me last fall. They've been in the garage, frozen. I bring some in, cut and cook, and haven't had bad luck with them that way -- but those that I bring in and thaw before cooking have gone off in a hurry.

@JAZ, while we wait for @TdeV' answer I'll ask about another of your recipes. I'm looking at the Pimento Cheese Quiche from your Super-Easy Instant Pot Cookbook. I have oodles of eggs and this quiche looks like it might lend itself to road trip food soon. Can you think of a reason not to make it and freeze it?

That means I'll get double bang from the book bucks: how to make the condiments, but also what to do with the condiments already in my refrigerator! (See: "Condiment Creep" 😀 )

Sugar cane was (and I presume still is) common in parts of Egypt as well. Vendors had street stalls where they'd squeeze the canes to fill cups with juice. Local kids, and my pals and I, would occasionally snatch a stray stalk from a donkey cart as it was being pulled down the road after harvest. One stalk provided a lot of short pieces to share around! In the absence of pocket knives, we'd just brush off the cane and chew the stalk to get the juice. Very sweet indeed. I remember the stalk as being green, rather than the purple in your photo. Are there different varieties of sugar cane? (Short answer: yes! I had no idea until I went looking! Here's one writeup, from juicedfresh.com.)

Thanks for that writeup. I haven't had time yet to dive into the book, but from what you write here and what I've seen so far this book seems to be akin to Vivian Howard's This Will Make It Taste Good as far as its approach and likely uses go. Would you agree with that?

I just acquired a copy of Samin Nosrat's Salt Fat Acid Heat, thanks to @blue_dolphin's recommendation above. It looks like it might be a good book to fit your needs. Another book to consider, which I haven't read but which received a lot of discussion here, is J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. You can read more about the book in this topic:

Tamales are such a crap shoot. When I find good ones, I like them a lot. The last time I was at a Trader Joe's I looked for the pork and red sauce tamales that I'd liked so much. No dice. So I tried these: Meh. Bland. Even the masa seemed to lack the flavor of really good masa. The green chile had some heat but none of the green flavor I expect from green chiles. Here's an attempt to show the melty cheese and chiles inside. After shooting the photos I gussied these up with salsa and sour cream, to give them a bit of oomph, but I won't buy them again.

The Ambriola cheese company has recalled cheeses sold under these names: Ambriola, Locatelli, Member’s Mark, Pinna, and Boar’s Head due to listeria contamination discovered during routine testing. For more information, see here.

I still haven't tried any of his recipes for using these eggplant preserves, but I want to update with this note: chopped into smallish bits and mixed into my green salad, the eggplant makes a nice addition. The acid kick fits well with my vinaigrette, and compliments the rather bland ripe olives I'm using up.

I blame @blue_dolphin. I really just went in looking for Good Things, but look at that promo price! So then I had to get her earlier book too, although it wasn't discounted. I'll have fun with these.