Members' ideas for ready to eat meals

[Cronker]

On 25/01/2018 at 11:50 PM, ChocoMom said:

I've had tremendous success in the past by making and freezing pasties.   They're quite hearty, and really are a full meal by themselves. In addition to the meat (beef or beef and pork), there are diced veggies including rutabaga, carrots, potatoes and onion. Salt, pepper and butter are the only seasonings I've ever used. They are traditionally eaten plain, with ketchup or gravy.  

 

  One of the upsides to the pasty is that they can be altered from the original beef or beef-pork combination. .  I've had chicken, broccoli, potato, onion, carrot- and they were fantastic. There's really quite a bit of room for creativity there.  You can use practically an veggie-meat combination that strikes you as being tasty when combined together. 

 

Another option might be chicken or turkey pot pies. I've done many, with great success.  Come to think of it, there were a lot of meals I used to freeze.  Years ago,  I used to do a thing called "Buddy-cooking" with one of my former neighbors. (I'm not implying that we cook our buddies, btw.) There idea is that two friends would pick 4-5 meals that could be frozen, we buy and split the cost of the ingredients, and together we'd cook a month's worth of freezable meals. So, we did pasties, pot pies, chili, meat sauce for pasta or lasagna, sloppy-joe, and I think we did meatballs in tomato sauce for meatball subs, as well.     

 

As far as that weird texture of frozen potatoes....I never had that occur with the pasties. I don't know why, but its never been an issue.  Hopefully, there are some ideas in there you can use, @Cronker !   

Thanks to everyone for the support and suggestions.

 I’m having lots of success with your menu ideas.

 

 I’m now moving into the new season menu plan (Autumn/Winter for us)

I already have some lovely, hearty meals such as my from-scratch lasagna and a traditional Irish stew.

following the idea of a pastie, I was thinking of trying a tamale style pastie filled with a Mexican beef ragu, served with refried beans and cacao sauce.

thoughts?

[Thanks for the Crepes]

39 minutes ago, Cronker said:

I was thinking of trying a tamale style pastie filled with a Mexican beef ragu

 

Sounds good to me, but what you describe would be called an empanada. There are many good recipes for these, both savory and sweet.

[Cronker]

Oh, how excellent!  Thanks so much.  Now that I think about it, of course it’s an empanada!  My silly brain was so focused on tamales that I didn’t even register that what I want to do is in fact an empanada.

Problem now is that it is very difficult to find masa harina in my town.  Closest I can get is polenta, but I don’t think that is the best ingredient to use.

[Thanks for the Crepes]

Many empanadas are made with wheat flour for the crust.

[kayb]

You might think about shredded chicken instead of beef. I think that's more traditionally served with cocoa (mole) sauce.