The freezer challenge, it is back!
I kind of fell off the freezer challenge wagon this summer when I was about 75% of the way through.
But I really do want to finish cleaning this thing out so that I can easily defrost it.
And I'd love to have a nice clean slate to start with!
If you weren't here this summer, a quick refresher is that I'm working my way through my freezer one small section at a time, in order to not overwhelm myself.
So, here's what I'm assigning myself this week!
We have from left to right (kind of!):
- some whole wheat bread (croutons?)
- a container of pulled pork (thaw and serve for dinner)
- a container of frosting (this is Sonia's...maybe she wants to make cupcakes.)
- cranberry sauce (I could roast a chicken)
- Swedish meatball sauce (I have meatballs in my other freezer, so dinner one night maybe)
- a flank steak (lots of options here!)
- a pound of ground beef (again, this should be easy)
- a pound of chicken breast (I'll use this in BLT salad)
So, nothing here seems super difficult to work through.
Phew.
It'll be an easy week to get myself back into the swing of things!
Thank you for following along with my freezer challenges...knowing I'm going to report back to you guys does wonders for keeping me on track. I highly recommend having a few thousand accountability partners.
You could make chicken sandwiches with brie and cranberry sauce!
I would love to know how you can cook flank steak and keep it tender. I have some for the first time and it looks like a cut I know as skirt steak. I cooked it quickly and it was very rare but oh so tough. Any help would be appreciated.
You got it right - flank and skirt are, literally and figuratively, close to each other. They are inherently tough and tasty cuts as they come from muscules that are well-used. There's not really a way to make it tender. The usual methods for prep and cooking are to slice thinly and cook quickly, or cook quickly and slice thinly.
Flank steak is good for Fajitas. You need to slice against the grain when you are prepping.
Marinate it. For at least a day. Then I broil it for 6 minutes, flip it and broil it for 6 more minutes, let it rest, slice against the grain and serve as is or tossed into a salad or chop up and make sandwiches. Skirt steak is a flatter piece, flank is usually fairly thick so that is the reason for the cook time.
I was wondering how this was coming along. Glad to help by being an accountability partner.
Some other ideas for cranberry sauce:
- Cranberry Sauce Quickbread
- apple-cranberry pie filling
- mixed in with applesauce
The cranberry sauce would also go well with Swedish meatballs a la lingonberries.
ooo a la IKEA -- yum!
Before today's true confession, I forgot you never finished! So much for your accountability to me. 🙂
Haha, well, NOW you can keep me accountable. Check in on me next week!
That's a fairly easy batch to use up right there. You lucked out on this section. I've kind of let my challenge drop, too, but this will get me back on track. I've got a lot of it done already, which is good.
Question, not related to freezer challenge but to freezers:
Before Hurricane Michael came through, I bagged up as much ice as my refrigerator had time to make in that short span during which Michael went from minor to major hurricane. Worried that I didn't have enough ice to keep freezer and two fridges cool in case we ran out of gas for the generator or if the generator quit, I decided to put canning jars with water in the freezer, to let them freeze. I had room for three quart jars, which I filled up to within about an inch and a half to two inches of the rim, and capped. Days later, when it came time to remove them, I found every single one of those three jars had shattered, even though the ice didn't even begin to reach the rim. I've frozen broths, soups, purees, and milk in jars lots of times before without this ever happening, and as it happened, we were able to keep the freezer and fridges powered the whole time, so no freezing/thawing/re-freezing cycles occurred.
Some of you scientifically minded people, tell me what happened, please!
I freeze wide mouth jars all of the time with 2 inches of headspace. The ONE time I froze a regular jar (not wide mouth) it shattered. I do not cap the wide mouth jars until all contents are frozen solid.
Which jar were you trying to freeze? Regular or wide mouth?
These were canning jars, regular mouth, but I freeze broth in regular mouth canning jars and have never had a break with those. The ice in the jars was no where near reaching the cap.
One possibility is that the top layer of water froze first, blocking the rest of the freezing from expanding up. It may be that the differing qualities of pure water vs "contaminated" water (stock, soup, etc) led to this outcome.
Agreed. May be that the fat, even small amount at top of something like broth wouldn’t freeze solid and would be able to move upwards. I use wide mouth pint and a half jars for freezing. Also worth noting...can be risky to can in jars which have been used in the freezer.
I wonder if capping them before they froze would do it? I always leave the lid slightly ajar for a day or so until it's frozen completely, and then come back and screw it on tight after it's frozen. It's sort of hard to imagine that enough air pressure could have built up to cause them to shatter though. The only other thing I can think of is that maybe there's something different about the way pure water freezes as opposed to other liquids? Like maybe it freezes on the top first forming some sort of a cap which didn't allow space for the water at the bottom to expand? I'll ask CatMan if he has any ideas, athough he's an engineer not a chemist! 🙂
This is a good incentive to get me going again too. I was doing it along with you this summer, and got off track. Thanks!
Make Crimson Crumble Bars (Betty Crocker) with the cranberries. One of my favorite desserts this time of year !!
I need to do this as well! I need to stop buying groceries and use up what's in my freezer/make it less daunting! Plus I have a bad feeling there's a lot of freezer burned stuff. How do you get over the guilt of having to throw away things you've let freeze too long?
I know that feeling! I try to learn from it (What did I do wrong here? Did I buy too much? Did I not label something? Did I package this poorly? Did I lose this item behind something else?), and then make an effort to change going forward.
You can't undo freezer burn, but you CAN try to do things differently in the future!
Cook and feed to the dog. Especially meat
Freezer brunt meat will work fine in soups and stews (and therefore pot pies as well).
Freezer burnt bread makes good crumbs, croutons, and thickeners.
Freezer brunt fruit works well in baked goods and smoothies.
If you like muffins, this recipe is a great way to use up cranberry sauce. They taste a lot better than the quantity of bran in them would suggest. (They're my favourite homemade muffin, and I am fussy.)
http://www.hungrymonster.com/recipe/recipe-search.php?C=Muffins&rid=6751
Maybe a silly question: why can’t you keep the cranberry sauce for thanksgiving in 2 weeks?
My freezer challenge was a success! It’s completely empty. There are only two of us now and we are downsizing to an apartment soon and no loner have room for it...I’ve had to completely empty it twice now this year. First when we moved to a new city, and now to move to our new condo we jsut bought.
Happy cooking! Your summer challenge was very helpful for me!
Woohoo, congrats on your success!
I LOVE flank steak. It's one of my favorite meats. We had it a lot back in the 70s and early 80s when it was cheap. Not so cheap anymore! My brother calls it, green beans, and potatoes a "classic cold war meal". 😀
My family rubs Kitchen Bouquet on both sides, then sprinkles salt, pepper, and garlic powder on one side, and let it sit covered, for a bit. Then we broil it 7 min one side, 5 min the other. Though my husband likes his meat well done, so often it's 7 min each side, cut the thick end off and put it back under for a bit.
I think ive mentioned this before but i love this way of doing the freezer challenge. I have a huge issue with not knowing what to do with random things in the freezer so i let them sit and go to waste. Its so helpful and fun to see how you change these things into meals.
At least your freezer looks organized!! I've been doing a freezer/pantry challenge sort of kind of this last month and much of what's sitting at the bottom of my freezer is either unidentifiable (chunks and patties of animal -- WHO didn't date and title them??) or just plain not very good.
Well, you are encouraging me!
We keep very little in our freezer. We mostly buy enough to last us until our next shopping trip and not much goes in our freezer. However, I went through a major popsicle phase over the summer so I now have about 20 or so random popsicles in there that I need to eat and just have no interest in. Now that it's getting cold out I have even less desire to eat them. Maybe your freezer challenge will motivate me to eat them. I don't have any children to help me eat them and my hubby isn't a fan so I am on my own.
Hmm. Do you have any neighbor kids? Nieces or nephews?
We live 1500 miles from all of our family so no nieces or nephews to share with and also we travel and live in a fifth wheel full time so don't know any neighbors. There is a young family in our current park that has a few little kids. They may appreciate a box of popsicles....as long as they don't think I am a creepy wierdo. Thanks for the suggestions!
For the popsicles-- I don't have a particular interest in alcohol, but if you do, you might do something with vodka slushies?
Chop them off the sticks and use them as ice cubes with 7-UP?
Or melt them and think of them as flavored juice to mix into deserts or something.
Well, I got a sort of involuntary freezer challenge a month or two back when my chest freezer died suddenly and unexpectedly. OY! Thankfully I caught it before everything had completely defrosted, but I still tossed most of the meat just in chase. I was able to salvage most of the rest - and luckily I had some space in the regular freezer. I did toss a lot of things that were languishing in the land of good intentions like veggie scraps I was saving until it got cool enough to make soup, and fortunately at least a third of what was in there was not stuff that really needed to be kept frozen like flour and brown rice and stuff that was just in there to extend its shelf life.
I'm still on the fence about replacing it. I fear I wasn't very good about keeping up with it and lots of stuff would just collect in the bottom. I'm thinking that perhaps I should go for an upright model next time so it's easier to keep things from getting lost. Any suggestions?
I've been wondering how that was going! Your freezer project actually motivated me to empty my own, so I could defrost the inch thick chunks of ice. I love a good creative challenge, so it was fun to put everything to good use! Now I am back full speed to fill it up again. This time though, I am commited to the habit of writing down a chronological list of what I add, and crossing things out as I it gets used. This way I'll always know what the oldest thing in the freezer is. In my household of one it is a managable system.
I am working on a freezer and pantry challenge since we will be moving in January. It's just across town, but the less we have to move, the better!
That's very smart! Why move what you could just eat?