Meat - cooking double, making mulitple meals from, etc. please share your tips.

[one l michele]

Now that I know what I need to do to solve our lunch problem, how?

Two crocks?

One gigantic crock with two roasts?

You can't do ground turkey/beef in the crock can you?

Freezer bags for storage?

Can you then reheat in either the oven or crock?

How do you store frozen prepared meats in the freezer?

Any "bulk" cooking sites, books, or tips?

How long do you spend in a "cooking session"?

One meat at a time? One per week? or What?

[RoughCollie]

I use freezer bags that are large enough to fit one meal at a time. I cool spaghetti sauce, stews, soups, and so forth and put them in freezer bags too. That way I don't have to wash a plastic container. OTOH, plastic containers stack nicely, and that may be a more beneficial use of your storage space.

As far as I know, all browning of meat must be done in a pan on the stove.

When I do "session" cooking, I use the same meat as a base for everything I cook. For example, a ground beef/turkey/chicken mixture can be used, crumbled and browned, in chili, spaghetti sauce, tacos, and a lot of other dishes. Raw, it is the base for Salisbury steak, meatloaf, meatballs.

I freeze browned beef/chicken/turkey, as a mixture, in amounts that are required for one recipe.

I followed a cook once and have dinners for 2 weeks plan in a magazine one time. I thought it was a good idea. It took about 3 or 4 hours.

There are books and websites on the subject. I Googled "once a month cooking" and found a bunch of sites and books. "Freezer cooking" is also a good term to use for Google.

I don't use my crockpot very often, but I do use my pressure cooker quite a bit. That is a real time-saver. Usually, I just use big pots on the stove.

[j.griff]

for ground meat, I put it in a big pot (a bulk package of meat, like from sam's) and cover it with water and let it all boil. I looks gross at first (the water is all red, if it's ground beef), and you need a long handled sturdy utensil to stir it with (you want to make sure you keep breaking up the parts that stick together- you aren't trying to boil a meatloaf, LOL) every 5-10 minutes at first. When it starts turning brown the sticking shouldn't be that much of a problem any more. I love cooking ground meat this way, because I can walk away from it if I need to, as opposed to cooking it in a skillet without the water- then it can burn quickly if I need to tend to a Little emergency. Pay attention to the packaging so you know how many pounds of meat were in it, and you can divide the meat into that many freezer bags if you just want some meat read to throw in a skillet for tacos or something- or you can go ahead and add it to other recipes if you're freezing a make ahead meal.
Either way it's a great help.
HTH