DIY -- frozen food

So in a very rocky part of the winter, and anticipating our usual hot summer, I made some frozen dinners.

I cooked up some of my less-used recipes, ate half, and froze half in nice little square plastic (no BPA) boxes. The boxes are multi-use and microwaveable, for those of you who have a nuker.

Well, instead of a long heat wave, we had frequent rain amounting to nearly 20 inches by the middle of August. I started eating up my frozen food.

Because summers and winters often mirror each other. I expect the winter to have mild temps but if we get as much snow as we got rain, it's Katie Bar the Door: some of us will be snowed up for weeks. I wanted to empty those boxes and re-fill them.

And here are my lessons learned.

Never never never never freeze potatoes. Not fresh, not cooked, unless they are mashed. Chunk potatoes get mushy. Now you know why most frozen dinners have mashed potatoes. Frozen fries need special treatment with chemicals to not get disgusting.

Never freeze things with eggs or mayonnaise in them, like tuna and other salads. Yolks of eggs will freeze but the whites crumble. The mayonnaise will separate and you'll have to whip it again to homogenize it.

Cheese and other milk products freeze well -- you know this from buying frozen pizza and yogurt.

Stews work extremely well. This includes things like couscous, tagine, chili, veau pique, petit sale, cholent (without potatoes), hoppin' john, and so on. I even froze some chao mian.

If you want frozen burgers or slab meat, buy the meat. Make the burgers up for yourself, it's cheaper, or cut the meat into portion-sized slabs.  Then tear off a big piece of freezer paper and some smaller pieces. Lay a burger or slab of meat on the big piece, then put on the small piece, then another burger or slab and so on. Wrap the sides of the paper around the meat and put in a plastic freezer bag. Label it with a sharpie. When it's time to use, slightly thaw and take off the end portion.  The rest will still  have ice crystals in it and can be put back in the freezer.

Same thing with boneless chicken breasts and other things you can buy family packs of.

Vegetables mostly need blanching before you freeze them and it's more convenient to buy them in the freezer section of the grocery except for kale or collards. The commercial frozen ones are mostly stem. So I buy them fresh at the farmer's market or in the store, strip the leaf off the stem, blanche and freeze, and put the stem into the compost. I buy my artichoke hearts, for tagine or marinating, already stripped and frozen.

Now. If the power goes off your frozen food is at risk. If you leave the frozen food in the freezer, and the freezer is at least half full, the frozen food will do the job of ice. When my power went off for three days during a hurricane, I had a full freezer and everything was still frozen when the power came back. BUT you can't open the freezer. So always have non-frozen things to eat in an emergency.