Need some help please - I need to know about freezing/refrigerating food & meals I can use for 2/3 days??

[ThePieWhoLovedMe]

From Sept I will be working full time and will be at uni - I will get in about 6.30pm every night and do not want to waste time cooking when I could be studying - but need help with what foods i can keep in the fridge until the next day and re use and how to defrost any foods I freeze (Sorry to sound so stupid!) AND what meals can I do this with ??

For example I was thinking about cooking up some mince and onions one night - then adding some beans and eating it with rice and salad... then put the other half of the mince in the fridge to use as spag bol for the next day. Is this safe to do and do I just re heat the mince the next day on the stove or the microwave??

or say cook 12 sausages have 6 of them with pasta and veg and then stick the other 6 in the fridge to have the next night with mash and veg. Is this ok to do?

If I cooked a massive stew how do i freeze it and more importantly how do I heat it up ??

Do you have any meals that is good for this ??

Thank you - sorry this is so long !!

Think that both of the things you have mentioned should be entirely safe. The thing to remember with freezing is, always use fresh meat. You don't want to cook with thawed meat and then refreeze.

Think it all depends on how much freezer space you have. If you've got loads there is no reason why you can't cook on day a week, say a Sunday. Do something different each week, divide into those cheapy cartons, label and freeze.

Say you do Lasagne one week, chicken Korma, the next, cottage pie, beef stew etc. Then you will have a selection to choose from. You can get home at night, bang the Lasagne straight into the oven. Go and do something else for a while, and eat the lasagne with salad when it's ready.

Thank you Jilted

So the things I freeze can go straight into the oven frozen? So I dont have to defrost?? is everything like this or do some things need to be defrosted first?

Does anyone have any meals that I can cook over two days ??

Our favourite freezer meals are
bolognese, with lots of extra veg, freeze cooked pasta separately you can warm it in minutes in the microwave.
Chilli (rice can be frozen but not as successful as pasta!)
Sausage casserole is excellent
Curry
Any Stew
Avoid putting courgettes in anything to freeze they always come out watery.
The reason we like these ones is that you can prepare veg the night before, put in a slow cooker, come back to a big dinner and freeze the extra for another time.
With a slow cooker you can balance whole potatoes on top of the cooking stew and and really have a meal completely ready. They need their skins on and need to be sort of medium sized.

ooo you can freeze pasta??? what type of container do you freeze it and microwave it in?

Please keep them coming

I was thinking about cooking chicken - use some for a stir fry and then fridge the rest and use it in a pasta sauce the next day ?

You can get quick cook pasta, takes 5 mins & is surely better than freezing pasta?

Fish with mashed potato then fish cakes the next day?

I thought it was ok to refreeze thawed meat that had been cooked (but not to refreeze thawed meat which hadn't been cooked).

Thank you for the ideas !! Keep them coming.

One way to avoid freezing pasta is to either buy fresh pasta (you have to keep it in the fridge but it cooks quickly) or you can buy vaccum sealed gnocchi which takes 2 minutes to cook and can be kept in cupboard as long as you don't open it.

You can freeze most things, but some veg goes mushy (peppers are one example).

I feel comfortable keeping cooked food for upt to 4 days in the fridge. I often make lasagna or enchiladas, and don't bake (the ingredients are all precooked) then stick the pan in the fridge and take a serving as needed and heat in the mircrowave. Leaving out the baking keeps the cheese from getting hard and nasty.

I also make soup and keep it in the fridge and just reheat what I want to eat.

The rule is that you cannot freeze food more than once without changing its state. For instance:

FINE: freeze raw meat, defrost it, cook it, freeze again, re-heat and eat.

NOT FINE: freeze raw meat, defrost, freeze again before cooking because you didn't have a chance to use it.

NOT FINE: cook meal, freeze, defrost, reheat, freeze again.

It is also NOT ok to cook a meal, pop it in the fridge, reheat it, leave some leftovers, reheat them AGAIN.

The rule I have always lived by I'd that you can keep food in the fridge for 2 days after cooking. If you aren't going to use it then, you can still freeze it at that point (subject to rules above).

We rarely cook from fresh mid-week. Lots of pasta sauces, chilli, lasagne, stews, curry (or curry sauce and you can just chuck fresh meat in and cook).

Fish does not reheat well as it tends to dry out.

Also, if you are handy with a knife, it's relatively easy to spat chock a chicken, marinade it overnight and roast it for dinner. Takes much less time than roasting a normal chicken and you still get all the leftovers.

Thank you all so much for the advice - any 2 day meal ideas ??