Batch cooking and freezing - advice please!

[slopeyjoe]

on this snowy afternoon, i have decided to stock my freezer and am planning on making lasagne, beef stew and macaroni cheese in huuuge quantities and freezing in portions.

i know i can freeze the lasagne sucessfully, but what about the stew and the macaroni?

the meat i am using is fresh so there is not a problem with re-freezing, it;s just whether it will still be a nice taste and texture once defrosted and reheated.

any advice?

Go for it! It will work perfectly - very envious!!!

It will be fine - I am a lazy arse cook batch baker supremo

Stew - leave veg in biggish chunks and it will be marvellous. Often even better after freezing, bizarrely.

Ha! agree with the lazy arse-ness!

the great thing is my dh thinks i am a domestic goddess (i most certainly am not)when i suddenly produce something scrummy out of nowhere in next to no time...

i love my big freezer!

white sauces can sometimes separate after they've defrosted - check with one lot of macaroni cheese first (and if you have a method whcih doesn't separate, can you let me know please?)

I want a large freezer

white sauces can look bad once defrosted but when reheated they're fine - cauliflower cheese always works for me, either the all in one method or traditional normal roux then sauce way.

I have a tip which once made me look like Nigella (albeit a rather less sexy version).....all my dh's mates were well jealous.

I had dd2 and the following day when unexpected visitors arrived I produced home made biscuits fresh from the oven - the trick is to roll biscuit doughinto sausages and freeze; when biccies are required you just slice off inch thick potions and bake as normal

phew! that was a cookathon!

i now have two macaroni cheeses, 3 lasagnes, 2 cottage pies (had a stack of mince!) and a whole vat of stew in the oven, slowly cooking in loads of red wine.

i too feel very nigella-like, wisteria!

thanks all for the tips on the macaroni, i think that is why i was afraid of freezing it, but if it tastes ok than it doesn't have to win any beauty contests!

Well done chick - now you have officially passed the Nigella course and can move onto the next level of Keith Floyd and open the vino

tell me where you got the biscuit recipe to freeze, i like the idea of freshly baked biscuits for emergencies!

i got nigella express for christmas and i have already used the tip of making up a tin of dried pancake mix to dazzle the family with fresh pancakes of a morning, quick as a wink.

the dcs said, "they're not like the ones from morrisons.." Philistines!!!

It's a bog standard 'roll out' biscuit recipe so you could do it with anything I imagine - will have a look later for you if you want x

oooh well done on all the cooking, I am very envious as I only have a tiny freezer box in the fridge so could never do this!

I do the biscuits though and pretty much any recipe that involves rolling out the biscuit dough and cutting into circles etc. can be frozen in a log and sliced into biscuits for baking.

I am going to experiment with cookie dough too though, hopefully that will also work!

oooh, overmydeadbody, i just think of ben and jerry cookie dough ice-cream...drool!

but how do you cut the log when it's frozen, or am i being thick?

(btw, i got my big 6-ft freezer to keep in the garage from the small ads in our paper. before that we only had a tiny freezer too. it was £40 well-spent that's for sure, i can buy up on all those buy 2 for £5 or bogof deals on meat etc as well as batch cooking!

yes that would be good if I had the space! Sick of this tiny little house, there isn't even any parking as it's on double yellow lines! Saw a chest freezer 'free to a good home' on gumtree and wished I could have got it!

The frozen dough isn't that hard from my freezer (it's only a poxy -4C though) a serated knife like a steak knife cuts them just fine. Also, the high fat content stops them freezing too hard. Might be another matter in a chest freezer at -25C though!

Funny, I have often thought, when cutting the dough, what it would be like to bung some in some ice-cream for a home made version of B&J, but sadly I think it would not work!

When I lived in the states, you could buy cans of frozen cookie dough in the freezer section of the supermarkets, then just slice off as required, that was good raw too am drooling now.

It cuts fairly easy with a serrated knife if it's been out for 5mins or so.

I got my chest freezer for free; a lot of people get rid of them as a space saver now so just sit tight and keep your eyes open - mine looks awful from the outside but it works fine and is in the garage anyway so it's irrelevant to me!