beginning the freezer meals

messing about with raw meat makes me SO paranoid. on saturday, i finally got started on my freezer meals that i've been talking about making for so long. i had bought 16lbs of boneless, skinless chicken breasts and was ready to make about 10 meals (that serve 4-6 each) from my cookbook The Big Cook. i started cutting up the chicken into chunks and separating it into bags (my T.ware freezermates are all already full of other things like berries, veggies, and mashed bananas!) and i started feeling a little panicky that i'd waited too long after buying the chicken (two days) and that it was getting warm sitting there while i cut. what if i am making meal after meal of contaminated meat that will make us sick when we eat it? so i'd cut up one package of chicken into bags then put the bags in the fridge and get the next package out of the fridge and repeat. it took awhile but i'd had enough sense to do all this chopping while sitting down.

then it was time to make the different marinades. the idea is that it takes the same amount of time to make one meal as it does to make 4 or 8. i did two recipes for 4 meals. i hadn't exactly thought about how MUCH of each ingredient i'd need for such large quantities - i'd just bought the ingredients. when you multiply everything by 4, it meant that i had barely enough honey, not enough soy sauce, i used our entire bottle of ketchup, and ran out of lemon juice. woah. i ended up not being able to make the two recipes i'd originally intended and had to switch to one that i had different ingredients. oh brother. but anyways, i got 4 meals of Cantonese Chicken, 4 meals of Maple Chicken, and 2 meals of Pasta Chicken Casserole (in which you add pasta later).

so i have other chicken frozen meals that i wanted to make but will wait a bit. i should get some beef and maybe some pork chop meals prepped first so that we don't get super sick of chicken. i browned a bunch of beef the other day as well and tonight i made one lasagna to freeze but think i might as well make the rest of the beef into lasagnas as well since i've had a bit of an aversion to red meat lately and lasagna is one of the few red meat meals i still like. oh - but i could make burritos maybe...hmm...

now if only my feet didn't hurt so much - it would make all the kitchen work so much easier.