AC FREEZER 7

Fabulous Freezer Meals

Fabulous Freezer Meals is a collection of over 200 recipes for dishes that can be frozen, then reheated and served later. Each recipes uses everyday ingredients and includes easy-to-follow instructions for food preparation and freezing. With the unique ideas in this book, you will quickly and easily stock your freezer with delicious meals, ensuring that you always have a handy meal in an emergency. Best of all, you can create convenient meals that are healthier than fast food and pre-packaged frozen foods.

Fabulous Freezer Meals will help you:

*Reduce food preparation and cleanup time.
*Package meals according to your family size and preferences.
*Cut down on trips to the grocery store.
*Save hundreds of dollars every month on your grocery bill.

Fabulous Freezer Meals will improve your lifestyle by saving you time, money, and sanity!

For additional information about freezer meals, visit Jenny at freezerdinner.com.

My burger shrunk in the cooking! If it hadn't, it would have fit that bun perfectly. Alas.

Oh well. I scooped all the innards out of the bun anyway after I took the photo and threw them away. (I like a bun shell much more than I like the bun itself. It's convenient for holding, but not so bready.) And once the insides of the bun were gone, the burger and vegetables all fit nicely inside the shell.

This was really good, anyway. It came from a cookbook that I picked up a few days ago, The Dinner Fix by Sandi Richard. Richard has a tv show on the Canadian food network called Fixing Dinner, which is basically about helping harried families get into a week-night routine of cooking quick, tasty, healthy meals. I don't generally have a problem with my cooking, since I only have to work around my schedule, but I love cookbooks and I was interested in seeing some of her recipes.

I'm actually intending to do a straight week of Dinner Fix recipes (that is five days, since she doesn't worry about the weekend), and this was a pretty good start, I think.

The burger is flavoured with chipotle seasoning, chili powder, cumin, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and ketchup. I made two (froze the second for another day) and also made meatballs for dinner on Tuesday. (Her thing: if you've already got ground beef out for one recipe, you might as well prep for another.)

It really was very fast - the prep took just a few minutes - and it cooked in about 12 minutes. All told, probably a 17 minute meal. Which even Rachael Ray could be proud of. (Though she'd have eaten two burgers and twice as many potato wedges. Which she'd have made herself instead of getting them from a bag in the freezer aisle.)

Bit by bit, I am getting durn close to that lighting from 1970's Better Homes & Gardens cookbooks. If I find a genie in a lamp, I'm gonna wish for a kitchen with natural light. Or for that matter, a place to live with natural light, this place is like a dungeon ...

Anyway, Pork Loin (center cut) en Croute. I decided to make this about two hours before dinner, so I didn't have time to defrost the phyllo dough in my freezer, and thus I used ... I used Pillsbury Dough Flaky Biscuits. Not my proudest moment, but it works, so who cares?

The pork gets about four minutes on a side over medium high heat, then get wrapped in the dough and into the oven for - and only the most experienced chefs can get a grip on this - as long as the directions on the biscuit tin say so. Maybe a little longer, but you get the idear. A meat thermometer is a good idea, in any case, although I'd generally advise you fine ladies to distrust any man who routinely recommends using a meat thermometer anywhere else but a kitchen environment.

The compote is half a can of peaches and half a can of pears in light syrup, stewed in a sautee pan with about two or three teaspoons of butter for about fifteen minutes or so. The brussel sprouts were pouch-steamed in a 350 degree oven for a good forty minutes, with butter and shallots. This meal shies not away from the butter. Nor the meat thermometer.

Voila! Food!