2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense

2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense Seminars@Hadley

Presented by Linn Sorge Sue Melrose

Moderated by Dawn Turco

February 4, 2016

Intro You are listening to Seminars@Hadley. This seminar is Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense presented by Linn Sorge and Sue Melrose. Moderated by Dawn Turco.

Dawn Turco Good morning and welcome to today’s Seminars@Hadley. I’m Dawn Turco and I’ll be moderating today’s seminar and kind of co-presenting as I tend to do with these food- related seminars. Today’s topic is Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense. And I suspect everyone in the room today has done some forms of make-ahead dishes, because how can you not? There is just so many choices out there. But we got to thinking and we realized so many of us today are super, super busy.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 1 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense And how do you plan healthy and tasty and kind of cater to your families concerns? That’s not a right word. How do you plan those dishes that’s going to make everybody’s likes and dislikes in your family without always reaching for the taken menu, and goodness knows I have a jarful of them. And the people at Costco, you know, they see me in the frozen food section a lot, so they know that I’m putting a few things in my freezer.

What we really wanted to talk about some ways that we can do that on our own, you know, fill those freezers, economize on our freezer space so that we make good use of that space. You know then on the other hand how do you entertain without frantically fuzzing in the kitchen at the last moment missing too much of your own party? So we put all that together and decided to do this seminar today on the Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense topic.

As we prep for today’s seminar we realize there is a lot of good information out there that we wanted to share about freezing and tips for freezing and how long things can stay frozen and how to label properly. So we are going to be sharing lots of those tips. I do want to say that we have a resource list that will get posted with the recording of today’s seminar, and it’s pretty extensive so lots of things that we talk about today are on that resource list, so don’t be scribbling notes throughout. You’ll be able to get it very easily on the Hadley website. So the links will be there to some of the websites that we got our information from, and then we’ve got a long list of recipes.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 2 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense Linn and I kind of went a little crazy and there are a lots of recipes there that are from no-cook to crock-pot to oven recipes, you know, something for everyone pretty much at every skill level. So we’ll invite you to go visit those as well.

I’m presenting today with Sue Melrose and Linn Sorge; both people are very familiar to our seminars on food and other topics, so you’ll probably recognize their voices if you’ve been with us before. Both are instructors with Hadley and we all love our food. So here we are the three of us today.

Before I hand the microphone over in fact, I want to just share – We just said we’re going to share. I’m going to share two stories that happened as a result of planning for today’s seminar. Over the holidays I tried something completely different. I found a recipe that was for meatballs and the idea was you can make this huge batch of meatballs, eat some now and then freeze some for later. And I’ve made a lot of meatballs in my days, but I never tried putting them in the oven and baking them. And I’ll have to say baking the meatballs; so fast, so easy, you can make a ton of them at once.

And luckily for me I did that because here is the kind of the make-ahead comes in handy over the holidays of a group of college kids home on break, dropped in, and you know those meatballs came out of that freezer and found their way into a huge bowl of pasta and my meal was almost

And keeping with my Italian roots here, I also over the holidays tried something a little bit different with my lasagna, which I always make at the holiday time, typically one-time a year. And instead of the lasagna pan I made it to transport a smaller portion to Saint Louis with me. So I used a loaf pan. But here is the part that was so cool that I read about online and tried it; you know, if you use your 13x9, you’re making your dishes ahead, the last thing you want to do is have your 13x9 in the freezer not only taking up too much space but also, you don’t have your 13x9, which is really handy. And this was true of my loaf pan. I wanted my loaf pan back to bake breads.

So the idea was you line those pans with aluminum foal with excess on the top and you put your make-ahead dish that you want to freeze in there, put it in the freezer and freeze it till’ it’s hard as a brick and then it pops right out of that baking dish or whatever you’ve got it in that you want to reuse. And when you’re ready to use it that little brick you peel that aluminum foil off and you can pop it right back in to the baking dish for baking, and that’s exactly what I did.

I’ll add a caveat to what I read online. I happen to use a little plastic wrap as well as the aluminum foil and when I peeled that off it came off really easy. There was no aluminum foil left on my lasagna thing. So it was a

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 4 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense wonderful tip on how you can economize on that space in the freezer by making these little bricks. I don’t know what else to call them. Well, clearly I’ve talked plenty for getting us started. And we have quite a little program outline here. And as I read I am handing the microphone off to Linn. And let me just say Linn and Sue, thank you very much for agreeing to do today’s seminar. We are underway.

Linn Sorge Good morning everyone. When it is my turn, it appears that there will be just a little pause between because it takes about three times to get the control key to react. But I will be coming on. So thank you Dawn. I love her idea about getting your pans back by wrapping things in the freezer.

I am a make-ahead cook. Also for me, I have another thing besides vision going on, I have rheumatoid arthritis. And so by the end of the day I am usually pretty tired. So on weekends or when I do any kind of a dish I make more than I need purposefully and then I make some meals. Often I put them in individually meal-size containers that at the end of a busy day I can just pull one out and enjoy it. Actually, I would probably pull it out about noon time and put it in the drainer of the sink or I might also pull it out the night before and put it in the fridge and let it start to thaw. That way you’re not doing so much cooking at the end. You just heat it up and it is so helpful to me.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 5 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense How do you do it efficiently is partly what I want to start with. You don’t do the entire thing at the beginning. If you bake it, if it’s a big casserole and you bake it and it has rice or noodles in it and then you put it in the freezer it isn’t tasty, because you’ve already cooked the noodles, you’ve already cooked the rice. So what I always say is think up the ingredients in your dish that have an extra prep step that need to be.

If you’re going to make, say Dawn lasagna and it has sausage or ground beef or something in it, you can brown the meat and get it drained out and cooled ahead. That’s the step you could do. You can simmer, create sauce and simmer it; that’s another step you can do ahead. So what I actually do in my freezer you will find containers of ground beef. And they’re usually enough to just dump into a casserole, about a cup, a little less than a cup and I fry when I do these to fill the container pretty close to the top or to put plastic wrap over the top.

This lets air and stuff like that – If you think about ice cream in your freezer, it’s a good example. At my house it doesn’t stay in the freezer too long, but if you keep it for a long time you feel kind of a dried out or crystally part at the top. I would think more companies should design containers where you would take a little plastic wrap or something that would slide right down in and rest on top of the ice cream. And that keeps the extra air and in some cases when you’re freezing things, the extra watery steamy stuff from getting in there. Before you freeze

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 6 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense anything, let it cool completely. Don’t just let it be warm. Let it cool totally completely. We make apple sauce every fall using I think three different kinds of apples. And I let them cool and then I freeze one-cup containers and a few two-cup containers with their labels on them and put them in the freezer. I’ll talk more about labeling later. But then all winter long I have one pudding in my fridge right now, I have homemade apple sauce and you just pop it out of the freezer and there you go.

You can also do some of the assembly steps I had. You can – let’s say it’s a dish with noodles. You can cook your noodles, make your sauce, ground – drain and cook your ground beef or sausage and then you put it all together in whatever pan or pans you choose and do Dawn’s nifty method of using that wrapping and freeze it. Then you bake it at the time you need it. That way you’re not baking it and then reheating it, which means cook the noodles, bake the noodles and then reheat the noodles. That’s where they lose that nifty pasta kind of texture and taste.

So you do everything you can, but cake it, bake it, or cook it or whatever. And that’s the only thing you have to do and when people come to your home if it’s baking it smells absolutely wonderful. And you didn’t have to spend extra time, an hour making and simmering sauce, time ground – you know, cooking the beef or whatever. Then people say, “How long do I keep it? What can I freeze? Well, what shouldn’t I freeze?” And those are the things we’re

Sue Melrose Okay. I learned some things and I was doing this research and I did not know, one is that frozen foods although they might discolor, they might freeze or burn, they might look strange, they lose their taste, they are not unsafe almost forever. So I guess in a way I was somewhat relieved by that, although you don’t want to serve discolored foods or freeze or burnt foods, but to know that you’re probably not going to get sick from foods that been in the freezer too long as long as they have stayed frozen and not been refrozen a second time. So that to me was kind of an interesting fact that I didn’t know.

Another one that I guess I didn’t really realize is the more – or I sort of did. The more processed the food, the shorter time you can keep it. Put for example hotdogs. I think of a hotdog is something that’s almost indestructible. But really, the recommendation for freezing a hotdog is just one to two months, and that surprised me.

Lunch meat, the recommendation for freezing it again is one to two months, whether it was opened or unopened. And we kind of think of these picnic foods and that kind of thing is again bacon is the same way, a hamburger. If it’s ground beef, actually that can go for three to four months, fresh beef can go six to 12 months. So you can kind of see a pattern here, the more process, the more if it’s

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 8 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense opened or not opened, the smaller the pieces too make a difference. For example in poultry and chicken, turkey, for a whole one you can freeze that for a whole year and it should stay pretty fresh. But if you cut it up in pieces then it’s only nine months. So again, and ground – so I remember was down to the shortest two months. So the more smaller the pieces and the more processed, the less time is kind of the pattern.

The ones that we also often make ahead are breads and desserts. So for baked cookies and breads it’s about three months that you can freeze them in the freezer; cakes and breads and muffins. All of that tend to be about three months; pancakes. The only one that is out of that pattern is cookie dough and bread dough. They only recommend one month on that, and I suspect partly because it has eggs in it; the cookie dough at least.

Fruits can stay in for – fruits and juices can stay in for a year. Vegetables eight months and nuts three months. Now I would’ve thought that maybe the other way around, but according to the charts. Dairy ice cream they recommend only two months. I’ve been at Linn’s house and I know she doesn’t have to worry about that one. We tend to dawn our ice cream pretty quickly. Butter can stay in for nine months, cheese for three, and milk for one month. I don’t freeze my milk, but if some people do.

Okay, meats and stews they can stay in about four months. Roast steaks they can stay in a whole year,

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 9 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense because see their whole of it haven’t been touched. Lamb veal about nine months. Ham I was surprised by frozen, only two months. So sausage they recommend only one month.

Now seafood, that’s one I always worried about and thought that actually would spoil. So three months you can keep your fatty fish such as the mackerel, the trout that can be three months. Shellfish such as cod, flounder, that can be six months. Crab can be 10 months. And lobster I was surprised can be a year. It wouldn’t last in my house a year, but scallops also is one of our favorites, and shrimp they can stay in for a year.

You can get all these charts off the internet. Actually, you can just sort of Google freezing time and give the specific food and you’ll usually get taken to the chart. So I guess I learned a lot and learned that I really need to start looking at those charts because they’re different than I thought they might be. They were saying casseroles if you cook them, three months. Soups and stews are again for two months. Pizza, that’s something we often freeze, one to two months.

So again, those are just some guidelines and maybe you too were surprised by some of the date of the times on those. And so now I will turn it over to, I think it’s Dawn.

Dawn Turco

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 10 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense Thanks, Sue. And I was just looking at the chart myself as you went along and they are on the resource list, so we made it easy. And one of those charts is from the US Department of Agriculture I think, so we’re considering them pretty good sources. And you know Sue just mentioned the soups and stews, one of the tips that I read for the make-ahead is – well, there is two of them; one is when you’re doing something like a soup and certainly Linn touched on this, you want to undercook those vegetables in there just a little bit because of the reheating process. And then the second thing I read and I actually do a lot of soups and stews and the crock-pot so this was good for me, the container choice. You know when you put them in a container in your freezer, you don’t want to leave a lot of room at the top. Just enough for freezing, but too much air at the top of those containers is not good for I think that longevity or the kind of crystalliny thing that happens on the top of things when they’re in the freezer with air.

So anyway, I learned those. But as much as we’ve learned about things that can be frozen that were surprising, we also learned there was a list of things that you’re not supposed to freeze and some of these caught me by surprise, because you know, there is often conflicting opinions out there. And Sue touched on lunch meats, and you know I found a list that said you really shouldn’t freeze the deli-products, unless they are well- packaged was what another site said.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 11 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense Some of these are so, so make sense you’d wonder why somebody would think to do this but I’m going to give you the list. Things not to freeze included eggs in their shells, hardboiled eggs. The list said that you can freeze raw eggs but they have to be out of their shells, but they can still be frozen for about a month and if they’re well in a good container.

Coffee, this I had read once before that you should not freeze coffee, which I used to do and, you know, the advice out there too was that you shouldn’t even put the coffee in the refrigerator that – we kind of do that. So I went home to announce to my husband, not only should we not be freezing it, we shouldn’t be putting it in the refrigerator. You just want it in a cool place.

Mayonnaise, sour cream butter milk, cream cheese, pudding, custards, salads and salad dressings, now here come some of the ones that who would think to do this? Unopened canned ham, uncooked pasta, uncooked rice, does that stuff ever really go bad? Why would I put it in the freezer? Not sure.

Cereal, apples, melons, artichokes, eggplant, lettuce, potatoes, now that was kind of interesting because we get potatoes in so many frozen meals, but it did occur to me a lot of times those frozen meals have mashed potatoes in them and that’s the one that is a little better in the freezer than any other kind of potato. Radishes, sprouts, carbonated drinks and beer; no freezing the beer out there

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 12 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense people. I guess that is telling us we should just drink it in a timely manner. I don’t know.

Anyway, that was the list of things that do not go in the freezer. Now I’m going to hand the microphone off to Linn who is going to start the conversation on kind of storing options and labeling. So back at you Linn.

Linn Sorge Yes, I’m going to talk about those things. I will tell you the things Dawn was saying, “Don’t freeze,” I’ve only – some of them frozen accidentally. If you get something way in the back of your fridge next to where it gets the very coldest, you may open a can of soda and it will freeze and make one ugly mess. So make really, really sure that you don’t keep things like that. I did the same thing with eggs. I accidentally put – I was very efficient, I was in a hurry and knew I would be at the supper time so I peeled the eggs and put them in the freezer and they accidentally got pushed back into the very coldest part. They were like little rocked when I got them out.

I would agree that freezing boiled eggs is not at all appealing or tasty through the mouth. But when I’m talking about what to do and how to organize it, I tend to label a lot in my house because I live independently. Some people – and they can be very organized, very put- together, but if you’re in a household where there is a sighted family member or two or three with a spouse and a child, a teenager or just a spouse you don’t tend to label

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 13 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense as much. I noticed this with my friends because they can turn and say, “Hey, Michael. What’s in this?” Well, I can’t say, “Hey, Michael. What’s this?” So I tend to label. However, I must confess that of all the places in my house the one that is the least labeled in certain areas of it is my freezer. But I do – I have an upright freezer. I would not use it as freezer at all. And my top shelf on my upright contains desserts, bread, muffins, that kind of thing. I label them. What I do is I put labels on containers while things are not cold. That way the labels will stick better. Depending on how you’re going to setup your freezer you might put the label on the side of a round container or a little square box and that way you just put it toward the front and you can read the labels. Or you may put it on the top of the containers and all the apple sauce is stacked in one row, all the corn chowder is stacked in another, all the – and on the top of each one is the label.

I use masking tape a lot because it comes off easily and just good old braille [00:24:27] paper for this kind of labeling. It’s cheap, it’s quick, and when I do masking tape on mine I tuck a tipsy little corner and bend it so that there’s a corner that is not taped, but a little place you could get your fingertip or nail under and then you just start to pull and the tape and the label comes off so easily. And that really helps a lot.

With my ice cream it sounds crazy, but it works. I have a company that I get a lot of ice cream from. A couple of examples I think that are pretty saundered [00:25:12] are

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 14 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs. They have round containers with lids on the top. When I get them I put a label on the lid and I propose you use braille [00:25:29] label, which is a sticky-back kind of stuff. And I put it on, I let the lid dry. Just the first time I serve the ice cream, I take it out, take the lid off, dry the lid, clean it so it’s nice and clean, put my label on and then all the way through that container. I’ve got a whole roll of them in the door of my fridge, butter pecan, chocolate marshmallow, mint chips, peppermint, chocolate caramel crunch, what it might be, triple chocolate chunk. And they all have plastics; their cardboard labels.

When that container is empty I keep the lid making sure it’s clean and then when I get a new container of the same ice cream I simply take that old container’s lid and put it on. It is a lot of time and it does keep everything labeled very, very well.

I also do things like – if you’re doing things for work or a workday make sure you think about what you want to freeze and how much of it. I touched on this at the beginning, but if I know I’m going to have two people here for dinner, it’s very handy to have several things in my freezer that are saved in containers that would hold two servings. Sue is going to talk to you about various containers and things like that, but I use a lot of stuff. I use one-pound margarine containers, I use small cottage cheese containers, I use – any kind of container like that

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 15 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense that I can wash up, get clean, and then just slap a label on and put it in my freezer. And it helps a lot.

I like the little plastic containers with snap-on lids for that kind of thing. If you’re going to have four people, use a bigger cottage cheese container or a two-pound margarine tub container that you happen to have extra that you – I have a box in my pantry that has containers that I’ve used and then I can use again. So you can use Ziploc bags if you want in your freezer, but two things; make really sure that you have sealed it well and then to freeze them you can just put them on a flat tray like a cookie sheet and get them frozen. I would label them beforehand with something, and then when they’re frozen you can tip then up and stack them like – either stack them and just stack or put them with the tops up which I tend to recommend just in case something might happen. But tops up and put them in a row like books in your freezer.

So it’s a very handy way, it’s economical and it takes up the least amount of space, because you’re not taking up space for containers around the food, which really helps a lot. So how do I label? I have heard and I am going to release the key here in a minute to see what the audience has about this. But I have the old pen friend [00:29:14] the version one, and they say for that, you know you can’t use it for freezer labels but there is a pen friend [00:29:23] new generation or a version two something like that, and I have read that you can get freezer labels for it.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 16 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense So I don’t have one yet, because I already bought the old one, but I wish you could trade those babies in anyhow. If any of you in the audience have used the new one and have used it for freezer labels, I’d love to hear how that works, and if it is as good as they claim it is. So I’m just going to release the key for a minute here to see if there’s any input about that or any questions about what we’ve done so far.

Woman I have a question about the masking-tape use. I didn’t get clear about how do you put braille [00:30:08] in it.

Linn Sorge What I do is I make braille [00:30:14] paper labels leaving an edge on each end. And then I stick a piece of masking tape on each end of my label with – some of it on the paper and some tape hanging off. And then I either put it on the lid of a container, on the side of a bag, or on the side of a container. All my apple sauce containers have labels on the side and something else that I do when I freeze things, because of what’s so sad, although I’m very glad to hear even if it doesn’t look so hot you could still use it because I have some hotdogs in there that have been more than two months. But anyway, I date them.

My apple sauce will say the day I made it, so it will say, “Apple sauce 11/10/15.” And that’s when I made it. And so if you would happen to find something from 14 in there

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 17 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense you can get it out and use it sooner than you would typically do. So that’s how I do it.

I know Ziploc bags are great, but I like the ability to stack and sort and put things. So I use certain kinds of containers for certain foods just to make it quick. I use a certain brand of margarine container for my ground beef that I’ve stored already, fried out and ready to go. It is still labeled but it’s just a certain shape. I use a different shape for my apple sauce, and that way – even though I may two different things of one shape; hamburger and mashed potatoes, but at least I can just quickly reach in and look for that shape. I know where I keep them in the freeze and then I do that.

Now some people aluminum pans are handy because often they’re a take somewhere. I’m going over the grandma’s tonight or, you know, and I am supposed to take a dish. So I can grab something in an aluminum pan, that’s a handy way for me and take it and sometimes those pans get kind of cruddy and stuff, but if they’re aluminum pans and it’s okay you could use them a couple of times then you can just throw them away and not have to clean all the gunk out of a little rough crinkly edges of aluminum pan.

Some people use glass jars for freezing or bowls. There are plusses in that. Some of them go from freezer to oven to table, but I am not one to like to use glass a lot in my freezer. If something would slip you could truly A, break

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 18 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense the container, especially because it’s very cold. And if it breaks you can’t use the food because you can’t see if anything might have clung to it. So have no glass in my freezer at all, but I know it is a recommended way and you can just take it, flop it in your oven and then flop it on your table if it’s a lovely casserole dish. I’m just telling you from my kind of inner feelings. I just don’t like to do it very much.

Some people use a vacuum sealer and vacuum bags, and they’re very good because you can get all the air out, make it just perfect. But I don’t – again, that’s a lot of fuzzing and mushing around. When I freeze muffins I do all the steps. I get the little cupcake or whatever muffin, little crinkly-edge things, set them up in pan, make my muffins when I’ve got time, fill the little things, put them on in the muffin pan, in the freezer and freeze them. Then I put them in a Ziploc bag with a set of instructions brailled [00:34:35] that tucks in the bag or on it and then when I want fresh muffins that will make my house smell really yummy and welcoming to somebody getting up in the morning, I take however many I think I’m going to need out of the freezer and put them in the oven in the pan and all they have to do is bake.

I don’t have to grate the apples, chop the nuts, dice the fruit whatever, mix the whole thing. I just take them in my freezer, put them in the muffin pans, pop them in the oven. Now, you have to experiment a little. Some of them will take five minutes more baking time, some might take

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 19 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense eight. So just do a little test. And the nifty thing about that is you only have to do as many as you think you will enjoy eating. So those are some of the ways that I label and organize. And now Sue is going to talk to you about all the different cool containers and there are nifty ones out there.

Sue Melrose Okay. One thing I did learn in reading is that you have shortage in freezer space, using square containers is the most efficient, because you can put them in corners, they stack together with no extra space between them. And so that’s one of the tricks that I did learn. Another one as Linn already said was the Ziploc bag. And if you can freeze it flat and then get all the air out of it, that really is probably the most efficient way because they’re very, very thin.

A lot of people like Dawn recommended and it’s a good – I do it a lot is wrap it in tin foil. The only thing I did discover for me is oftentimes the tin foil will stick if you can’t get it off – if you have to get it off before it’s totally thawed out. So sometimes I will wrap that kind of stuff in plastic first or wax paper and then put the tin foil on. And that way the tin foil allows you to get all the air out because tin foil molds right to the shape of what you’re freezing, but also it won’t stick. You’ve got an inner surface.

I like Linn don’t like jars. I don’t know, there’s a lot of safety things said about jars like don’t – if you’re going to

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 20 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense freeze something in jars don’t tighten the lid because things do expand and your jar could break. But also then you got to remember to go in later and tighten the lid. To me it’s too inconvenient.

If you’ve got a freezer with several shelves I would sort them by putting meat on one and whatever dinner is on another. Also, I usually try to keep kind of a plastic box in the freezer for things that are just oddly shaped and doesn’t seem to go anywhere. I label them. If they don’t categorize them where I just label them and put them in that box, and then I know for kind of odd things I know right where to go find them.

I think you need to remember though when you do all these kind of things you need to rotate them frequently, pull the stuff from the back to the front, pull the old in front so you eat it and let the new sit a little bit longer. So again, rotate everything around. And now I’m going to pass this over to I believe Dawn.

Dawn Turco All right folks. I am going to open the microphone in just a second so anybody out there – we’re looking for other tips. And before I do that I will just kind of piggyback on Linn saying that the ground beef – to get the better price of course we all know in the grocery store you want bigger packaging. And with only two of us in my house on most days I can’t use a huge package of ground beef, and then you don’t want them sitting in the fridge that long. You

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 21 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense don’t want raw meat in your fridge long, so I have taken to pre-cooking ground beef. And you know it’s so easy for make-ahead because I might be making chili with most of the meat, but I’ll peel some cooked ground beef off, put it in the freezer and it is the fastest thing to get a taco salad at a later date, and you can get that dinner together in less than 15 minutes with that pre-cooked meat.

So with my travel schedule, and I will tell you I have a husband who will admit he does not cook. So if I’m on the road for a good stretch of time I’ve got it all lined up in the freezer for him, because one thing he can do is work the microwave. So make-ahead makes sense for our household.

Okay. I’m opening the microphone. I hope somebody out there has a nifty tip to share with the group.

Linn Sorge I forgot something so before I am done if you are at all text savvy and you are really a computer buff, I make a file on my computer of any recipe that I’m freezing as in, let’s say tuna noodle casserole and in it the recipe will give the baking instructions and the time. And that way I can print up that little label if I want and use it over and over for each one of those casseroles that I do. And another thing if you’re making stews and soups along with being careful about the veggies and how much you cook them, don’t put quite as much seasoning as you think you might need, because that tends to increase over the resting time in the

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 22 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense freezer. So do your final taste test, which is always fun anyway or have a guest do it when you’re going to use it. Now, the microphone is up.

Miley This is Miley, and sometimes I will save in an ice cube tray like little bits of bullion or stock or tomato sauce or tomato paste if I just need a little bit and then I store those frozen cubes of whatever it is in a freezer, Ziploc bag and label it so I have those small portions available.

Dawn Turco I love that idea, because how often have you opened a can of tomato sauce or tomato paste or something and it costs for a couple of tablespoons or a part of the can and then you don’t use it. You put it in the fridge and you find it there weeks later. So I love this idea. Thank you for sharing it. Any others?

Woman My mother uses ice trays, ice cubes to put eggs in. You could put one egg in each little cube and thaw your egg out or egg white or egg yolk, you could separate it. Also when we’ve got a larger amounts of hamburger meat or set and we want to make hamburger steak or hamburgers, we shape them into the patty, freeze the patty on a tray and then put it on a wrapping, with hand wrap or something and put it in plastic bags.

Dawn Turco

Man Just the other day a friend brought me 14 oranges. They have orange trees, and so I juiced all of that and froze it because I knew I might not drink it all right away and I didn’t want it to go bad. That does not last very long. I’m like, stuff you buy in the store it doesn’t have additives.

Dawn Turco That’s a good one too. You know in keeping that thought going of how we really don’t want to waste any of our fresh foods I have a tip that I haven’t tried yet, but in some ways makes sense. You know we buy our onions, our celery, our carrots; the trilogy that gets put into so many mirnpua [00:42:28]. And I’m terrible at French so sorry for butchering that. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown bits and pieces of all three of those out because I didn’t use them in time.

So I’ve read that you can actually, you know, pre-chop some of those and put them again in freezer bags. And the advice I got on it was it’s not good for everything, because after they’re frozen they’re not going to have that same crisp for example as you might get when they’re fresh, but you know if you’re putting them in stews or soups and they’re going to get cooked a good long time you can make use of those frozen bits and not waste it.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 24 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense And so I’ve kind of got this new thing where I don’t want to waste anything if I don’t have to, so I’m going to figure this out as I go forward but that was a tip that I picked up in preparing.

Where at a point where we wanted to kind of just touch on a few ideas for entertaining and I have the microphone so I’ll start off. There are recipes on the resource lesson and one of them was a crock-pot fajita recipe. And it occurred to me how brilliant is this idea. You know crock-pots are not the old crock-pots that when they first started out we’ve gotten really very good at them developing recipes where you can plop even huge chunks of meat.

I do my Saint Patrick’s Day meal in the crock-pot because I don’t have the fuzz with it right before guests get there. It’s been cooking all day so I encourage you. But in this case it was crock-pot fajitas and I thought, “How great for like a Super Bowl party or something.” You can just have that going and people can kind of serve themselves because you have all the bits that go with the fajitas in the bowls alongside of the crock-pot and they can make it to their own taste. So I loved that idea so I put the recipe.

And I said at the outset there was one other thing I tried for the first time and I’ll share that now before passing off. Oatmeal. Oatmeal in my house; I’m the only one that likes oatmeals so I never make it because, you know, I’ll eat it on the road but I don’t want to be making and fuzzing with oatmeal just for myself, even though there is – and I don’t

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 25 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense like that pre-packaged stuff. It’s just too many calories and sugars than you might think.

So anyway, I tried this recipe, it was make-ahead oatmeal and it’s on the resource list as well. And basically you do this quicky thing in your pan stove top and do it the night before, turn the heat off and leave it. And when you come up in the morning there is your oatmeal ready to go. And so if you got a family or if you’ve got guests and you’ve got other things you’re going to be doing for breakfast, here you’ve got this made-ahead oatmeal.

Again, you can dress it, have people have fun dressing it their selves. I ate part of it for breakfast the other day and I will tell you the honest truth it is here at Hadley with me today the rest of it. I’m having it for lunch. I threw some raisins in a Ziploc, I threw my Splenda brown sugar. I like brown sugar but I use the Splenda version. It’s in a bag ready to go and I’ve got a little milk and it’s all going into microwave shortly after this seminar completes and I will be having the oatmeal that I did not fuzz with at all because I made it last Sunday. How cool was that? I love it. The make-ahead oatmeal recipe is on the resource list.

Other entertaining ideas. Who can I hand this off to? Linn and I think we go to Sue and then we’re about done.

Linn Sorge I’m going to talk about salads and breakfast. We keep talking freezer and I can hear some of you saying, “Well,

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 26 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense are things, other things? Oh, yeah, other things.” I am not one – if I’m planning for a busy day perhaps there are a whole bunch of people and we’re going off for a class. And I am responsible for them to have breakfast at my house before the class. I do not want to have to get up and make a whole bunch of stuff and spend an hour, hour and a half and then go off for a whole busy day.

Another time, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, any kind of holiday like that if there are guests, I love to make a good breakfast but I don’t want to spend the whole morning doing it. So there are a lots of make-ahead breakfast casseroles where you can create them the night before and then you get up, you put them in the oven and during the last little time you get all some of those frozen muffins and put them in the muffin pan and bake them and you get those lovely meal and you don’t have to do much ahead. Or I’m sorry, during the time you do it all ahead.

Just to consider, make sure if you’ve got somebody that isn’t a real big carb person I would probably use a breakfast casserole that didn’t have oats and have whole slices of bread and that’s a lot of bread if you’re especially going to serve muffins with it.

So some of them don’t. Or you can take three or four of those slices of bread and put in a little more meat cheese or crab cheese and eggs. If you’re not wanting a lot of egg yolks and more egg white or egg yolks than your recipe says. And another we do is if you want to have

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 27 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense grapefruit halves, nobody wants to get up that morning and kind of clean up the edges and make sure the little chunks of grapefruit come out easily. But you can do that ahead the day before and flip them outside down on a cookie sheet with sides and they’re fine. You just take them off the next morning, flip them right side up and put them in soft dishes and you’ve got them.

Another thing that I like to do is make either salad or parts of salads. I don’t feel like dicing and slicing after full days of teaching, as I said because of the rheumatoid arthritis in my hands. So I might take a container and I stuff a whole bunch of celery on Monday; whole bunch of little carrot, dice up or grate or get a package of grated seeds; boil up my eggs and get them peeled ahead of time. And you can make a salad bar buffet like that for somebody who is coming but you can do it ahead. You don’t have to do it the hour before the guests show up.

Another thing that I like to do is create salads and then let’s make make-ahead chicken salad, egg salad, tuna salad. So what you do is you get the nice crunchies to go along with it and maybe really nice fresh rolls. You could heat them in the oven if you wanted or not. And we have bowls of the various salads available. Maybe somebody wants egg salad, somebody else wants tuna salad or whatever. And so it’s a salad buffet. And then you can perhaps make some brownies ahead of time or cookies ahead of time and you’ve got your desserts and a salad buffet.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 28 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense Or if it’s just you, you could create nice thing of tuna salad and make two different days lunches before it goes bad to work. Just remember to keep things like that in the fridge. So all of this can either work for everyday or if you’re going to have guests. And I know that Sue has had 32 people in her home for I think it’s Thanksgiving. So if there is anybody that can talk to you about holiday cooking and prep, here she is.

Sue Melrose Okay. Yes. Obviously, I come from a large family and what we generally tend to do I have an open family living room. We set up folding tables from one end to the other about 30 some feet of them. Run long table cloths and go to work. So basically what I’ve learned over time and my family has taught me because I tend to get stressed out about the time keep rising is we do as much ahead of time as possible.

Now much of this we’ve already covered so I’m not going to repeat it. But a lot of it remember is up to your own taste. I know you can freeze homemade frozen pies. I don’t like the flavor of them. So I make my homemade pies the day before, cover them well and they’re just as good the next day. Now some casseroles I think actually taste better if you make them ahead. Some of the things people forget and I don’t think we’ve mentioned though is when you’re making a casserole, cook it then you have to let it cool absolutely down to room temperature. This is true with soups and sauces too.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 29 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense In fact, I even saw in the website one woman said she gets so impatient and she puts her pan of stew in ice cold water in the sink and stirs it until it cools off. So you can do it however you want, but it’s absolutely important that things are cool because steam if you wrap it up it just turns to water and ice and ruins your food. So again, be very patient when you’re doing casseroles ahead of time. Cool them to room temperature, wrap them tightly.

Other thing is the – I was glad to hear you could freeze mashed potatoes. I haven’t done that, but I know mashed potatoes I think taste better when made the day ahead allowed to sit and really kind of stew in their own spice and juices and whatever.

Obviously, when we talk about make-ahead I think it’s more into just say that not only as food can be ahead of time but cook soak in the setup. Half of our house is no longer usable after about 7:00 the night before because it’s all setup for the guest the next day. Also the next morning breakfast tends to become a problem so I was very interested in Linn’s ideas about breakfast. But also you know you can make pancakes and waffles ahead of time. Go ahead and make them, cook them, stack them with either wax paper or parchment paper between each one, freeze them in like a Ziploc bag or something that you can get all the air out or wrap them in tin foil however you want to do it. But then when you’re ready you just take them out of the freezer and because they’ve been separated you can just pop them in the toaster, and it’s

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 30 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense amazing how good the pancakes and waffles come out. And we’ve learned to do that the day of a big holiday so that we’re not stressed out trying to get breakfast ready and get the kitchen all dirty again. So that was something I also learned.

So I think most of these other stuff has been covered, but yes I did learn you actually can serve 32 people sitting down about the same time with a lot of thought and it’s actually one of my best probably Thanksgivings ever. So I’m going to turn this back over.

Dawn Turco Thanks, Sue. We are winding down our hour. I will open the microphone one last time if any participant had a tip and didn’t get it in we have a second for that and then we’ll start our farewell. So one last time, here is the microphone.

Sheila Hi, Dawn. This is Sheila. They were talking about that you could not freeze like melon and that kind of stuff, but I thought I’ve seen it like in the store when it’s been frozen like let’s say Costco or Sam’s Club or something. So how can they get by with it but we can’t at home?

Dawn Turco You know I thought about that as well since I’ve kind of gotten into smoothies and I’ve discovered lots of frozen fruits. But I think they’re talking as you buy them from the

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 31 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense store. So don’t freeze your cantaloupe, your melon as you buy it. I think if you take it out and prep that you’ll be fine. But it was a good follow-up question. Thanks for that Sheila.

Sue Melrose Also, I think one reason you’re saying that is believe it or not, a lot of the stuff we get from the stores has already been frozen once. Most of your meats have already been frozen once and I suspect to some of the cut-fruits and other things have been frozen once. And so what they’re saying is to re-freeze some of these things will take away the freshness of it.

Dawn Turco And I have to say Sue when you were talking about the things that can kind of have a long life in the freezer but they’ll lose their color and their taste I can’t tell you how many bags of shrimp I’ve thrown out because I just left them in there too long and they taste terrible. They may not make you sick but they do taste terrible. So the whole concept of the keeping in mind what you’ve got in there and not letting things go too long is really key.

So and Linn, any last thoughts before we close down? And I’m going to get ready to, excuse me, post that survey. So if you have time, please fill it out. Thanks.

Linn Sorge

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 32 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense I was thinking of your shrimp Dawn, because you mentioned that the other day and I agree with you. But you know what I think – I was wondering, you know, you get shrimp in these big bags and it’s a floppy bag and there’s lots of air in there and all. I wonder if we took them out and put them in Ziploc bags and really took the air out and made them, you know, much better for freezing would they last longer? And I think the answer probably is yes. So I’m going to try that next time when I buy my shrimp is not keep it in that floppy bag with all the air in it, but see if I can get some of the air out and freeze it in a more prepared manner.

Sue Melrose Well, it’s talking to me now. Sorry about that. It hasn’t been doing that all hour. It’s actually been behaving quite well, this little computer of mine. Anyway, you can tell by the clock, at least my clock that we’ve had a wonderful hour together. I was thinking Sue is saying rotate. Take your stuff from the back of the freezer or if you’ve got a chest freezer from down below where it’s buried and use it first. It could be arm-stretching exercises you can do by reaching for the back of the shelf to pull out the oldest apple sauce, the oldest ground beef then and the finger dexterity and all that that you slide the other ones back.

And that way you can also make room in the front, so that your freezer doesn’t get to be kind of a mess. You come home and you think, “Oh, I’ve got to get this here,” and you open the door and you sort of pitch it in. Pitching

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 33 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense doesn’t help with organizing and it doesn’t help with finding things later efficiently. And yes, I freeze mashed potatoes. You have to be careful to warm them really well, because at first they feel a bit watery but that disappears as you warm them up. And do I like them better than the, you know, sorbet kind? Absolutely, because we put real butter and sour cream or cream cheese in ours.

And I buy Schwan frozen fruits, strawberries, pizzas, things like that, blueberries because they’re individually frozen and I use them for smoothies. And they’re very handy; you just grab out what you need, you don’t have to tip something apart or anything. And so I think that sort of where the frozen fruit comes in.

Anyway, I just want to say thank you to all of you. I hope we’ve shared things that will help make your lives a little more easy, efficient and tasty all at the same time. So thanks so much for joining us.

Dawn Turco Thank you Sue and Linn for today’s seminar. We had fun planning it. I hope you picked up some tips out there. We have one last tip actually in the text messaging and the idea is to freeze blueberries in the summer. And yes, then I can put them in my oatmeal all year long. That’s true. Orange smoothies. We happen to have blueberry picking right next door in Indiana and during the summer so I’ve done it and I did not think to freeze them. They go bad. Again, I’m going to be better about this.

©2016 Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired Page 34 of 35 2016-02-04-Make-Ahead Dishes Make Sense Thank you everyone for participating in our seminar today. If you have a question that you’d like to share, we have the feedback line; so [email protected] well, I checked that and we’ll get those questions or comments or ideas for future seminars. We love all of those things. And meanwhile, happy shopping, making ahead and we’re coming up on a weekend soon. Sunday happens to be my day. Anything that gets cooked Sunday is in-part eaten on Sunday and the rest of it saved. So happy times in the kitchen. Today’s seminar will be posted in the past seminars area, the Hadley’s website in just a couple of days.

We try to clean up a few of the hiccups that have happened with passing the microphone off, along with that will be this resource list I’ve been referring to. So feel free to listen to the seminar again, refer others to listen in and copy that resource list off or use some of the links. Thank you everyone for joining us today and I’ll say goodbye. Bye-bye.