Freezer Food

Near the end of my pregnancy, I'm pretty sure my need for nesting manifest in cooking stuff; suddenly I was feeling the need to make large amounts of food from scratch. Hubby and I had decided to make freezer-friendly foods and stock up so that things would go more smoothly after the baby but, as the due date drew nearer, I couldn't seem to stop!

Originally I'd planned to just make some lasagna, shepherd's pie and some beef and quinoa soup to have on hand, but somehow we also had this tasty mini apple pie, Italian Wedding Soup, this stuffed manicotti, some cheesy cauliflower soup, and there may or may not have been Snickerdoodles and Biscoff Chocolate chip cookies as well. (i was out of control!)

I used a silicon pan 'cuz then the soups would pop out easier 

Most of the dishes, in packaging things to be frozen, I cut into individual-sized portions to simplify the re-warming process later. Overall, most everything froze and reheated pretty well, but one thing I wish I'd heard about, before it all hit the freezer, was the idea of freezing soup in muffin pans to portion it out, cuz it turns out that even medium-sized containers of soup take a loooooong time to thaw.

So, now that life has returned to a nearish-to-what-once-was sort of normalcy, I'm back to cooking myself Mexican food and sticking 2/3 of the yield in the freezer to have for lunches later. My most recent thing was this fabulous bean soup with brown rice. And this time I used a muffin pan to freeze the leftovers. 

It worked fabulously! Next up: this deliciousness.