A good freezer helps too. Making basic parts that can be combined in different ways works well. Like make a plain roast chicken, served once as roast chicken with vegetables and maybe a sauce. Then there's chicken in a vegetable salad or added to a vegetable soup (perhaps made with the carcass), Chicken pasta or risotto or fried rice. Use the leftover sauce, vegetables and starch to make something noew and irreproducible. Is that the kind of thing you meant? I usually cook by the size of the product, and have grab and go leftovers ready to eat, or remake as above.

I think freezer cooking has been taken over by the currently popular "food prep" movement.

Are you still low carb/dieting? Lots of things freeze well and I often just make a double or triple batch of things like cabbage rolls or chili or lasagna. I also make and freeze cookie dough and scone dough, unbaked, just thaw and bake.

I don't really like the meal prep thing. I don't want to eat the same thing 5 days in a row!

Annie

I get what Annie is saying, and totally agree about freezing, but I also do love leftovers. Like throwing a handful of brisket into the same old salad, or in eggs, or a sandwich... I keep trying to eat more meat, and having it ready to use is a boon. The "dry" vegetable soup I made last week was super delicious, and I didn't freeze any--which was a mistake because it got too old for the last few portions. I was eating a large bowl of it every day becasue it was really satisfying, and it wasn't until the sixth day that I was thinking, "I don't want vegetable soup, " but there wasn't anything else that didn't require making, so I took half a bowl and it was still super delicious and very satisfying. Every day the soup was served in a different context,

What I mean by this is that if real cooking isn't something you can or want to do daily, you can find a way to make building blocks, or whole dishes, that you don't mind eating for days in a row. Altering the context is key.

When I cook I often make extra portions so I can freeze the leftovers in portion sized containers and pull them out of the freezer on "I don't feel like cooking" nights.

Today's dessert has been in the freezer since Christmas. I made it as a back up but never served it. I use home made frozen stuff all the time. It's much more efficient to make a larger batch than just cooking for two. Pasta sauces, stews, soups, unbaked pastry cases, pancakes, etc. I do not prepare meals ahead for the week. It's either freshly made or based on something home made from the freezer. I don't buy ready meals They're expensive and nutritionally highly suspect.

Thanks all. I do freeze soups and some leftovers. I think I'm going to start doing whole meals to vac seal and just add a salad or something. Annie, yes we are still low carbing....to an extent (hubby is out of the pre-diabetic zone, so we're still doing it!)

Floral, now that's my kind of freezer food!

I do freeze lots of things when I have freezer room, as there is only Elery and I and we can't eat a whole pan of lasagna or batch of cookies. At least we shouldn't! That way I can have it now and again in a month, instead of day-after-day-after-day although I admit that I have three servings of the really good lasagna the chef across the street made for Christmas and we haven't eaten it yet.

If you are doing the low-carb eating plan, then you don't want a lot of pasta, although I actually like some of the legume based pasta and the fiber content keeps the net carbs down. A big roast or swiss steak or meatballs or ham all freeze well as do many vegetables. Cheese can be problematic when freezing, texture changes are sometimes very noticeable but not as much when it's an ingredient as when trying to freeze a block of cheese by itself. Those little "egg muffins" freeze and reheat well and are infinitely customizable. I've made the sauce for shakshuka in advance and frozen it and then thaw/heat/add eggs, it worked too.

Good luck. I don't mind cooking daily, but it does create a lot of leftovers. Elery doesn't mind eating chili every day for a week but two days and I'm done. That's when it gets frozen. If I can turn last night's roast into tomorrow's barbacoa tacos that's better than just trying to eat roast for the next three days but some things are what they are and don't morph into something else easily.

Annie

I have been cooking this way all my life... I think... at least my Mom did too. Right now I am trying to clean out my freezer and have been eating lots of frozen foods, and now I think I might have eaten the last cube of Lasagna. My oldest daughter helped me eat some too when she was visiting .

I do have lots of great recipes - both from moving so much and from here (CF) collected over the years. I think cooking from "Scratch" tastes much better than just about anything from the grocery.

Kate, I agree, I couldn't eat grocery store deli or pre-made stuff for very long, even without taking cost into consideration. I do like an occasional rotisserie chicken, but the emphasis is on "occasional". When I first divorced and the girls were grown and gone I often had things like a bowl of Raisin Bran for supper but that got old quickly and so I learned to freeze things today for next month and it didn't seem so much like leftovers. As I said, though, I don't really mind cooking on a daily basis, there are still recipes I haven't tried, gotta work my way through them. :-)

I like pancakes a lot and those low carb cottage cheese pancakes without the banana freeze and reheat pretty well too. Add some fruit and some meat and have breakfast for supper.

Annie

My mother always said if you can make one chicken, you can make two and freeze one. she froze many kinds of things. I used to, as well, but often found myself not using them until I had to make room. I don't inflict it on the family so much, but if it's good, I can eat the same thing with different accompaniments for days. I remember my shocck many years ago when AnnT said she hated leftovers, given how good a cook she is. I've been served leftovers which would have been better as compost, but I'm generally of the opinion about my own cooking that the proof that it's good is when it's good cold out of the fridge! My father didn't want tosee the same thing twice, so I learned from my mother how to ”redecorate”, but I'm often glad to just eat it as it is. Weird, huh?

One of my mother's planned versions was skewered barbecue (originally shishkebab, but mophed into anything, often turkey). The next day it all got cut up, meat and veg, and made into an ersatz paella. ;)