Ali Rosen - Modern Freezer Meals: Simple Recipes to Cook Now and Freeze for Later

Copyright 2021 by Ali Rosen

Photography 2021 by Noah Fecks

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Daniel Brount

Cover photo by Noah Fecks

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-6375-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-6376-0

Printed in China

This book is dedicated to my parents, Susan and Robert Rosen, for instilling in me the values of working hard, being kind, giving back, and loving your family to the fullest. Everything I accomplish is because of the example you both set.

contents

chapter 1

how to freeze

Do This If You Do Nothing Else

Heres the cheat sheet for anyone who doesnt want to take the time to read the following chapter. Please, please just do these things if you do nothing else:

Let your food fully cool down before freezing it.

Freeze in single servings, not in giant blocks.

Make sure no air is touching your food and it is sealed as tightly as possible.

Read on to learn morebut just these simple rules will make your frozen food worlds better.

start with a new mindset

We are, thankfully, living in an era of freshness. Weve discarded the cloak of canned foods and oversalted TV dinners and now we relish in our ability to find the most local and unique products to turn into our evening meals and weekend projects. But heres the problem: theres still just not enough time in the day.

Its the modern cooking rub. We want to cook better and eat better than our parents did, but we dont actually have the consistent time to devote to it. The number of nights that Ive looked around in my fridge to make a salad out of sad leftover ingredients are too innumerable to count. And yet weve all gotten into the mindset that if it comes out of the freezer then it must be the worst kind of leftover. Its a necessary failure. But why cant both things be truewhy cant we love our fresh, seasonal foods and also sometimes need to pull something out of the freezer?

I wasnt always a freezer convert. In fact, I was the kind of person who was surprised when anyone used them for something other than ice cream and gin. Who didnt have time to throw a piece of fish in the oven for twelve minutes with a bit of lemon and some fresh herbs? But then life happened. I had a kid and suddenly the time it took to actually get to the grocery store to buy the fish was sometimes more than what I had capacity for. My mom went through chemo, and suddenly freezing food was the only way to be there for her on the days I couldnt physically be. The freezer started looking like the nice boy from high school who asked you out but (at the time), wasnt exciting enough to say yes to. The freezer wasnt sexy or cool, but it was there when I wanted to visit friends with new babies and give them meals to parcel out over the coming weeks. I no longer minded taking a meal out of the freezer when I was working late and barely had five minutes to heat something up.

My life as a person obsessed with peak summer tomatoes didnt have to impinge on my growing love for the freezer. It could enhance it. I started to make more and more food with the freezer in mind. At first it started out with the typical freezer farea lasagna here, a soup therebut soon I started to branch out. I was putting skewered shrimp and soy sauce glazed snap peas in the freezer just to see how they would eventually thaw. I was testing whether crab cakes actually cooked better from frozen (they do, by the way). I was making so many batches of cookies in various forms that I became a pretty popular neighbor to have around.

To my surprise and delight, a lot more food could handle the freezer than what Id been conditioned to believe. And it was so much easier than my image of hours of batch cooking. Most of the time it just meant making a few extra portions of what I was already doing. It barely added any time and in return I always had something on hand to eat. My days of ordering in just because I was tired were over. Every time I wanted to eat something a quick trip to the freezer held delights Id forgotten about from days or weeks earlier. And it actually saved seasonality for later: the flavors of summer corn and berries could all be kept frozen in time until some cold winter day needed a bit of brightness to be summoned.

We have reembraced so many of our grandparents traditionscanning, pickling, fermentingso what is the holdup on the freezer?

Because of this dated mindset, truly the most important place to begin when thinking about freezer food is to eliminate your previous notions about what can and cannot be frozen. There are certainly indulgences here, but the freezer doesnt have to mean unhealthy and it certainly doesnt have to mean you cant pair it with something fresh. The easiest dinner for me is to pull something flavorful out of the freezer and pair it with a quick salad of veggies and greens from the fridge.

So, get comfortable with it. There is a range when it comes to freezer food. Some things work better (baked goods like scones and cheese puffs, anyone?) and some feel the same (hello, braised meats). Others, like pastas and rice, are never quite as good, but if stored properly they can really surprise you. Some things will never translate and thats okay. This is about making your life easier, not eating every single thing out of your freezer.

The other thing I want to emphasize is that better ingredients still make better food. There is a reason why some of the best summer fruit is made into jam and why frozen vegetables often have the highest vitamin contentusing the freezer is just a more modern way of preserving our food, like generations have done before us. And having tomato soup in November is a bonus. The goal here often is to eat a meal and save a mealyou