Frozen Meals

No I haven't LuckyRed, tonight I'm going to try it. I'll let you know how it goes!

Tip from me:

If you want to make a pie/casserole in a pyrex (or similar) dish to freeze then here is how you can re-use the same dish rather than have it stuck in your freezer:

Make food as required, serve into dish, cool, then freeze. I have a dish with a lid, but covering with cling wrap also works.

Once frozen (I left mine 2 days but I'm sure one will suffice) remove from freezer. Have a giant snaplock bag ready (and labelled).

Put dish (without lid) into sink with hot water up to the level of your food (careful not to overfill or you will swamp your meal).

After a minute or so, use a knife to wedge between the food and the side of the dish, soon you will feel enough give to remove it.

Take dish out of sink, flip it over (I kept one hand underneath to make sure I caught it) and then place in snaplock bag. Seal and take back to freezer.

Worked a treat on all four of my shepherds pies and now I can reuse my pyrex for something else.

A Ha! That's a great tip and I was wondering how to freeze the likes of shepherds pie. Thanks!!

I should have added that when you want to eat your frozen pie to remove it from snaplock and put back into original dish to defrost.

That will save a bit of mess!

Mine was great and I couldn't tell the difference. It was a little bit salty but that was my own fault with adding salt before baking. The parmesan and chicken stock provided enough salt.

Good pointers kiwiking, I'll be coming back to this thread a bit closer to when I'm due!

we are a bit unorthodox when it comes to freezing meals. I work random nights a week and when i'm at work DP eats home alone so we pre make meals with left overs for him to have on those nights. we go by the rule of if it can go in a container it gets frozen here. its all in glad containers with the blue lids, and the larger stuff is in the clicky sistema containers.
currently in the freezer we have:
1. a lasagna with white sauce and grated cheese on top (we have a small glass pyrex container with a lid that we specifically make this in. let it cool and put the lid on and freeze, thaw, remove lid and cook)
2. beef casserole on rice
3. roast chicken portions and roasted vege's pre gravied
4. roast lamb, veges and gravy
5. corned beef, veges and mustard sauce
6. stirfry. the vege's are slightly crunchy and the schnitzel meat is only 1/2 cooked. so he just has to bang it in the fry pan for a few min and its done and hot

I also make up a mince mix using about 2kg of mince with garlic, chilli, oxo beef stock cube, worchester sauce, egg and breadcrumbs and whatever else I feel like (usually some grated carrot and zuchinni).
some I roll into small meat balls and pre cook them pasta sauce added then frozen so he just has to boil some pasta and heat them up.
some is made into burger patties and free flow frozen then bagged for burgers
and the rest (about 500g worth) is frozen pressed into a container so it can be made into what ever he wants, and usually he defrosts it, mixes sausage meat into and turns it into meatloaf.

Yum, some good ideas on here.
I want to get into making a few frozen meals over the next few weeks.

Random question: If you buy meat and freeze it straight from the supermarket, can you refreeze it again after cooking?
I was going to make a lasagne to freeze, but just realised I put the mince in the freezer so don't know if I can re-freeze it after cooking???

Thanks

Bump - going back to F/T work and want to stock the freezer to get us through the first few months!