"asian" pork lettuce wraps

This is the second recipe I cooked from the epic prep 'n' freeze session of a few weeks ago. Of course, in the recipe listing, it's simply Asian Lettuce Wraps, but I feel compelled to put the "asian" in sarcasm quotes every time I mention it.

The ingredients: a pound of ground pork, red sweet pepper, grated carrots, some ketchup (!), soy sauce. I vaguely remember tossing in some dried red chili, but I can't taste it. Mostly, it tastes like pork-based Sloppy Joes — not offensive enough to be bad, exactly, but not terribly Asian either.

I do like having the meat on a bed of lettuce instead of some starch or another. The recipe called for iceberg lettuce, but I'm not a fan, so I used Boston lettuce instead. I've been bringing two dishes to work: the plastic square dish you can see in the photo above, with just the lettuce in it, and my trusty pyrex round dish for the meat so it can be warmed in the microwave. Once the meat is heated through, I dump it on top of the lettuce and enjoy. I suspect eating it in lettuce cups as the recipe calls for would be messy, so I've just been having it as a sort of salad.

Next time, I think I'm going to add some Lee Kum Kee chili garlic sauce in addition to, or in place of, the ketchup. I'd like to drop the meat mixture on top of a bed of bean sprouts and thin rice noodles, maybe with some fresh mint leaves, but I think that's too elaborate for a work lunch.

I used the maximum prescribed cooking time again. At the end, all of the flavouring bits were at the bottom of the pot, and the meat was sitting on top, virtually unseasoned. The photo above shows how things looked after I gave the mixture a stir. I set the pot to cook on high for an hour and left the lid off, just giving the occasional stir whenever I was in the kitchen. That boiled off the excess water and let the flavours cook in a bit.

So yes, I do plan to make this again, but it's going to need tweaking, and while it's a nice dish, I don't think I'm ever going to be comfortable with calling it Asian.

chicken fajitas

I made my first meal out of the slow cooker/freezer mass prep I did a few weeks ago. Right now they are taking up most of the space in my little apartment freezer (looks like a hotel mini bar fridge, but it's a freezer), so I just grabbed the first bag that had something appropriate for the weather in it: chicken fajitas. 

There's not much to this one: chicken, onions, a red pepper, spices. I made a batch of wild rice to go with since I'm not a big fan of factory-made tortillas, and I don't know how to make my own.

A work friend gave me some English bacon she found on sale but didn't want, so I fried that up, sliced it, and sprinkled some on top of each serving.

It works well. The whole dish works well. People have been stopping me between the kitchenette and my desk and asking what's in my pyrex storage dish. 

What I learned from this week's cook, freezer to slow cooker recipe No. 1:

• There might still be frozen bits in the bag, even after a 24 hour thaw in the fridge. That's all right. Everything will cook in the time prescribed (I used the upper end of the range given). 
• Don't freak out over droopy vegetables. The flavour is still there, and the nutrients will be too if you use the liquid to season the rice.

One down, fifteen or so more to try...

diy meal service

I think the Pinterest pin originally came from J-A. At any rate, I found a blog post, which linked to a free PDF, which listed thirty-one recipes for a slow cooker aka crock-pot. All of them were suitable for simply prepping and throwing the raw ingredients into a freezer bag. Then, when you wanted to cook one of them, you thawed it in the fridge for twenty-four hours, then dumped everything into the slow cooker and cooked as if you were making it from fresh. Prep once, cook many. There's even a list at the end of the PDF telling you what you need to buy to make all of the recipes, with cross-references to the individual recipes in case you're substituting ingredients or leaving some out.

The dishes are all American, with a strong emphasis on Southwest flavours, but a decent attempt was made at variety. There's one curry, a couple of soups, some roasts, and some Americanised Asian (meaning vaguely Thai, vaguely Japanese, vaguely Chinese, vaguely Vietnamese) meals. All of them are straightforward recipes: it's easy to substitute if you don't want to use a particular ingredient.

The recipes were designed for the standard family of four, but since I'm a singleton of one, one recipe will last me about a week. The PDF said all of the recipes could be frozen for up to three months. I figured that was 15-16 recipes, picked through the list, used a spreadsheet to compile my shopping list, and had at it.

I have been ill most of the summer, and am currently on sinus infection three or four for this year, so I knew I had to pace myself. I hit a supermarket on the way home from work Friday night (see top photo) and got most of the things I needed. As it happens, this particular supermarket is frequented by residents of the Toronto Islands, so perhaps that's one of the reasons why the cashier didn't blink when she had to scan five boxes of frozen chicken breasts — it's a place that sees a lot of people shopping to stock up.

I was very proud of myself for remembering to bring my big blue IKEA shopping bags to the supermarket. I needed them, and the two regular reusable bags I always have tucked in my purse.

The following morning I went to the independent butcher's across the road from me and got the rest of the ingredients I needed. The clerk was curious about what I was doing when I ordered 2kg of ground pork ("Are you sure you need two kilos, or is it two pounds?"), so I explained the grand plan to her. She pointed out this is the sort of make-ahead we should encourage university students to do. They'd save precious studying time and eat better.

I timed the prep and freezer-stashing with a stopwatch, just because I wanted to know how long it was going to take to make 15-16 recipes every three months. Not counting meal breaks and "need to sit down now and feel sick" breaks, it took four hours and thirty-seven minutes to get everything done. Not bad, really, and I'm sure it would go faster if I were healthier.

Every freezer bag got labelled with the name of the dish, plus the cooking instructions and freezer date. The label in the photo is an example of a recipe where you have to add one more thing during cooking (cream cheese in this case). Most recipes you can just dump and cook. A few need water or soup stock added at the start of the cooking time.

The sixteen meals should keep me in decent food until the start of December, give or take a week. I can see myself tweaking and replacing recipes on the next round, but overall I like this approach! There was remarkably little to clean up at the end of the prep, because of course you don't use any pots, and most of the garbage was either compost or recycling. Most of the ingredients are whole foods too — the few processed foods are along the lines of tinned beans or ketchup, so processed but not too scary, and replaceable if it really bothers you.

Toronto is in the midst of a late-summer heat wave at the moment, which means I'm sticking to salads for now, but in a few weekends I'll have to remember to toss a bag in the fridge Saturday so I can cook it Sunday. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the rest of my groceries with all these prepared meals on-hand.