I still buy canned food occasionally, but I try to eat more fresh food to avoid this. When I freeze food, I only use pyrex glass containers, which still have flexible plastic lids, but less plastic is touching my food. I cook w/stainless steel & cast iron pans and cook w/ceramic bakeware, never use non-stick.

When grocery shopping (not as often since I joined a CSA), I take my own cloth produce bags to avoid using the plastic store produce bags (better for environment too). It is darn near impossible to completely avoid plastic, but I’ve cut down my family’s exposure by at least 75% in the kitchen.

Check out http://www.ewg.org for more info on this kind of thing. Although initially this change made my life way more complicated, now that I’ve done the “plastic purge” (not just in my kitchen), my life is simplier. There are so many things I do not consider bringing home to junk up my house because they are made out of plastic. Fewer choices = happier me.

My kitchen is less cluttered. I found a blender w/a stainless jar (they make glass ones too), but I can’t find a non-plastic food processor. I use my good ol’ knife and a cutting board instead.

I freeze fresh fruits and vegetables in 1/2 cup serving sizes. That way, if I need something for a recipe, it’s all ready to go. Also, if I want some for a meal, it’s ready to go. This allows me to take advantage of the farm stands. Also, if I cook and dice a vegetable, it’s all ready in 1/2 cup serving size.

I cook a whole turkey in my Showtime Rotisserie. Jennie O has a “Classic” turkey where they remove the legs and wings and you simply have the whole turkey minus those two parts. I cook a 8.5 pound bird and once it’s done and cool, I put the white breast meat in 3 oz ziploc bags and I can use it for sandwiches, dinner or to top a salad. Plus, it’s entirely white meat. I do the same wit chicken-cooking it in a rotisserie.

I also make homemade veggie burgers every ten days or so. (You cook the veggies and make the burgers but do not cook the burgers.)I make individual patties and store them in the freezer. I also make a home made veggie hamburger (made with four diced fresh veggies and lean chopped sirloin) and store them uncooked in freezer bags. When I am ready to cook, I’ll microwave it for one minute and then cook it in a single serve grill pan. I’ll eat this with a salad.

I also purchase skinless boneless chicken breasts on occasion and store them in individual bags.

By storing fruits and veggies in 1/2 cup serving sizes and poultry in 3 oz serving sizes, I can make anything I like.

There is a trade off though. you will spend a LOT of time now on food prep with this. when you come home you need to cut things up, bag them and clean up. you are saving money but you are spending time. If you have the time to spend, or you make it quality family time, then great this is a benefit all around.

you need to gauge if the time spent is worth the money spent. Plus it does increase your kitchen clutter. you have not only one more gadget but all it’s parts and then the boxes of the bags.

Garlic:
1: buy a bulk portion of garlic from Costco
2: peel them
3: run them through the food processor so that it’s finely minced
4: scoop the minced garlic into the Foodsaver bag
5: press out the air
6: seal the bag
7: press it so that the garlic is one big flat patty in the bag
8: freeze
9: drop the frozen garlic patty on the floor and against the edge of the counter to break into smallish pieces
10: when I need garlic, I just snip off a corner of the Foodsaver bag, drop out a few broken shards of minced garlic, and re-seal the bag.
Why do I go through all this? My garlic would go bad if I kept it on the counter or in the fridge. I’ve tried keeping it in a ziploc, and unfortunately the garlic smell would go straight through the ziploc bag and into everything else in the freezer. Great for garlic chicken, horrible for iced tea. And because I only cut off a small corner of the bag at a time (and I don’t vacuum seal it after that first freeze, just seal without vacuuming!), I’ve been able to re-use this same bag for three batches of frozen garlic.

And for bags of chips? I buy a bag chips and hate to throw them away, but I hate the thought of eating them all in one sitting. So I’ll take some out of the bag and then re-seal the bag! I don’t need to transfer the chips into a special Foodsaver bag — mylar and most thicker plastic bags (not the thin grocery store shopping bags or the bags on rolls in the produce section) seal beautifully. I use my Foodsaver to re-seal chips, frozen pot stickers, frozen meatballs, etc. (And obviously I don’t vacuum-seal the chips!)

Regarding bag material: I buy commercial vacuum bag material online and, including shipping cost, it’s a little bit cheaper than buying it at Costco. Problem with Costco is that you have to buy an assortment and you end up with too much of this and not enough of that.

Here are our top strategies:

1. We have found that it’s helpful to keep an ongoing inventory of the items we have in the deep freezer. We keep this list pasted to the inside of our pantry for easy access and update it as we take things out. The master list is on the computer and we update it every month or so, when the printed list is too marked up. This makes meal planning easier and keeps us from having to rummage through the entire freezer to find things.

2. We buy packaged foods like ice cream, frozen vegetables and french fries either in bulk sizes or in quantity when on sale at the regular grocery store. We also take advantage of sales on items we use a lot (like chicken breasts). We would rather spend $30 on chicken breasts at one time and eat from them for weeks or months, rather than spend smaller quantities of money and have to buy the item every time we go to the store.

3. I have also made a habit of freezing leftover in meal-sized portions immediately. After Thanksgiving, for instance, I dished out leftover turkey and sides onto small plates and froze them. I then removed the frozen meals from the plates and vacuum-sealed them. I had fresh-tasting, homemade meals to break up my lunch monotony all the way until March. This is far more frugal than keeping those same leftovers in the fridge for four days and dumping them, when the picked over portions aren’t eaten.

4. I make a batch of muffins once a month and freeze them. 20 seconds to defrost in the microwave and 3 minutes in the toaster oven, and I have a homemade muffin ready to eat and run out the door with (if needed). Pancakes, waffles, french toast also freeze excellently.

5. Lastly, pizza dough. I make a big batch about once every six weeks and freeze individual 6 to 8 oz balls in plastic bags. I take out a dough ball to defrost every Thursday. We have homemade pizza every Friday.

http://www.reynoldspkg.com/rey.....n/home.asp

We find it less trouble, and best of all less expensive than the alternatives.

Lately, I’ve been buying my meats and veggies at the beginning of the week and then cooking things during the week. I’ve saved time and money by planning my meals on the weekends and getting only what I need at the grocery store and not what I think I might need (if that makes sense)

We used to buy a lot in bulk, but I found that I forgot about the meat and it would end up with freezer burn. But now that I’m in a habit of putting together a weekly meal plan on Sunday, then it might work well and I’ll be saving money and time if I go “shopping” in my freezer instead of at the store.

Great tips from everyone. I really enjoyed this post.

I vacuum seal our elk/deer/antelope/goat/fish and it is a lot easier than the wrapping we used to do. Much faster, and the meat keeps just as well.

The meat we have butchered is still all paper wrapped, but it too does just fine for the next year.

I doubt that we spend more on bags than we spent on paper/plastic/tape to do up the meat before. And it’s sooo much faster to stick it in a sealer bag and zip it shut.

Oh by the way — you don’t have to belong to a CSA to buy half a cow (or pig, or lamb) There are plenty of us small folks around who raise clean and humanely kept animals to sell. Just call your local butcher and ask! They usually have lists of folks they call when they have people wanting meat.

In the days before I took early retirement, my husband and I would cook on weekends and freeze meals for use later in the week. Most casseroles worked well, but macaroni and cheese was less than successful.

What I would do was line the (glass or Corningware) casserole dish with foil, extending well over the edges of the dish. Then I’d assemble the casserole, fold the foil over the top and seal it, and then freeze dish and all. A couple hours later the freezing would be to the point where I could pull the foil wrapped package out of the dish and let it freeze the rest of the way on its own. That way I could just unwrap the casserole when needed, put it back in its dish, put it on “defrost” in the microwave, and once it was reasonably thawed, reheat it. I think now I would just put the casseroles in one of those reusable Glad or Ziploc containers, so I wouldn’t have to do all that wrapping and could just slide the meal from the container into its dish. Those containers are an amazing invention and I wish they’d come on the market sooner.

I still buy packages of frozen hamburger and turkey-burger patties, which can be peeled off their stack and grilled or fried without thawing. Just right for a quick meal of burgers without going out. I keep packages of hamburger buns from the day-old department in the freezer. You can take the frozen buns out of the package and just thaw what you need in the microwave.

We had a bag sealer when we were first married (wedding gift). It was one of the very first Seal-A-Meal units. We were on a tight budget then and the rolls of bag material were pretty pricey. So although it worked just fine, we didn’t use it much. Somewhere out in storage I have one of those “pump and seal” gizmos that uses regular plastic bags and seals stuff in jars if you punch a hole in the lid and use their special stickers. Used to be advertised on TV all over the place. My mother-in-law got one and really liked it, so she got me one too. It worked fine, but at some point I misplaced some small part of it or other, and by the time I finally found it I realized that it probably wasn’t worth the hassle to assemble, use, disassemble and clean the thing.

My timesaver (from Once A Month Cooking) is to freeze browned ground beef for use in something else later. I feel like this cuts down on the opportunity for spoilage because it seems like hamburger is more perishable especially with thaw time added.

The only cooked item I regularly freeze is sloppy joes. That is my go-to dinner when we are short on time. I don’t freeze the buns but that might be a good vacuum-sealer trick. We typically do have buns on hand.

I think the vacuum sealer would be great for saving portions of things for picky eaters. I bought a bag of meatloaf servings from Market Day and they are a lifesaver for eating at home with our picky eater child. No way should we be bound to only eating what she will. This way she eats a good dinner and we get variety. She may or may not grow out of her pickiness; for now we are just trying to work around it.