Batch Cooking #2

the freezer after the last batch cooking session

We’ve cleaned out our freezer lunches from the last batch cooking session – so I’ve started up again. This time I made or am in the process of making:

DONE Taco Casserole (my own design, it was a massive fail but I have ideas for round two)
DONE General’s Pork over brown rice (aka shredded cooked pork with jarred General Tso’s sauce)
DONE Chicken Noodle Soup
DONE Tex-Mex Sticky Rice with pork (I got a good deal on pork recently)
Breakfast Sandwiches (fried egg sandwiches cut in half, for breakfast not lunch)
Macaroni & Cheese
Chili (I don’t know why I am unable to make decent chili without a recipe, it should be so easy…)

The Plan:
I decided not to try and fit everything into one weekend like I’ve done in the past. That idea had been inspired by the once a month cookers. It seems so awesome, the idea of only cooking once a month. I just haven’t found that it works well for me. I cook for a few days instead, and will freeze leftovers to have quick things available. But once a month cooking, even for lunches, is too much trouble for me at the moment.

Instead, I’m making one per week, which gives me a little more wiggle room. So far I like doing it this way a lot better - it gives me time to do other stuff on what would have otherwise been a purely cooking weekend. (Such as doing other stuff like ripping up the kitchen floor to get the broken dishwasher out because the previous homeowner installed another layer of ½” subflooring after putting in the snugly fit dishwasher, making it impossible to get the dishwasher out without demolishing something. Idiot.)

I’ve gotten a lot of great tips on freezer cooking (or cooking for the freezer) over at Life as Mom. In particular:
http://lifeasmom.com/2010/09/how-to-do-freezer-cooking.html - lots of links on this post
http://lifeasmom.com/2009/11/freezer-cooking-what-can-you-freeze.html - a quick guide on what you can successfully freeze

It doesn’t have to be lunches or dinners, by the way. My mom freezes cookies. Every few weeks she makes dozens of chocolate chip cookies and then freezes them. She brings a dozen or two to work every Friday, so this way she doesn’t have to bake every single week. (Lucky bastards. I could be eating those cookies instead.)

So, do you make extra food? Do you freeze it for later? Do you make meals just for the freezer?