Better in Bulk

One thing that I think is just nasty and gross is RAW MEAT. ICK. It's just so barbaric and the texture is disgusting. Not to mention the whole e coli and salmonella thing. However, I am not a vegetarian and I enjoy eating and cooking with meat. So therein lies a dilemma.....I want to eat it, but I don't want to touch it in order to cook it. Hmmmm......

So I use a technique that I watched my Mom use all the while I was growing up - cooking meat in bulk and then freezing it in individual containers for reheating later. I can remember waking up on a Saturday morning to the smell of hamburger being browned. Not exactly the normal smell on a Saturday morning, but it was normal to us because from time to time, Mom would buy many pounds of raw hamburger and put them all in a big pot on the stove with chopped up celery and onions. She would cook this entire pot of hamburger and drain off the grease and then freeze all of it in 1-pound 'batches' in Tupperware. When she wanted to make spaghetti one day, she would just take one of the 1-pound containers of hamburger and thaw it out and then dump it in the sauce - all done! Very quick and easy meal preparation after working all day. What a smart lady Carol is!

Anyway, I adopted that method a long time ago, not so much for the ease factor, but rather for the fact that I hated touching the raw meat, so if I just bought a ton of it and browned it all at once, then I only have to touch raw meat ONCE for all of those meals! This also works for chicken. I will buy a bunch of packages of boneless, skinless chicken breast and then bake them in the oven on 2 big pans and then freeze each piece in a ziploc bag for a future meal. I only have to deal with raw chicken ONE time and I get about 20 meals out of it!