What cooked foods are easy to freeze?
What are some foods that can be cooked, then frozen, and then thawed or reheated for a quick meal?
I'm not necessarily looking for specific recipes, but ideas about general food types.
3 answers
Pesto
Not a whole meal, but the key part of a quick meal:
Our annual pesto production goes into ice cube trays, then into freezer bags once the cubes have frozen. A few cubes at a time can be pulled out for either refrigerator defrosting or microwave quick defrosting and then used as pesto sauce on pizza, directly spread on bread, or as sauce on pasta.
Other vegetable sauces
We do the same with "garlic scape pesto" (a non-basil product) when it's garlic scape season, and with a beet tehina in beet season.
Meat
A local grocer often has large amounts of chicken or pork on sale stupid-cheap. Far more than we'd eat in a week. I'll braise up the whole 5 lb or so package and then put meal-sized portions of cooked meat with some of the broth in freezer bags or reusable take-out containers, and the remainder of the broth frozen in a container as a soup base. I suppose one could finish that as soup before freezing. The bit of broth in with each meat portion is primarily to help reduce drying out in storage.
Soup
Soups have already been mentioned.
Falafel
I make a somewhat non-traditional[1] falafel patty[2] which I bake, since I hate fussing with enough hot oil to fry, and those freeze well when formed but before cooking. They can go straight into the oven from the freezer (and likely could be fried that way as well).
Summary
As with anything in the freezer, minimizing airspace in the container and storage time in the freezer improves results. More airspace and time allows more water to vaporize from the food and reform as ice crystals elsewhere in the container. On the other hand, I've fairly happily consumed some stuff that's got a touch of freezer burn after being in there quite a while.
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Thick stews and "mushy" foods seem like they tend to do pretty well. I've had good luck with chilies and soups (both vegetable and pasta). These can all be dumped in a bowl and microwaved for a few minutes.
It's true that ice crystals form in the meal and degrade it, but this mostly affects texture. For something like chili or vegetable stew where texture is already somewhat homogenized by boiling, it's not a huge loss. Of course, fresh will always have better texture, but when the trade off is a tasty meal that is 3 minutes away for months, it's tolerable.
"Greasy" and "sloppy" foods also do well. Butter and fat don't crystalize like water, so they don't lose as much texture. In particular, cheese freezes pretty well. Lasagna has been very successful for me - there's some movement of water and oil out of the cheese in storage, but when you heat it up a lot of it migrates back in anyway.
One trick I've found with soups and stews is to freeze them in sandwish ziploc bags. You can either hang the bag on some frame, with clips or by just folding over, or you can have someone hold it for you. Then pour in the food, squeeze out air and seal. This minimizes air movement between the food and the freezer, so new moisture can't come in and form a bunch of frost. It also prevents smells of different foods from mixing.
Foods like soups, stews, chilli, and pasta dishes freeze well. Casseroles, cooked grains like rice or quinoa, and cooked meats such as chicken or ground beef also freeze easily. Baked goods like muffins, bread, and cookies can be frozen too. Just cool them before freezing them for the best results.
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