Ok, so not quite hibernation – and not only because it’s the wrong part of the year – but more the preparation for losing access to proper cooking facilities for 3 months or so.

Over the last couple of years we’ve settled on a food routine of batch-cooking at the weekend, freezing everything, and then defrosting a wide variety of food from the freezer during the week for lunches and dinners. It works quite well for us as it means that a) we’ve always got delicious lunch and b) we don’t need to spend time (or take shortcuts) cooking when we get home from work.

Unfortunately (from this perspective at least!), having three months of building work being done will put a cramp in that routine – no, or very little, access to cooking facilities during that time so no opportunity to cook much at all, never mind batch cooking. Which brings me to the subject of this post – the great freezer fill of 2015.

The Calculations

Let’s say 13 weeks of food required, including a week this side of the building work.
Currently ~110 portions of food in the freezers.
We estimate that, per week, we’ll each take roughly 2 breakfast portions, 7 lunch portions and 5 dinner portions – the assumption being that we’ll be out and about doing <stuff> for at least some of the days. That adds up to:
– 52 breakfasts
– 312 lunches/dinners

Challenge accepted!

Clearing the Space

We always have a lot of stuff in the freezer but because of our regular dinner/gaming-hosting a fair portion of it tends to be leftover desserts, starters, sides, dips, that kind of thing. To cram all of the required meal portions in we needed to clear that down – and some friends were more than willing to partake in a few ‘freezer food’ evenings. It’s almost like tapas! Here are some pics of one of those.

Getting Ready

Freezer space created, we decided on the list of things I wanted to cook and got in a mega-delivery of groceries. I took two days off from work because this was also my last chance to do some significant cooking for a few months and I was going to make the most of it!

Most important of all, I chose the listening material to sustain me over the couple of days – the entire 6-episode WWI series from the Hardcore History podcast, about 24 hours of dense interesting stuff altogether.

The Marathon

I was ready to start, and at 6am Thursday morning I was awake and in the kitchen. Here’s a bunch of pics illustrating the progress over the two days.

 

The Results

Over the 38 hours between 6am Thursday and 8pm Friday evening I spent about 26 hours cooking. I was exhausted, but extremely satisfied – and now also much more knowledgeable on the topic of WW1!

Have some pics of some neatly-packaged freezer food.

• 12 Chorizo and Sweet Potato Chilli
• 18 Chicken and Bean Chilli
• 24 Butterbean, Pork and Polenta Casserole
• 15 Chickpea, Chorizo and Goat’s Cheese One-Pot
• 14 Lentil Burgers
• 14 Chorizo and Dijon Polenta
• 12 Durango Potato Casserole
• 14 Butternut Squash, Sweet Potato and Coconut Curry
• 16 Baked Oatmeal
• 16 Red Lentil and Sweet Potato Curry
• 18 Saffron Butternut Baked Risotto
• 12 Roasted Potato and Salami Salad
• 16 Pork, Cheese and Polenta Spoonbread
• 16 Chorizo Pilaf

217 portions in all. That’ll do, pig, that’ll do.

There’ve been a couple of smaller-scale batch cooks since then and now, on the eve of the building works starting, our freezer stock is:

• 36 breakfasts
• 323 mains
• a small assortment of cookies, cakes, desserts

Now to survive the next 3 months!