I have a confessiong to make…last night there was not a single Homemade Gourmet item on my dinner table (GASP!!!).  My daughter called me at work around 5:00 to ask if there was something she was supposed to be doing for dinner.  It was only at that moment that I realized I had not taken a meal from the freezer to put in the slow cooker.  I had just come home from a 4 day business trip and it was the last thing on my mind that morning.  She was wanting to make open faced meatball sandwiches…but we were out of precooked Italian Mozzarella Meatballs in the freezer.  So I told her that she could use the shredded roast in the freezer to make open faced French dip sandwiches.  Great…problem solved. 

 Ring…it’s my sweet daughter on the phone again, “Mom, we don’t have any shredded roast in the freezer”.  Ugh…when did we eat that!?  I was sure we had some.  Ok…I’m out of ideas so I tell her to be creative and surprise me when I get home. 

I arrive home about 2 hours later to a teenage daughter on the phone with the latest social crisis on her hands (any of you with teenage girls knows exactly what I came home to !).   Off to the kitchen I go…surely I, the founder of Homemade Gourmet, have something to serve my family fast and easy!!! 

 Now…it is still HOT here in Texas, so soup just wasn’t something our family wanted for dinner.  In fact…salad was all I could think of that sounded good this hot Texas night.  So I go to the freezer to find some sort of precooked meat to toss with a refreshing salad.  TAco meat, cooked chicken, left over steak…something.  Alas…with all my traveling these last few weeks…my freezer has been depleted.  All except for a package of precooked breaded chicken patties from Swansons.  Into the oven they went as I prepared a salad to top with slices of the breaded chicken breasts.  Dinner was delightful, but as I sat listening to my family chat about their days since I had been gone…I was lamenting the fact that I did not have Homemade Gourmet Italian Mozzarella breaded chicken breasts in my freezer to top this salad. 

I’m off to Colorado for the rest of the week…but you can be sure the next week will be a fill your freezer weekend at the VanHoy household!!! So help me out…tell me your favorite freezer stocking ideas that I can use when I get back in town!!! 

 God Bless and Keep You!

Tami

While my husband and boys have been making plans for the football game schedule on Thanksgiving day, my mom has been emailing me back and forth on the topic of our Thanksgiving Dinner Menu.  To be honest…I haven’t even thought about it yet!  Not that I shouldn’t and not that mom’s emails weren’t just what I needed to get on the ball!  Thanks mom!

So what are some things we can be doing now to make Thanksgiving stress free and easy…the HG way?  The first place to start is to plan the menu…which mom has seen to for our family already.  Now that we know what we are going to need to cook…we can do the next steps…looking for anything we can do now and put in the freezer for the actual day!

 If your favorite Thanksgiving dishes call for things like chopped onion, chopped bell pepper, or diced and chopped vegetables of any kind ~ go ahead and do that now.  Find a time when you could pull a stool up to the counter with a friend or the kids and get the veggies chopped and labeld in freezer bags.  On the day that all the cooking needs to take place…you just have to scoop out the measured amount and cook.  Afterall..preparation time is usually the most time intensive part of a casserole or stuffing dish. 

 Speaking of stuffing (or dressing as we call it here in Texas!)…we make ours with day old cornbread and white bread.  Early this month I can make a double batch of HG Texas Cornbread and a double batch of HG Basic Bread, using one of each as a side to a meal and the second to put in the freezer.  Then the day before I make my dressing…all I have to do is pull it out of the freezer and let it set out for the next 24 hours.  This is much easier than making the bread the day before so that it can sit for a day.  Of course…not as easy as having mom just make the whole thing!  Thanks again mom!!

 Another thing we can do with our selection of vegetable dishes needed for Thanksgiving is determine what can be made the days leading up to Thanksgiving.  For example…the traditional greenbean casserole can be made several days ahead and kept in the fridge.  Thanksgiving day…toss some of those fried onions on top and throw in the oven with a few other vegetable casseroles you also made ahead and reheat them altogether real quick.  

 Now lets look at that dessert menu.  What can you make ahead and freeze?  One of our family favorite pies to serve is the Brownie Pie…and it freezes beautifully.  How about a Gingerbread Trifle?  Bake an HG Gingerbread Mix and put it in the freezer.  The day before Thanksgiving…make an HG Pumpkin Pie Cheesecake mix…but don’t put it into a pie shell.  Instead…take that frozen gingerbread, cut it into cubes and begin layering the cubes and the pie filling in a clear glass bowl.  Top the last layer with cool whip, sprinkle with nutmeg and you have a great dessert made fresh and easy.  I mentioned a tip for cookies on a previous blog…that would work here as well. 

If you want more specific tips and recipes….even a day by day prepare ahead plan, menu and grocery list, check out our October Newsletter.  You can see a copy of it by hitting the link on this blog site that says view and example of our free newsletter.  In the October edition, in the article titled “Featured Product for this Month”, there is a link to a flier you can print that will give you lots of great ideas and help. 

Speaking of help…what are you doing to get things ready ahead of time so you can enjoy the day with your family?  Mom???  You are the queen of being ready for Thanksgiving before the leaves fall from the trees!  Any tips?

God Bless and Keep You,

Tami

It is getting chilly here in Texas, reminding me that the busy holiday season is fast approaching!  I have found that if I don’t start getting ready for it now…I will be stressed and overwhelmed for most of November and December.  So what will I do?  Stock the freezer of course!  There was a time when I could carve out a full day to do some holiday freezer stocking…but these days I have to think about things I can do one day at a time.  Here are some things I do that might help you be ready as well:

• Next time I am going to make meatballs for a family spaghetti and meatball meal…I will quadruple the recipe and have the kids help me roll a bunch of meatballs for the freezer.  I have a deep 11×14 dish I can load up with a lot of meatballs at one time and get a few batches baked in an hour or so.  After dinner, the family will help me put the cooled meatballs into gallon freezer bags. 
• These can then be turned into fast appetizers: put the frozen meatballs into a slow cooker on low with some bbq sauce (great with HG Baconcheeseburger meatballs), sweet and sour sauce (great with HG Old Fashioned Meatballs) or spaghetti sauce (greaat with HG Italian Meatballs) and serve at a party buffet. 
• Of course…when making HG spaghetti Sauce…this time of year I will never make a single batch…I will make at least a quadruple batch and keep it in gallon and quart sized freezer bags for a quick sauce on a variety of meals and appetizers. 
• things like: HG lasagna for a fast and easy dinner party (and if I make one of these….you can be sure I will put together 2-3 more to freeze and bake later), the meatballs appetizer, topping for baked or grilled chicken breasts, and for a crowd…spaghetti and meatsauce.  Not to mention the variety of meals I can make in the slow cooker with the sauce, like Italian Mozzarella Roundsteak.
• I will start making 3-4 batches of our family’s favorite 4 meals in 4 minutes recipes this time of year to be sure I have enough to serve a crowd for a planned (or unplanned) party, or to pull out and use on those hectic days during the holiday season that makes meal time a challenge.  I am able to do this by simply planning on making extra on the day I am serving the meal to my family…this uses time I had planned to cook anyway to go ahead and stock up for the future.  
• Fresh baked Cookies this time of year are always a treat.  The next time I make our favorite HG cookies…I will make at least 3-4 batches.  While the cookies I want to eat that day are baking, I will scoop up the rest of the dough into balls and place them on a large cookie sheet or 2 (they can touch…so I put as many as I can on a pan).  I will then tightly cover with foil and place in the freezer.  An hour or so later….when I have 10 minutes…I will take those off the pan and place the frozen cookie dough balls into freezer bags, label with type and baking time and put back in the freezer.  Now I can make fresh cookies at a moments notice when friends and family drop by, when I am off to a holiday party and want to bring a gift to the hostess, when I am having a party myself and need a fast dessert, or just on a cold day after school to take a break and share warm cookies and milk with the kids. 

There are other things I will do this time of year to be ready to serve a crowd, get ready for gift giving needs, bring a pot luck dish at a moment’s notice, or just have a meal to enjoy with the family on a non-stop day.  As I do these things…I will be sure to share them with you…one at a time!  What do you do to get ready for this busy time of year?

God Bless,

Tami

My freezer was lacking precooked ground beef so I made it a point to restock this weekend.  I had 15 pounds of raw ground beef in the freezer already…from my shopping trip I described last weekend.  However…I never got around to cooking the meat, so into the freezer it went last Tuesday.  Sunday afternoon I cleared an hour on my calendar and made a point of getting it done.  I used my large steamer and cooked 5 pounds at a time.  While it cooked, I took advantage of time in the kitchen and straightend up a few cabinets.  All the while I couldn’t shake a chocolate craving…so I then pulled out 2 HG Chocolate Chunk cookie mixes and made some cookies (afterall…the oven was empty and I had the time while my beef cooked!).  I cooked a dozen for me and the kids and then filled a cookie sheet with preballed dough, covered it with foil and put it in the freezer.  This morning I scooped up the frozen balls and put them into a freezer back for individual cookies as needed. 

 After my beef finished cooking, my daughter helped me scoop 2 cup portions into bags for the freezer (yes…I used the cookies as a bribe!) Done! Now I have a freezer full of choices.  Fifteen pounds of ground beef, several bags of frozen chicken for quick casserole or 4 meals in 4 minutes meals, as well as a few pounds of stew meat for that day when we get our first cold front and I am inspired to make stew!  This will last me a good 30 days before I need to think about what’s for dinner.  I love having choices in the freezer with HG mixes on the pantry shelf.  I don’t know what I would do without them!  How about you?!

God Bless

Tami

So Sunday afternoon I look at the clock and realize I have 20 minutes to get a grocery list put together before my hubby goes into town to get the kids to all of the church functions for the evening.  You have to understand…we live in the country and I am one of ‘those’ people that insists we are efficient with our time spent in town! I can’t stand the idea of the car going to town to drop off kids and then going back to town later or another day to do the shopping (it’s a personal growth issue…I know…but my husband has learned to love it after 20 years!)

 So….what am I going to do?  Twenty minutes to get the list together for a full week of meals that have not been planned yet?  I do not panic but defer to the printed grocery list we work from every single week.  We print this in our HG cookbooks and my family uses it religiously.  But today I look at my 2 boxes of casserole kits that had just been delivered and remembered that the grocery list was included.  I tear open the boxes and fill my grocery list with the items listed on both flyers.  I then take my ‘preprinted…fill in the amount’ grocery list to the pantry and go down the list looking for standard canned and dry goods that we need to keep on our shelf and fill in the blanks.  Then it’s off to the fridge/freezer.  I stand with the door open, list in hand, and do a quick inventory of what is missing or almost gone and fill in the amounts of items needed preprinted on the list.  Grocery list completed with food for a week of 3 meals a day plus snacks! And did I mention that I went ahead and used the tip from the list in the casserole kits to buy enough grocery items to make 2-3 of each casserole so I can cook ahead in the next few weeks?

 At this point the sweet daughter of the family is honking the horn to signal us that she is going to be late to praise rehearsals!  I hand off the list to my dear hubby and am confident that it will all come back to me just as listed.  Now I can turn my attention to listing the meals we will be able to choose from for the week.  I keep a running list on a chalkboard in the kitchen so any member of the family can pick a meal and make it during the week. 

Several hours later…family returns with groceries in hand.  I am ready to face a week with the answer to ‘what’s for dinner?’!  By the way…as I was looking at the reciept from the grocery excursion…I was intrigued by the amount.  I think I am feeding my family dinner for less than $2 a serving.  I will dig in and let you know what I find out! 

 How do you get dinner on the table every week? 

 God Bless!

Tami

If meal planning is something you need help with … you have come to the right place. This is where you will find tips and ideas of all kinds to help you manage the “costly” question … “What’s for dinner?!”

Did you know that the most common cause of overspending in the typical family grocery budget is lack of planning? It makes sense when you think about it. If you come home at the end of a long day and have to answer the question—“what’s for dinner?”—you had better have a plan or the answer is going to “cost” you. Drive-thru, take-out, and even a quick run into the grocery store will cost you more than a meal planned ahead and waiting for you to serve.

One of my favorite tools in meal planning is using the “Cook Once to Serve Twice” method of cooking. It is so easy that anyone can do it! Not only will it save you preparation time, it will save you money too. A great example of this is preparing ground beef for tacos, casseroles, soups, etc. Instead of heating up the stove to brown one pound of ground beef for a single recipe, just use a larger skillet and brown and season 5 pounds at one time!

Use what you need for your meal tonight and divide the rest in 1 pound portions into quart- sized freezer bags for use later (2 cups cooked ground beef = 1 pound). Be sure to mark on the bag what type of seasoning is used and the date.

This pre-cooked and reserved ground beef is a quick addition to spaghetti sauce, casseroles, soups, and even quick burritos. In the morning, just place the frozen bag in the refrigerator to defrost or defrost it in the microwave when you need it. Buying the meat in bulk also saves $$$ and helps with the grocery budget. Do you have some great tips for planning meals? Tell us about them! Tami