This past Sunday, I spent the day grocery shopping and cooking with Carol to prepare for a car camping trip we're taking. The idea is that we'd make 4 meals (each for 4 people) in advance, and freeze them into single-serving size ziploc bags. When dinner time rolls around, we'd heat a pot of water on the camp stove and add the bags to the water until the food was warmed. I've never tried this method of reheating before, so I thought I'd document this on the blog and come back after the trip to report on how each recipe fared.
Chili and Cornbread
For this we used a mashup of the recipe for Chili Con Carne out of the Spice Bible and the Vegetable Chili out of The New Basics. It had ground beef, onions, red peppers, kidney beans,and zucchini in it, and the mildly surprising addition of oregano and thyme to the spices. It came out wonderfully spiced, even before we added salt, which upped it's punch a bit more. More savory and aromatic than up-and-at-em-spicy, and should go very well with the Smitten Kitchen Aleppo Cornbread recipe.
We plan to serve this with pita bread, and dates for desert. In the dessert. Or vice versa.
Meatballs, Polenta, and Broccoli
This is also a mashup of several recipes that we're both made before. The meatballs were out of Joy of Cooking and my recollection of how my mom makes them. Ground beef with onion powder, breadcrumbs, tomato paste, and an egg, rolled into balls and coated with flour before being pan fried. then added to a lovely tomato sauce with red bell pepper, zucchini, and lots of garlic. Then we pan fried some polenta in olive oil. It didn't get as golden as I hoped, but will be quite tasty and not as soggy as frozen pasta would be. We packaged the sauce and meatballs together, the polenta separately, and the broccoli separately. Again, I'm not sure how the broccoli will reheat after being frozen, but I do know that it being "the best broccoli of your life" that I won't mind.
So that's two tomato heavy dishes, a lentil-spiced dish. What is the last surprise we have for the trip?
I used to have this recipe posted online, but I think my account ate it. But I have made it dozens of times, and this was perhaps the best time of them all. This is a recipe from Cooking Light in 2003 or so. It is best made with a sweet curry, and this time we used apricots instead of raisins. And I put twice the needed ginger in it, because ginger saves. We also made a couscous mix to go with it, amped up with orzo, split garbanzos, red quinoa, and a bit of saffron.
The other thing I wanted to remark on is how wonderful it is to cook with Carol. We had a pretty easy-going time in the kitchen, where we both slipped into complementary roles. I found myself mostly doing sous-chef tasks, which I really do enjoy, while she kept the timetable and orchestration of the main dishes. It took us somewhere between four and six hours to do all the cooking, with a grocery trip at the end while the food cooled enough to package into bags and freeze.
I'm thinking about this partnership in part because I am teaching a series of cooking classes this fall for a friend of mine, and I want to see what I can do to be hands-off so she learns, while keeping the tasks from being overwhelming and stressful for her. We'll see. I'm very excited about those upcoming plans and will likely post the results here. Possibly with pictures.
