Until recently, I really didn’t know how to cook properly.
One of the things I used to make often was spaghetti bolognese. It was high in protein, fit my diet well, it was reasonably healthy, and so I made it about twice a week. The recipe was very simple: mince, onions, spaghetti, and a bottle of pasta sauce from the store.
Over time I started experimenting. I tried different recipes, added more ingredients, cooked parts separately, and let the sauce simmer longer. Bit by bit it evolved.
Now I make the sauce from scratch, cook the mince in a separate pan, add finely diced carrots and a do a bunch of extra steps I never used to, as well as letting everything simmer for a two hours.
The result is honestly fucking delicious and better than any spaghetti bolognese I’ve had in restaurants.
The problem is that it went from being my easy go-to meal to something that actually takes effort. I used to make it multiple times a week, but now I barely do.
And the worst part is I can’t go back to the old version anymore, because it just tastes disappointing.
I just wanted to rant, I’m frustrated because I want the dish more, but don’t want all of the added effort.
Make a bunch and freeze it, now you have premade meals of the good shit whenever you want.
If it doesn’t freeze well as a final product, do the prep and freeze the individual components separately. Later all you have to do is thaw and fry/boil. End result tastes not quite made fresh - you can still tell - but often much better than just freezing and reheating the cooked product.
Huh, I’ve been making marinara for the last 3 summers and it freezes great.
Marinara seems like it would, but some things don’t. I assume they meant freezing stuff separately only when freezing it finished doesnt turn out well
Freezing sauce is fine. I never learned canning when we made sauce from the garden, we sealed and froze.
The noodles cooked in sauce as its final dish, shouldn’t be frozen, no. The texture of the noodles will be wonky.
My advice to Op would be to batch the sauce and freeze it. Make fresh noodles when you use it.
Yeah the marinara is probably not going to change much from being frozen; it’s the meats and veggies I was thinking mostly about.
In OP’s shoes, I’d make a big batch of the the most basic version of the marinara sauce, portion it out and freeze it; then prep the meat and veggies up to being ready to be sauteed and freeze them separately.
When it’s time to cook a meal, thaw out a block of each and get some noodles going, sautee the meat and veggies, mix with the sauce, add the noodle when they’re ready, and nom.
When I do meal prep, that’s usually my approach: don’t cook it up to completion and then freeze (works, but the taste/texture is often a bit off); but prep it up to the last couple of steps so that when my lazy ass gets off of work later in the week, I’m 10 minutes and a single frying pan away from an actually decent meal.
This is the way. I’ve got little frozen containers of spag bol and Mexican beans and mince sitting in the freezer ready for dinner when ever. The trick is to get a giant ass fry pan and just make up a fuck ton of what ever you happen to be cooking and have a bunch of freezer safe containers.