Write it down before it becomes Mystery Meat

I wanted to start a tips section so I figured I would say my few tips again.

- Double your caserole recipes. It's just as easy to make two of them as it is to make one. It's most convient if you keep a few foil pans on hand for this. You can also double your crock pot recipes, just label a gallon freezer bag and dump everything in. You just pull it out of the freezer the night before so it thaws, but if you are like me and don't think about it until that afternoon, it just about doubles the cooking time if it is frozen when you put it in to cook (standard, add about 45 minutes to the cooking time, less if it is only in for like 20 min, more if you cook it for over an hour). Except with the crock pot, it only adds an hour or so.

- Make a freezer meal list. Every time you make a meal for the freezer add it to the list. This way you don't have to go searching through a crowded freezer for something to feed your family.

-Catagorize your freezer. I just started doing this because I was sick of having to pull everything out of my freezer to find a bag of meat. So I still bag my meat in pound packages, but now I use regular sandwich bags instead of the freezer bags. Then I put all of the pound bags inside a labeled gallon freezer bag. I label them by meat- chicken, pork, ground beef/turkey, and beef. Then I plan on keeping all of the meat bags on one shelf so I just have to find the right bag and grab one out.

- Hamburger. Everyone hates dealing with this don't you agree? Almost everything I make requires the hamburger to be cooked, lasagna, chili, sloppy joes, etc. The only things that you don't want it cooked for is hamburgers or meatloaf/meatballs, but I just buy fresh hamburger if I am making these. So when I buy ground beef I just cook it all at once while I am unloading the groceries. I usually buy 5-6 pounds of it at once and dump it all into a big pot as soon as I get home with it. If I have the time I add a couple of chopped onions and some garlic. It takes about an hour to cook it, all you do is stir it up really well every once in a while. Then I drain it and when it has cooled a little I put 1 pound in each sandwich bag and through it in my burger gallon freezer bag to use whenever I want. It thaws faster and alot better then raw hamburger.