So, I am pretty frugal when it comes to food. We frequently cook from scratch around here and try our best to make our food go as far as it can. Thus, my freezer frequently comes into play, and I'd like to start a thread aimed at sharing food you can freeze--not just meals, but other things you can freeze in the interest of making the food last longer, or in the interest of reusing something for another purpose later.
Take stock. And no, Eden, I'm NOT getting into this debate again :P If I have clean trimmings from vegetables, I throw them in a zip-top gallon bag in my freezer. I save all my trimmings until I have enough to make stock. I then take the stock, pour it into clean quart containers (quart-size yogurt containers and salsa containers work GREAT for this), and freeze it.
Tomatoes. We had a surfeit of tomatoes this summer, and late too. There were too many to can in a timely manner, so I packed four quarts of stewed tomatoes into freezer containers.
Beans. Whenever I make beans from dried, I make extra and pack a quart or so of beans in the freezer. Supposedly this affects the texture, but I haven't had any problems with them. So what if they're a little more tender and prone to falling apart? If the beans are going into a soup where you want them to fall apart a bit, this is perfect--same with doing refried beans.
Soup. Extra soup always goes into the freezer, in two different size containers: a small one for an individual serving, and a quart for another dinner.
Stale bread. I freeze stale bread to reuse it in other things. Stale bread should be used fairly quickly, or else it starts getting a freezer-y taste.
Cheese. I freeze mozzarella cheese, in particular. We buy big blocks of it at the store, and don't always get around to using the second half in a timely manner, so I started freezing it. I discovered that this works really well, especially if you are going to shred the cheese. Freezing actually makes the cheese easier to shred with my KitchenAid shredder attachment.
I'd like to freeze lasagnas, but my freezer is stuffed with enough food already. I don't have room to freeze a whole lasagna. Maybe I will after my first anniversary--the top tier of my wedding cake is taking up a lot of room!
Alton Brown covers some more stuff you can freeze in this episode of Good Eats:
Part 1:
Part 2:
So what do you freeze? What would you like to freeze?