By Ralph Graner
When on the road RVing, or camping in national parks like Yellowstone or Grand Tetons, you don’t always have the time or desire after hiking all day to start cooking meats and dinner from scratch.
We solve these problems days before departure by precooking “basic” meats and freezing them in “one-meal” ziplock freezer bags.
We eat a lot of chicken in many forms, so when it comes to dinnertime, all we have to do is pull out a bag and easily mix it with fresh ingredients for fajitas, cacciatore, Chinese veggies and fried rice, wraps, and a gazillion other meals. Chopped beef is another set of bags for us. If you make a favorite spaghetti sauce, do a pretrip prep and “bag it.” We don’t put our special meatballs in the sauce (yuck … mushy), just “bag ’em.”
We always use bags as opposed to containers because the bags take less space. Be sure that when you put the bags in your freezer at home for the first time, you shape them as flat as possible. Be sure to prefreeze in your home freezer first, then take them to your RV.
Of course, we have a variety of other meals on vacation, but on those days when we want “quick and easy,” we have enough space in our trailer’s freezer for several weeks of “one-meal bags.”
Editor: See Part 2 to cover safety tips for freezing foods from health and nutrition specialists.
photo: skey on flickr.com.
