Kitchen Tip Tuesdays

I love buying in bulk because it saves me money and time. But I don't like dealing with those big packages on a daily basis. So when I do my Sam's run or my grocery shopping and come home with those huge containers of items, I take the time to do what I call "divide and freeze" or "divide and store".

Here is a 5lb bag of pepperoni. It is the only topping other than cheese and sauce that goes on our homemade pizzas!
I took the time to divide it into five-1# bags for the freezer. By doing the dividing, I can just pull out the one bag and not worry about defrosting more than I will need for one meal(which is 3 or 4 pizzas). The 5# bag costs $12.57 so that is $2.51 per lb. In the grocery stores, I usually can't find pepperoni for under $4 per lb.

I have talked before about my version of once a month cooking but I wanted to show you one of the ways I handle dividing up my packages of ground beef! This is 4.32lbs ground beef from round that I got on markdown last week! I was able to make 13 decent size hamburgers from that meat!

I took the 13 burgers and put them into one gallon size freezer bag. I put them into two different "stacks" one at the bottom of the bag and one at the top. Then I labeled the bag with the number that was in each "stack". This way, I can pull the bag out of the freezer and get out just one "stack" for a meal and cross off the number that I used. I used the gallon size bag rather than a quart size bag so I wasn't using LOTS of bags. Doing up the burgers this way saves me lots of time especially on those nights when I need to do something quick and have no meat thawed! I can pull out a "stack" of burgers and pull them apart and put them on my "indoor grill"(similar to a George Foreman grill) and have dinner done in a 1/2 hour!

These are just a couple of ways that I save time with my meal preparations. Looking for other "shortcuts" to meal prep, check out Fishmama's post here! She gives some great tips!

For other kitchen tips, head over to Tammy's Recipes!