On my quest to have some ready-made meals on hand and to avoid those last minute "Let's get takeout!" or "I need to run to the grocery store for something" times my goal is to double a recipe each week to store one dish in the freezer. I want this to continue with side dishes, breads, and desserts so that sometime soon I can have at least 7 meals waiting for us in the freezer. Instead of depleting those meals I want to also make sure that the weeks I take one out that I also stick a new one in. It's not an overwhelming thought and as of now I have two frozen meals in my freezer.My first recipe is one that I know freezes well, as I've done it before. I didn't snap a picture of it, but we all pretty much know what cavatini looks like. I made one casserole dish for us to eat for supper and froze the other one for later. I didn't quite double the recipe on everything though, and this is where the saving money part came in. I often felt like the sausage overwhelmed the dish. The original recipe called for 1 lb. but while doubling the recipe I decided to use just 1 lb. for both dishes and it seems to have worked well as it was just enough sausage in the dish without being too much. The below recipe is the doubled recipe so you can make one for supper and one for the freezer...or both for the freezer. It's your call!
Cavatini
2 lbs. pasta (any kind, I prefer the swirls - which I happen to forget at the moment what they are called!)
1 lb. sausage
1/2 lb. pepperoni
2 jars spaghetti sauce
2 lbs. mozzarella cheese (I used about 1 1/2 lbs.)
Cook pasta according to directions. While pasta is cooking fry up sausage; drain. Cut pepperoni slices in half or fourths and add to sausage. Drain pasta, add meat, add sauce, and stir. Layer 1/2 of pasta into two casserole dishes. Sprinkle with 1/2 the cheese. Add remaining pasta on top and sprinkle the rest of cheese on top. Wrap one dish up and stick in freezer. Cook other dish at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or until cheese is melted.
When ready to cook the frozen dish you can pull from freezer and stick directly into oven. Keep covered with tin foil and bake at 350 degrees for an hour. Pull tin foil off 15 minutes before done in order to let cheese melt.
Hey, that sounds good! (I have never heard of cavatini... :) )
ReplyDeleteI am going to do this one too thanks for the inspiration.
ReplyDeleteI have never heard of cavatini, either! But I have used a recipe similar to that and we call it "pizza lasagna". I use the 'swirly' noodles, too--rotini!
ReplyDeleteAhh...yes...rotini! That was my "duh" moment for the day. :) I have also heard cavatini be called pizza casserole, so your pizza lasagna is also probably the same thing. :)
ReplyDeleteI've not heard of this either, but it sounds quite yummy. I'm trying to eat less carbs for a couple of weeks, but maybe we'll try this sometime. I guess it would work with wholewheat pasta.
ReplyDeleteMy freezer meals tend to be veg and meat based and I freeze them in those plastic boxes you can put straight from freezer to microwave - of course they're just for me and my hubby, so it'll be smaller amounts than you'd be making!
Things like chicken fajita mix (with lots of onion and pepper to pad out the meat) work well. Also curry, again with lots of veg. I have a great recipe from a cook book my mum has for 'Italian country chicken' and it's yummy. Maybe I can blog that recipe sometime soon.
Uh, i'm just rambling, but hey, just wanted to say I agree cooking for the freezer is great :)