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Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Freezer Meal #1 for October 2022!

It's the end of the summer garden growing season and about the only thing we have left to harvest are peppers and the last of the green tomatoes, but those tomatoes are another post for another day.  


As you can see, I harvested a variety of peppers, but the one's we're going to focus on in this post are those small, small, small ... did I say small enough times ... bell peppers!  My plan was to make some stuffed peppers, but these were too small ... or where they????

Here's what I did ...


I washed, cleaned and cut the peppers into halves. Then I brought a pot of water to a boil, turned off the heat, added the peppers, put the lid on the pot and let it set for 5 minutes.  This is the way I blanch veggies!  


Once the 5 minutes were up, I drained the peppers and layered them in the bottom of two pans.  One was for our main meal of the day and the other was going to be a freezer meal.  I layered them thickly!


The stuffed pepper mixture was next.  I mixed some of the rice I had cooked on my earlier freezer meal prep day along with some browned ground beef and onion.  After mixing those two together really well, I opened up jars of home-canned tomato sauce and kept adding it until I got the consistency I wanted.


I layered the mixture over the peppers and added cheese to the top.


Once it was completely cool, I wrapped the pan for the freezer in plastic wrap.


Then, I wrapped it in foil and labeled it with the cooking instructions.  Do you notice what I didn't add that I should have???  I didn't label what was in the pan!!!  It's okay, you can laugh, I did!

I wrapped the pan in plastic over the foil again and added it to the freezer. I didn't notice that I hadn't labeled the contents until I was getting the pictures ready for this post.  I wasn't about to take it out of the freezer and label it.  Let's just hope I remember what it is, or we'll have a 'surprise' for dinner one night!

No this was not the stuffed pepper meal I intended to add to the freezer, but it is a stuffed pepper casserole freezer meal!!!  Those little knotty peppers wouldn't work for traditional stuffed peppers, but they made a delicious stuffed pepper casserole ... we enjoyed the one we had for dinner that night immensely!

That's a wrap for the first freezer meal for October, one down and nine more to go!

What's that in your hand ... it's little knotty bell peppers!  What do you do with them?

Until next time, 

patsi      

Sharing 42 years' experience of frugal living and pantry building (if you include my frugal childhood, well that would add a few more years to my experience!)

A Working Pantry

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She looketh well to the ways of her household … Proverbs 31:27 

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6 comments:

  1. Great idea! We lave little peppers too and they are coming in tomorrow.

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  2. Tip -- painter's tape on the outside of your plastic-wrapped package, with the contents in permanent marker. Or, duct tape would work equally as well. It works for everything, doesn't it????

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    Replies
    1. Lori, I better get it labeled before I forget what's in it ... painter's tape is perfect, and I have some on hand! Great tip!

      Delete
  3. Love this casserole. I have several in my freezer also.

    ReplyDelete