 Oh my goodness, this is so good. Hi friends, welcome back to my kitchen. Today we are going to be focusing on a monthly meal prep. We're going to be putting stuff into the freezer. Sorry if you hear my dishwasher in the background. It could be a little loud on the cycle that it's on. But I have been away, and if you've been watching my last few videos, then you know that I spent some time in Florida with my parents and we live in central Pennsylvania. And I feel like my kitchen needs a little bit of a reset. There's some staple items that I like to keep in the freezer that I need to get prepped and put in there so that they're good grab and go items that make cooking a little bit easier. The first thing that we're going to start out with is onions. I actually got this question in my Q&A video. If you guys didn't see that, you definitely want to check that out for life updates and things like that. But someone asked how to preserve onions. What's the best and easiest way to preserve onions? Now you can freeze dry them, dehydrate them, turn them into onion powder, and those sorts of things. But I really love dicing them up, vacuum sealing them, which is not necessary. I just want to make that clear. You can do this and just put them into regular freezer ziploc bags and you'll be fine. But I'm going to take the extra step of vacuum sealing them just because sometimes I go through sports of using them. And if some of them end up being in the freezer longer than I initially intended, at least I know that they have less of a chance of getting freezer burnt if they are vacuum sealed. So I'm going to pull out the onions and get chopping. I have a lot of other projects to tackle today and I'm going to take you along with me. Besides being extremely convenient to have onions already chopped and ready to go into your recipe, this is also a great thing to do with onions that are kind of on their last leg, you know, getting to the point of needing to be used up. You can simply chop them and freeze them like this and you'll be able to save them from going to waste. The other thing too is you can freeze bell peppers in pretty much the same manner. They don't need to be blanched or have any other preparation done to them other than to be cut in the way that you want to use them. So that's another thing. You could cut onions into slices and freeze them that way. They wouldn't necessarily have to be diced. I just find that that's the type of cut that I tend to use the most in recipes and whatnot. I mean, the possibilities are so endless with this idea. You can use them on pizza. You can use them in an omelet. You can use them to just fry up with some butter if you're going to add it in to some veggies. I mean, you can really find lots and lots of ways to use these and guess what? They sell them in the grocery store like this, but I can tell you right now, it's a whole lot cheaper to buy a nice big bag of onions and chop them up yourself than to be buying pre-chopped onions at the grocery store. So once I had them all chopped up, I pulled out my vacuum sealer and I'm just using a roll of vacuum seal bags. This way I can cut them to the size that I want them to be and a lot of the pre-made bags are pretty large and since I wanted smaller portions of these onions, I am just cutting them smaller. I'm sealing off the bottoms of the bags before I start filling them and this is another perk I love to making my own freezer items is if we had a massive bag of frozen onions, I may not use it all before they go bad. A lot of times they're not really in a resealable bag so you have to use them in a fair amount of time before they get freezer burnt and whatnot. So this way I can really put in the serving size that I know I will mostly use whenever I'm cooking with these and obviously if I need a lot of chopped onions, then I could open more than one bag at a time as well. So it just makes it nice and flexible. Then whenever I'm done vacuum sealing them, I will put the date or the month at least that I did these so that if I do another batch before I use these up, I know I can use up the older ones first. Hey friends, I wanted to pop on and say a big thank you to FitTrack for sponsoring today's video. FitTrack is a body composition monitor that monitors 17 different health metrics instead of weight. Lately I've really challenged myself to pull away from diet culture and focus more on my health and FitTrack helps me do that. Personally, one of my goals has been to stay on top of my hydration and know what my water percentages are. Knowing my water percentages helps me understand when I am really dehydrated and need to focus more on that. Along with my water percentages, I can also track my body mass index, body fat percentage, muscle rate, bone mass, basal metabolic rate, protein rate, metabolic age, which is super fascinating to me to find out about what age my body is actually at. And it was a little higher than I wanted it to be, a little older than I actually am. So that helps me to hone in on certain health aspects that get that number down. Along with my water percentages, I want to keep track of my protein mass and that is something else I can do with FitTrack. This body composition monitor connects seamlessly to my phone and I'm able to see all of my numbers in one place. Right now you can get 50% off of this incredible monitor along with an extra 20% off with my code Adeline. You can check out the link in the description box below to find out more. So anyone that knows me knows that I love drinks. I'm big on obviously coffee drinks, but also just mixing up different refreshers and things like that. And lately I've been wanting to get even more creative just to make sure that I'm staying really hydrated and things like that. And one thing I love to add to my drinks is lemons and limes. And I was thinking why not just freeze up a bunch of lemons and limes like in a wedge and then just throw them into my drink frozen and they will fall out in there and I will get the flavor of the lemons and limes. And it looks really pretty as well. So what I'm gonna do is wash up these lemons and limes because they're gonna be going into my drink. I kind of wanna make sure that the outsides are pretty clean. I mean they sell them in these net bags and so of course they've had a lot of travel and who knows where they've all been. So I'm gonna go ahead and wash these up pretty good and then I'm going to mix up a little drink with you guys too just a yummy refresher that I've been wanting to make. Just like the onions, I feel that there is so many different uses for this idea of doing lemons and limes. Again, you could do slices instead of wedges. You can kind of customize how you want to cut them before you put them into the freezer. And I also thought I may end up using these in marinades for meats as well. So they are flexible and I'm going to probably get them out a little bit before I plan to use them so that I can squeeze them into my drink. Basically allowing them to thaw enough that I can squeeze them into my drink and drop them right in there. You could do them frozen like I said before like an ice cube as well, just depending on how you want to use them. And I'm thinking I'm going to do this with some other fruit. A lot of times when you buy things like strawberries and raspberries in a bag that's already been frozen and done for you at the store, a lot of it is very clumped together. So if you're wanting to add fruit to different drinks or water to infuse it, it's a little nicer to have the fruit separated. So this spring, whenever I do strawberries from a local strawberry farm, I probably will lay them out like this to freeze them. All right, so we're going to make a mango lime with a little bit of coconut refresher. I recently got this pellet ice tray. It's really convenient because it is made out of silicone. I'll leave a link below if you don't want to invest in a really expensive ice maker. You still want that fun like small ice cubes. Then this is the way to go. Just kind of bend it around. It helps a lot if you have a plate or something flat to kind of let it all fall onto. So for myself with a drink like this, I use the whole tray and you can obviously fill the tray and then like dump it into another container in the freezer if you only have one tray and you want to like make a lot of the smaller ice. You can definitely do that. Hopefully it all lands in here. I think I'm losing a little. This is the coconut lime vitamin water and it is a zero. I try to make most of my drinks without much sugar because that's kind of the point is to get hydrated without a lot of sugar. So I'm going to put that in here. I'm going to take about two lime wedges and squeeze them and then drop them in, right? And then I'm going to add in probably about a dropper dropper full to a little less than a dropper full of the liquid stevia. I love using this. And then I'm going to finish off the rest of it with a mango bubbly and it'll give it a nice little fizz. I also love these cups that have kind of a silicone sleeve because I'm still drinking out of glass but it'll survive through my car cup holder and doesn't leave rings on things either, which is really nice. So I'm just going to put this together. Look how pretty that looks. And we're going to give it a taste. Oh my goodness, this is so good. It's so good. Honestly, with the coconut in there really gives a nice spring flavor. I thought maybe it would taste a little more summer but it tastes more on the spring side and it's so delicious. And actually I have to go run a few errands before I finish up this prep today. So I'm going to take this with me and I'll see you in a little bit. All right, after a few hours my lemons and limes were solidly frozen and I was ready to get back to work after doing my errands and whatnot. So I just pulled these up. I didn't mention this before but I did put wax paper down on these cookie trays. I just thought it would be a little easier. I knew that these would be juicy slices and they would probably want to freeze fast to the metal sheet. So I just thought I'd go ahead and put that layer of wax paper in between to help lift the slices of fruit up a little bit easier. And then I'm just putting these into gallon bags since they're already pre-frozen they're not going to stick together and I can easily open the bag, pull out what I need and close it again before I throw it back into the freezer. Okay, so the next project that I wanted to work on was making homemade hash browns. This is something I want to try to do every month. We love hash browns in our house and every time I pick up a bag of them at the store whether I purchased it or I put it back I always feel like I could just make it at home and make it with some better ingredients. I don't like to use seed oils where I don't have to. One of the areas that we haven't quite gotten rid of seed oils is mayo. Haven't found a good mayo that my family likes that's not made with an oil that would be more like a seed oil or a vegetable oil. But whenever I can eliminate it in other areas, I do. And one of the things that's often in pre-frozen hash browns is a vegetable oil and that sort of thing. So this was so easy. I've never done this before, but now that I've done this I'm like why in the world have I not been doing this? So I got out my food processor. You could easily use a box grater for this as well. I don't even think it would take that long with a box grater to be honest. You wanna get some water boiling and then you're going to drop your hash browns or at least a fair amount of them into the boiling water and you're going to blanch them. This is what blanching is. You just boil it for just a small amount of time for two to three minutes after you have let them in that boiling water for two to three minutes. You wanna remove them as quickly as possible. And some people suggest putting them in an ice bath. I didn't have a ton of ice made this day so I wanted to do it a little bit faster and to be honest, I like this method better. I just took my colander and I put it in to my sink and I just sprayed it all down with cold water. The main purpose in doing this is making sure that that cooking process stops. If you don't cool down the potatoes, they can actually continue to cook and they'll get really mushy, which is not the goal or the point of blanching. You're blanching to preserve the flavor, to preserve the nutrients and also to help the potatoes not turn black or brown in the freezer. And these looked so good. I did use red potatoes, so I did go ahead and just leave the skin on, but you could peel them as well depending on the type of potato you use. I do know that red potatoes are often a little bit less in starch, so I think that they would hold up a bit better than say a baking potato or a white skin potato. They just tend to get mushier a bit quicker because they have more starch in them than red skin potatoes. So I think without all of that starch, they're gonna hold up their shape a whole lot better through the freezing process. Now again, like with the onions, I get to make my own custom size for what I think my family would eat in a breakfast. And breakfast foods are such a staple in my freezer. I feel like they are the thing that I tend to prep for a freezer meal the most is breakfast food. So this was a good staple piece that I wanted to get stocked up in my freezer once again. We're gonna work on another breakfast item here in a little bit. So I just smashed them out nice and flat so that they would be easy to crush up once they're frozen and dump into my frying pan. I also did not season these at all. I only did the blanched potatoes and I'll season them when I make them. All right, so since this is all about staple things in my freezer, one thing that is an absolute staple and we've been out of it for a while is minced garlic. I've talked about this before, but one of my cringiest kitchen projects, kitchen tasks rather, is to peel garlic. I, it's just, especially when you're in the dinner rush and you're trying to get things made, it's just an extra little thing that can be frustrating to get the skin off the garlic. So having pre-minced garlic in the freezer in little blocks is so convenient. I'm actually showing you in real time how fast the food processor menses up garlic. Imagine if you had a little mincer, which I have a small one, and how long it would take to mince up this amount of garlic. Think about how much time I'm saving myself here. So I went ahead and tried a method I've been seeing a lot lately. That is people taking a spoon or a measuring spoon and kind of making these little blobs of minced garlic. I didn't really like how this turned out, as you're gonna see. I tried it and I felt like they were just going to crumble and not really stay in these nice little blobs for me. So I went back to my molds. If you guys have been around for a while, you've seen me do this before. These are these great ice cube molds from Amazon. I'll leave them linked below, and they work out so well. Once this is frozen, I just pop out those little cubes and I'm able to use them in any type of cooking that I'm doing. And what I'll do also sometimes is just drizzle a little bit of water over the top of this once I have it all packed in, just to make sure that the blocks fuse together really, really well. And I will usually pop them out and put them into a Ziploc and I'm able to just grab the amount of blocks that I want. So the next project we're working on is one that I'm pulling out a few baking-style ingredients and that is some fantastic pancakes. I am gonna be making this with gluten-free flour. We do a lot of gluten-free eating in our house. And like I said earlier, we also tend to lean towards trying to eliminate seed oil. My one daughter in particular is sensitive to that and to gluten. We do do sourdough though. She has been able to eat sourdough pretty well, so I'm very happy about that. But having some pancakes pre-made is so convenient. Kind of think the idea of like freezer waffles, but we're making them a little healthier and with some ingredients that I know what they are and all that good stuff. So this batch is a nice big batch. I actually doubled it and I will leave this recipe in the description box below for you all to follow. One thing about this recipe that is so great is they make nice fluffy pancakes and you can easily use regular flour in this recipe. It does not have to be gluten-free flour and it will work just fine. But if you want to make them gluten-free, you can also do that as well. So I just mixed up the liquid ingredients first and then added in my smaller portions of my powdered ingredients. Lastly, adding in the flour, using my whisk to really get things whisked up well. And I didn't film it, but I did actually grab my immersion blender and go through this just to make sure that the batter was nice and smooth and we would end up with nice fluffy pancakes. And these fry up so nice, I always fry them in butter and I add a little dusting of cinnamon over the tops of them. That's how my mom always made pancakes. I feel like they have to have that little dusting of cinnamon to taste like pancakes in my mind. So while you guys watch this time lapse of me making all of these pancakes, and by the way, this recipe doubled, I think made 55 pancakes somewhere around there. I had tried to count them all, but the girls were eating some too while I was making them. So I think that's the ballpark of what I ended up with this day. But I wanted to chat with you all a little bit about cast iron pans. So in the last year, we have completely switched to cast iron skillets. And some people I know try it or they're very hesitant to try using cast iron. And I'm here to tell you that it is so much easier than you think. And once you switch, you never wanna go back once you've got your pans nice and seasoned. They work so well. So cast iron pretty much works like this. It is a very textured pan and it provides a surface area for the seasoning oils and fats to bond and adhere to the iron, which then creates a layer buildup and the oils and fats will fill the texture and it will create a smooth, natural, non-stick surface. So the big question is what do you do whenever your pan is not seasoned? And my answer is keep using it. So I will leave the cast iron pans that I have in the description box below. We have the Lodge brand, I believe if I'm saying the correct brand here. We have that and both of them are that we actually have some other pieces as well. And they work so well. They do come with what they call a pre-seasoning so they're not completely bare when you get them, which is great. And I can't recommend it enough. The other thing about cast iron pans that's really awesome is it's very evenly heated. So for things like these pancakes, it makes such a great even heat for nice golden brown pancakes. And it works awesome for steaks and many, many other things. So I can't recommend it enough. If you guys have more questions about switching to cast iron, please leave them in the comments below. I would love to help you if you are thinking you may wanna do this. It's really simple. It's not as scary as you might think. You can even keep your nonstick pans and try it out for a while and see if it works. But after a couple of weeks of using your cast iron, you will find that it is just as good as nonstick and it works so, so well. So this is what I got accomplished this day. I was so happy with what I was able to put into my freezer. If you're new here, don't forget to subscribe. Like I said, chat with me in the comments. I love to hear from you all and I'll see you all in my next video.