Freeze Tag

You remember that post a little bit ago about how life happens?  Well, life keeps happening to me.  The latest in my series of unfortunate events (my daughter loves those book, btw), is that the breaker to our chest freezer somehow got tripped, and instead of a freezer we basically had a large ice chest.  Fortunately, we discovered it in time to save most of the food.  The big things at the bottom were still frozen solid, but all of the meat at the top was beginning to thaw, so I have been cooking lots of meat and learning about freezer meals today.

(photo: Mustard Molasses Freezer Chicken from Chef Tess Bakeress site)

My friend Stephanie (a.k.a Chef Tess Bakeress), blogged about "storking the freezer" for new moms here on my blog, so I went to her site to find a freezer meal I could make with my no-longer-frozen package of chicken thighs.  I tried this one here with the Mustard sauce, since I had those ingredients on hand (will let you know how it is later).  I used my mom's taco seasoning recipe to cook up the ground beef and freeze it in smaller packages for tacos or burritos at a later date.  We are cooking the ham, and have some chicken and steak marinating that I plan to grill and cut into smaller strips for stir-frys, fajitas, and salads.  I'm going to crock pot the pork roast in the Cafe Rio style with some Coca-cola and adobo chilies.  Then shred it and freeze it in smaller portions.

We just have to see whether the freezer is the culprit, or something else tripped the breaker.  We might be in the market for a new freezer this afternoon.  Any recommendations?  We got this one off of Craigslist, so it's hard to know how much life it has in it.

Any other suggestions for me?  Have you been in this kind of situation before?  What did you do to preserve your food?  It will probably end up being a blessing in disguise as I will have an easier time preparing meals each night for a while.  Just not quite what I had on the to do list for today.

In other unfortunate events news, my computer is up and running!  We still have to re-install lots of software and things to get it back to where it was, but so far, so good.

So normally, I would tell you what posts I am working on for this week but lately, the only thing I can count on, is that things will happen that I'm not counting on.  Stay tuned for my on-going adventures!