Yesterday I cut a 10# pork loin (on sale at Sam’s Club) into 16 pork chops, salted and vacuum sealed them in individual bags, and sous vide cooked them. I seared one for dinner, put one in the fridge for Tuesday, and froze the rest. That’s the last meat I’ll be buying for awhile.
Today I’m turning batch cooked black beans from Tuesday into vegan black bean chili, adding in various bags of leftover TVP (I freeze whatever amount is still in the fridge after 5 days, and it’s time to use it up). My goal is to not buy meat until 2025 (except for holiday roasts), so I tossed a bag of vacuum sealed tri-tip steaks from the freezer into my Instant Pot to sous vide cook. I’ll eat one steak, and repackage and refreeze the rest. Sous vide cooking meat and then doing a hot water defrost and sear right before dinner is simplifying meals for me since I’m still not tolerating any produce that isn’t puréed and am still advised to stick with a low residue diet. Last week I cooked an eye of round roast sous vide for 24 hours, then sliced it thin, portioned it out, and froze it — I eat this for lunch a few times a week. I eat a lot of beef now since my ferritin levels are extremely low and my hemoglobin is also low. I can’t absorb iron supplements, but eating a lot of beef has raised my hemoglobin a few tenths since July.
I don’t need to buy meat for awhile, but what I have been cooking is whatever I find marked down at Sam’s Club first thing in the morning (8 am, and sometimes I have to wait for them to do the mark downs). The tri-tip steaks, pork loin, and eye of round roast were all marked down (I find eye of round pretty consistently marked down). A couple of weeks ago it was beef stew meat marked down, so I batched and froze beef stew, and also a package of two chuck roasts, but all I had time to do with those was salt and vacuum seal them for later.
I’m getting into a good rhythm with cooking for the vegans, and the leftovers not eaten at another dinner have been taken as lunches or frozen for our own version of fast food. I’m making note of how many servings I get from each recipe: I made 1.5x batch of spit pea soup and it made 7 servings (2 dinner servings the first night, a lunch the next day, 2 dinner servings a couple of days later, and 2 servings frozen in Souper Cubes for later). The guys are getting creative with eating leftovers, at home and at work. Today DH had a veggie burger because I defrosted a package of 4 burger buns but we only ate 3 of them (DS usually wants 2 burgers but only wanted 1 this time), so one was leftover and we didn’t want it to mold.
Now that I’m the only one eating meat, I realize how impractical the 1# packages of ground beef are for one person, especially since I don’t like ground beef that’s been cooked, frozen, and reheated. I’m sure it’s fine mixed in something, but by itself I don’t love it. I have something like 10 1# packages to get through (which will take several months) and then I’ll plan on either bulk buying ground beef and freezing it in smaller portions, or just buying what I need from the butcher counter. Until then, I’m meal planning to use the 1# over the course of a few days, making tacos one night, burgers the next night, and using the final third for a lunch.
I found 2 mushy moldy cucumbers in the fridge today, and we had a bag of potatoes spoil (not just go sprouty), but that’s pretty much it for food waste the past few weeks. I do have some zucchini that needs to be cooked soon, and some apples that are a little mushy and need to be juiced. DH harvested all of our “Utah Sweet” pomegranates and took them to work. I have a head of celery I need to wash, dry, chop, and IQF — this is the only way I end up not wasting celery now, since we really only use it in soups. After freezing I put it in Stasher bag and pull from it as needed.
Topic: Eat All The Food In Your House - Take 2 (Read 1269436 times)
