Last night, I was in the mood for tater tot casserole. I knew this would use up some things in our freezer (veggies, meat, tots,...) and we had planned on reorganizing our freezers so the less we had to deal with, the better.
I have made tater tot casserole before, similar to my mom's, with cream of mushroom soup but I was unable to find that recipe so I googled around for it. Instead, I found this recipe and boy am I glad I did! This recipe was so unbelievably good!! As with most recipes, we did modify it just a touch. We used frozen vegetables (we freeze peppers and onions when they're on sale, the corn was half a bag of frozen corn, and we added half a bag of frozen peas and carrots) and left out the chives but everything else was the same (that's probably the least we've modified a recipe lately).
We happened to have both the bold sauce and the cream cheese, even though neither is a staple in this house. I am pretty sure you could get away with using regular sauce if you wanted and leaving out the cream cheese if you don't have it. Since we added more vegetables (the peas and carrots) than called for, we just added these when we added the corn.
I'm not sure I agree with the 6 servings. Those must be real servings, not what people eat servings. We only got 3 servings out of it but we probably could've done 4 if we had to. 6 would've been a little skimpy (but probably healthier). Since we had the starch, meat, and protein all in the casserole, we didn't serve it with anything. That's the great thing about a casserole. However, if you were trying to stretch the servings, you could serve with a side salad or something like that.
As I mentioned, we also cleaned out our freezers last night. We have a chest freezer and the freezer attached to our fridge. Both were getting messy and hard to find things and our chest freezer needed to be defrosted. We put everything from the chest freezer into a big box and put it in the garage (our garage isn't heated and with the temps being in the negatives, we weren't worried about anything thawing). Then we left the freezer open and unplugged for a few days to let everything melt (we did an initial scraping but since we weren't in a hurry to get the food back in the freezer, we thought this was easiest). Then last night, we put it all back. We have two baskets and a shelf in our freezer, with the rest being open space. We made one basket meat (minus fish since it didn't fit), one basket fruits and veggies, and the shelf is what I call "quick food" (i.e. pot pies and TV dinners). We don't have a good way to organize the rest of it because it's just a big open space so we took a box without flaps and put our pizzas in there (you can tell we eat really healthy in this house...) on their sides and then put our fish and other miscellaneous items next to the box.
We have a lot of empty space in our freezer so we also have frozen 2 liters (of water. We drank the soda, then refilled) to take up more room (to make the freezer more energy efficient) plus we give these to Cocoa on hot days during the summer to lick and lean against.
Our other freezer was much easier to organize, simply because there was less stuff. Our chest freezer has a seal on it that after you open it once, you can't open it again for like 5 minutes (sometimes it's annoying, most of the time it's great). This means everything open that would go back in the freezer (for instance, a pail of ice cream), goes in the fridge freezer since this one doesn't have that seal. We also decided to keep all our after Teeny meals in there. This freezer is also rather empty looking but there's not much we can do about it. We looked into combining that freezer into the chest freezer but that doesn't help because we can't turn the fridge freezer off and it doesn't work the other way, to have the chest freezer go into the fridge freezer because it wouldn't all fit. Guess we need to go shopping!
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