Food: Eating from the stash

Just as I have a knitting stash of yarn, so too I consider my freezer food a stash for later. Like a squirrel, I guess. This past week has been mostly about eating from the stash to make room for make-ahead Thanksgiving goodies.

I still have more than half a case of canned organic pumpkin from last year (bought on sale), so that's where the pumpkin pies are coming from. I have a bunch of apples (from my first batch this fall) frozen as pie filling, so apple is taken care of as well. I still have that load of hot dog buns Barronius bought in the freezer, so what isn't made into crumbs for later will be cubed for stuffing and dressing.

So the big purchases are going to be cranberries, turkey (possibly just a breast), and ham. I ended up tossing what was left of our ham from Christmas last year just recently... it wasn't the nice pretty slices anyway, it was the unsliced heel and the bone, mostly, and I never did get around to making bean soup from it. We're not big soup people.

I never feel well-fed after soup, no matter how much bread I dunk in it.

So anyway, starting this week would be a good time to keep an eye on your store flyers for turkey and ham on sale. Also, if you've been dying to get one of those Nesco roaster/slow cooker appliances, those usually go on sale this time of year too. Watch places like hardware stores , W-mart, and even electronics stores if they carry appliances.

The roasters are good for doing more than cooking turkeys... I've heard people mention baking cookies in them, and other oven chores when they don't want to heat up a whole oven or their kitchen is being remodeled. They are also good for slow-cooking fruit butters. ;)

That's my advice for this pre-Thanksgiving season... watch for the sales. Stock up if you can. Pre-cooked turkey in the freezer is just as good as and can be substituted for cooked chicken, and at sale prices of around $.49 a pound, a real bargain.