Food Saving

Do you ever overestimate how much food to make for dinner and make too much? Can you only handle leftovers of the same meal so many days in a row? Has anyone given you leftovers - like a lot - and you didn't know what to do with it? Well, this is something you need, yes NEED to have:

It's a vacuum sealer.

I love my vacuum sealer. I can seal stuff up, stick it in the freezer and it lasts soooo much longer than if you chucked the same food in a "freezer safe" ziploc bag and left it for the freezer minions to make frostbittten mincemeat out of it.

I personally have a Food Saver brand vacuum sealer and I love it. I also have the regular and wide-mouthed jar sealer attachments so that I can vacuum seal dry goods, like beans or rice in my canning jars. (Note: Vacuum sealing is not a replacement for properly canning foods.)

I have an example. Our awesome new neighbor just made a boatload of pulled pork he lovingly rubbed and smoked himself for a fund raiser. Sunday morning he brought us an entire pan. Oh. my. goodness. I have never had such amazing pulled pork! And he had his own secret recipe BBQ sauces to go with it. Even our uber picky, practically vegetarian daughter asked for "oink oink" and devoured it to our utter amazement!

Well, we've been eating pulled pork since Sunday, and I don't want my love of this delicious stuff to wear thin, so I shoveled the rest of it into a food sealer bag, pulled out my sealer and vacuumed away. Now it is happily chilling in our freezer ready for a meal sometime in the future. Along with that I had made a lot of oven fried potato wedges because the bag of potatoes was going bad. So, I also shoveled the large container left into a food sealer bag, vacuumed & sealed it and it's also sitting happily in the freezer. Two-thirds of a meal is ready to go at a moment's notice!

Right before vacuum sealing my potatoes for the freezer.

Potatoes vacuum sealed and ready to go into the frozen depths!

I hope you'll consider looking into one of these. If only to save you money in the long run from keeping foods from getting freezer burn. Also, keep in mind that not everything freezes or vacuums well. Imagine trying to vacuum pack all that leftover watermelon from yesterday's picnic... it would be a very sticky, watery mess. Yikes!