How To Make Your Healthy Indian Home-cooked Meals Freezer Ready

I have always been a fan of fresh home cooked meals for healthy nutrition they offer and always find them delicious over any fancy restaurant meal any day. Few days back when I wrote about frozen food on Lifezing.com and later when tweeted about it, I realised that not every one has that much free time to cook and eat fresh meals everyday and healthy takeout options or eat out options are very limited. What can be the solution?

Solution is right there with you eat next best thing to fresh meals, that is frozen meals. Home cooked frozen meals are best options for the days when you are pressed for time and there is nothing great to come back to home cooked meal ready right there in your freezer.

Let me take you to for a walk through to my tasty curry and get many of these recipes ready to convert into ready frozen meals.

A walk down in the super market and there are not too many frozen meal options available. Even the available ones are also full of preservatives and extra sodium or fats.  So why buy ready to eat or frozen meals when you can create easy frozen dinners at home and ensure the amount and quality of the ingredients going into your meals.

Let’s see how we can tweak the recipes for Healthy Frozen Dinners.

I always cook bhuna masala, some sauces and pesto in big batches and freeze extra to use later. Other thing which I always have available are some frozen vegetables in the freezer.

Following are few examples of the recipes, which can be made freezer friendly , by slightly undercooking them ( 5 minutes before the actual cooking time) and freezing immediately. When you are ready to eat your meal, just pop them in oven and reheat for 5-7 minutes and your meal will be cooked just right.

Moroccan Chickpeas Soup

On of the popular dish on my tasty curry, WIth some tweaks this morrocan chickpea soup recipe can be made freezer friendly. Cook the soup till step-3 given in the recipe and freeze it, When You want to eat it, take it out thaw it and add some boiled chickpeas to it for a hearty and nourishing soup.

Tadka Dal 

Punjabi Dal Makhani

In these recipes, generally bhuna masala and curry paste come handy, For example in Rajma masala (Curried Kidney Beans), if I am cooking some extra for freezing , I cook a big batch of bhuna masala, store it separately and freeze Rajma ( Red kidney beans) that are slightly undercooked alongwith the liquid in which kidney beans(rajma) is boiled. When I am ready to serve I just put everything together and cook for 10 minutes in oven for a delicious meal of Rajma Chawal in a jiffy.

Red Thai Curry

In vegetable curries like this Red Thai curry cook the curry till you have added coconut milk and freeze it , when ready to eat throw some frozen vegetables with the frozen curry sauce and cook for 10 minutes in oven.

Spaghetti and Baked Paneer Balls in Rich Tomato Sauce

Balls can be baked ahead and they freeze well, spaghetti also can be cooked little underdone and sauces freeze well too. The day when you are want to eat the meal, Takeout everything from freezer and leave it on refrigerator shelf to thaw it.  Freshen up the spaghetti as given below and combine sauce and paneer ball together to reheat it in oven.

Aloo Baingan Curry

This curry can be cooked both ways, cooking vegetable curry and freezing it when it is slightly undercooked , or freezing chopped vegetables and bhuna masala seperatly and pressure cooking everything together for 2 whistles and both ways a quick and delicious curry is ready to be served under 15 minutes .

   

Grains
To freeze grains like Brown Rice, basmati rice and goodies made using flours etc also, leave them slightly undercooked when ready to eat sprinkle little water and reheat to freshen them up.

Cutlets Burgers and Patties

Most of the cutlets like Paneer and Dahi Kebab these can be cooked in pan till they are half done, these are then flash frozen and stored in freezer bags. When You are ready to serve you can just place them on baking tray and bake for 10-13 minutes till they are crisp again.

Whenever I am freezing my meals as far as possible I freeze them raw in almost finished and ready to put together stage and cook them when we are ready to eat them.

Though I would have loved to have one commerical freezer but till I have pantry attached to my kitchen { come on a girl can dream that much } I will have to manage with  one or two meals that are always ready till the stage of little underdone so that on days when no one in mood for cooking, we can still have home cooked delicious meals available.