Hi everybody! Welcome to Freezer Meals 101. My name is Christie and I'm going to show you how I
shred cheese. When I'm talking about shredding cheese, I'm talking about shredding cheese for
freezer meals, so we are looking at, I don't know how many cups... a lot.
I need about two kilograms shredded today. Each of these blocks is 1.15 kilograms. I'm just gonna do
all of both of them so that we have enough. It's nice when you have a little bit more sometimes.
When you work with somebody like Sharla...she's got this brain that can just think of things to
make and she'll say "oh we have a little bit of leftover shredded cheese and we have some onions
left and we have some uh you know some hamburger and some and some corn, so let's make tex mex
something" and she's great at that. I don't have a great brain like that, but I suppose if push came
to shove, I could probably come up with something. So when you're working with a food processor,
you have to make it small enough so that it fits inside there. Right? That's kind of the
downside. Don't you wish you could just go vrrrrm and have it be done but it doesn't work like that.
So with your food processor... I don't know what yours is like...
you can do all this by hand. When I have this much to do, I do a food processor. You get rid of
that blade and I have to put the tall piece in that extends this up and this blade has
a coarse grater and a fine grater and we're going to do the coarse grater
today
and mine has a safety feature that it doesn't turn on unless everything is locked into place.
There is a trick that we like to use when we're grating cheese. It's actually pretty important
when you're doing large amounts because I don't know if you've noticed there's some moisture
content in cheese and it kind of gets sticky, sticks together especially if it's warmed up
at all like just been sitting on the counter for half an hour, it starts to clump together,
so what the secret ingredient actually is corn starch. I use quite a bit of it. Start
by cutting our cheese into usable chunks. I think about an inch
So you'll see when I get going here how nice it is to put the cornstarch in. It doesn't seem to
affect flavour um if anything's gonna have juices in it, it actually kind of makes it
creamier and gives it some body like thickens it a bit it's... we haven't really noticed that
it's bad for flavour or bad for the freezer meal. So we're going to put a couple in here
and then it's going to get noisy, so hang on a sec
oh safety features... um this piece has to go down inside there and these are too tall.
Are you kidding me? So now going back to doing them like that. That's okay
I forgot it was on (laugh)
Put a couple more in and at this point, i'll just give it a little blob. I'm normally a measurer.
I really like to know the weights and measures of things I'm doing because I'm,
I'm a confident cook and I'm a good cook, but this is one of those things where nobody ever
told me. I just kind of figured it out so that was maybe a tablespoon
You'll notice that there's a little bit of the cornstarch in there. Not a big deal
because we're going to add more anyway like it's
that was more like a teaspoon and away we go again
so the bad part about using a food processor for doing your cheese is you're going to have
a little bit of waste. I find if i was doing this by hand you know there's a little bit at the end
that you can't quite scrape. Well here what it does instead is you get this kind of cheese goop.
Um I'm sure frugal people could find something to do with that like make a nice cheese sauce you
save that. um for the purposes of this video, I'm not gonna save it today. Take out my lid
and I'm actually going to just dump it right in there
get some reassembly happening here and then I'm going to add
even more so that I can get a nice even coat
and I literally just shake it around
and you might see it poofing out and that's okay
because I'm going to put these in the fridge overnight and by the time we actually do our
freezer meals tomorrow, these will be as orange again as they are sitting here in blocks. So I
went to the dollar store and I got these great little... they're not little... these great bins
and it is gonna fit the perfect amount after I'm done this. I'm gonna have another video
that shows you how to do onions and I have a new tool so make sure you tune in. You can click on
it there and check out how I'm gonna do onions. Oh I forgot. I'm distracted by all your good looks!
I got a new tool for the onions
doing onions before, I often used a mandolin because then I could get a very nice fine mince
and I could get a really even dice and you know I'll talk about it when I get to the onions but um
and it is really good to use it and it goes by quick and if your knife skills aren't that great,
you just can use the mandolin. It is really good. This is getting fuller. I think i can get
one more shot in there. Having good knife skills is important in a kitchen. You want to be safe and
you want to do things quickly and get things done, but um sometimes those little kitchen gadgets are
nice to have so I have a new one a dicer today that I'm gonna try out after this video but if
you want to see the mandolin video, you just click on that one. Oops, forgot the secret ingredient!
I'll get a chance to add more later. It doesn't really matter what order you put this in
You know my husband gets power tools in the garage. I get power tools in my kitchen!
I love technology
So I did put some in. I don't know if you can see it. It's still pretty whoops pretty orange,
so I'm just gonna add a bit more... dust it up nicely and again, here's about a tablespoon
and let's just shake it around. It's going pretty quick. I'm pretty happy with this.
It beats having to do it by hand that is for sure.
Oh I'm wiping it on my apron. How do you like my apron? My mom got it for me. It's quite pretty.
She's my apron lady. She has got me some of the best aprons over the years.
I had a beautiful blue apron that Sharla got me when we did our professional series
when we did our freezer meals the first the freezer meal sessions the first time
and my daughter wanted to borrow it for a play at school and it didn't get home
I'm really sad about it
I don't know where it ended up, but I hope they enjoy it because it was a beautiful
apron. So now I just don't lend them out anymore. Alright, we're onto the second package
So in case you were wondering, it's gonna get a little weird here because I'm gonna
mix measurements. Canadians have a funny relationship with measurements. This is 1.15
kilograms of cheese. I don't really know how many know how many pounds that is. It's gonna be
one kilo no that's two pounds. Bad at the math...sorry. But what I have found is one
cup of shredded cheese is about 100 grams so if I knew that I needed 20 cups which I do, that's how
I decided that I needed two kilograms of cheese so that's four pounds of cheese 20 cups four pounds.
Canadian Math... yay! So I'm going to try something different this time since
I had to cut those in half every time. I'm going to go right down the middle
She taught my mom how to cook. Well, my grandma did too. She worked at a logging
camp my great-grandmother and when my mom was 15, she quit school to go work with her grandma in the
logging camp and I'll tell you, those ladies know how to cook! I come from a long line of good cooks
and that's why I love freezer meals. I love to cook
but I lead a different life than they did. They cooked every day. I still cook every day, but I
don't have to think about what I'm gonna cook. I'm gonna go to the freezer and I am gonna pull it out
and whatever we have, whatever's left, we just pull it out and I have it that night
and it's great. That is just one of those things that is taken off my mental load.
Look at this cheese. What do you think? oh I'm going to get it all in
there. That makes me feel really good. I think it'll all fit.
space is a premium in my fridge right
now for those that are wondering all of this cheese is going to be used
in the next two days for all of our freezer meals i don't know how many
recipes we have or how many that are going to require cheese, but I think our plan is right
now for about a hundred and eighteen, a hundred and twenty meals, so we'll use this cheese up
in those meals and then if we have any leftover, like I said at the beginning of the video,
we'll either make more meals because we have leftover of something else and Sharla's brain
is really terrific at coming up with something or we can freeze it and you can because it's got that
uh cornstarch in it, you can just freeze it and bring it out next time you want to
make some nachos and you have a little bit of extra cheese and the cornstarch helps
it when it defrosts. It still keeps it loose. It doesn't stick together. It's really great.
See? Look at all that. I feel like I should make a cheese sauce
because I should measure that and see how much cheese. Now if I was doing this all by hand,
each of these might have a little bit left over. I don't know. I don't think it's wasteful. I don't
think that's more waste than I would necessarily have if I was doing it by hand and if you use it,
it's not wasteful a little broccoli and cheddar soup, cheese sauce, make some queso
and nothing says that you can't freeze it if you're gonna make it into a soup or a sauce oops
then uh just go ahead and freeze it. See? I'm on my last one! I don't even know how
long I've been filming. We'll have to see. It used to take me forever by hand
and to do it with the food processor, it is fast and it's a dream and I can
just put this in my dishwasher bing, bang, boom and it's done.
Oh that's a good chunk. Alright.
Don't forget, I'm going to be doing onions after this, so make sure you click on the link and watch
out for the next couple of days because we're going to be doing some filming while we're doing
freezer meals which is my favourite thing ever. No, I don't mind it other than I wouldn't normally
like do my hair and put makeup on to do freezer meals. I'm wearing a fancy shirt for y'all today!
and it's gonna smell like onions so bad here in about an hour.
The last time I did freezer meals and I did the onions,
it stunk the whole house. It just smells so bad and I went in my eyes watered so bad and I went to
bed and my husband was already in bed and his eyes started watering and he said "you have to go...
you have to go shower" so I will uh try get it done early enough tonight so I can shower early so
I'm not stinking him out of bed at 10 o'clock at night. okay hey I have um 2200 grams
of cheese shredded in this container and it fit perfectly. It's gonna go in my fridge.
It's gonna be delicious in our freezer meals and so here's our secret ingredient the cornstarch
which is really important when you're doing big amounts of cheese for your freezer meals. Thank
you for joining me today on Freezer Meals 101. My name's Christie. Make sure you hit subscribe.