|i heart my freezer, part three: regular zips|

Okay, last post about this topic today....but I'd like to share how happy I was when I returned back home after my Christmas travels and had a happy, warm, delicious, already made rice bowl packed up in regular-sized ziploc bag in my freezer. Well, it wasn't warm while it was IN my freezer, but I was able to go from freezer to a meal that tasted like it was hot off the stove in a matter of minutes. That was really a happy moment because I had been traveling and was sick of eating out, but was also not at all in the mood to go to the grocery store.

I'm pretty sure you can make any number of things into single-serving lunches or dinners in these regular sized (1 quart?) zips. It's just like a frozen meal, but a lot cheaper and healthier. It's a handy thing to do when you have some leftover rice and can quickly saute up a few other thigns to put with it.

(sidenote: you DID already know that you can freeze rice, right? It's amazing. You can put those in those tiny zips.)

So...since you can freeze rice, you can also just add stuff to it and then freeze it up. I did this a few weeks ago with the following layered in a bag...

• 1 cup of leftover rice
• 1/4 cup of beans (from a can, drained)
• sauteed onions, peppers
• 1 tablespoon cream cheese (I hear cheese gets weird if frozen, but I usually use light cream cheese in my rice bowls, anyway - it froze just fine)
• a handful of diced tomatoes, flavored with green chilis and garlic
• some corn

I just put them all in a bag and cooked them up later. So great.

Any other ideas for meals-in-a-frozen-bag?