Well, better late than never, right? Life has been pretty hectic around here, but what’s new right? 

I’ll fill you all in on our very crazy {and somewhat heartbreaking} week in a day or so, but in the meantime, I wanted to tell you about something very exciting…

Perhaps many of you have tried my very first ever Food Friday which featured one of my family’s favorite dinners….something we lovingly call “Amy’s Pasta”. If you haven’t tried it yet, you have find the recipe HERE. 

Anyway, we make this A LOT, and usually there is plenty of it, with enough to last us for a day 

or two. But last week, after making a brainlessly making a giant bowl of the pasta, I remembered that we were leaving the next day to Santa Rosa to work on the house and on top of it, the kids ate a late lunch and weren’t the least bit hungry. ugh. What to do?

So I decided to try freezing it. I put the leftovers in a large freezer safe bag, squeezed all the air out of it and popped it into the freezer.  Notice the bag of chicken soup I also tried to freeze underneath it {more on that in a second}.

 I then posted on facebook that I tried to freeze pasta and I had several helpful suggestions. Someone pointed out that you need to make sure the pasta is cooked al dente {or a TAD undercooked} or else when you defrost, the pasta will get all mushy. Well, shoot. I know for sure I didn’t cook al dente as Brandon doesn’t like his pasta “chewy”.  So, a couple days later when I decided I wanted a quick dinner, I pulled the pasta out a couple hours before dinner and then popped it into this oven safe bowl.

And then I put it in the oven at the below temp for about 30 mins. I sprinkled a bunch of parmesan on top too, just for a little extra touch. If I had some olive oil, I would have drizzled just a little on top as well.

My theory was that when you cook in the oven, usually pasta gets a bit dried out, so if, when I defrosted the pasta, it was going to be mushy, I figured if I baked it, the moisture would be drawn out, if that makes sense….

And it worked!! WOW…it was sooo yummy, just as good as the day cooked. YAY! I will definitely do this again!

Oh and what was the deal with the chicken soup you ask? ugh. Well, I usually make a big bowl of that as well and reheat it for a day or so. We reheated that one twice {lunch and dinner the next day} so everything was cooked nice and throuogh. So when I unfroze it, everything was extra mushy. So I would recommend freezing it right after you cook the first time, and stick to the undercooked rule with that one. ha.

Do you freeze food? I’d love to know some of your tips!!
xoxo