What’s In Our Freezer? Part 2: Letters H-Z

See A-G here.

Hazelnuts These are great for snacking on and cooking with.

Hummus We love hummus in this house! Hubby has devised many amazing recipes I should share some time. We normally have chick peas in the freezer ready to go for a fresh batch of hummus.

Ice Cream

Molé

Mozzarella Block We buy a two-pound blocks of cheese, shred it with the food processor, then freeze it and just take out handfuls as needed. Do not freeze cheese that you want to slice later. Frozen cheese becomes crumbly.

Orange Juice

Peas

Pierogies These make a great, quick meal on a busy night or an easy lunch to take to work (boil them in the microwave).

Pumpkin Puree Here is what I did in 2008. This puree is from two 2009 batches.

Reduced Cranberry Juice My America's Test Kitchen cookbook has the most amazing cranberry vinaigrette salad dressing in it (I couldn't find an online link to share) that requires 100% cranberry juice reduced to one-third. Reducing requires enough time to make me want to blow off the recipe. So, I decided to cook down a whole bottle of juice at a time and then freeze the rest in the proper quantity. Now the dressing is easy to whip up! Cost-saving bonus: 100% cranberry juice isn't cheap (most cranberry juice is a blend of berries). Using the whole bottle for this purpose saves me from buying a new bottle each time I want to make the recipe, only to use a small amount of it. Of course, we'd drink the rest of the bottle, but I'd rather we drink the $2.50 stuff and save the $5 stuff for when the pure flavor really matters.

Rennet For making cheese with my cheese kit.

Roasted Garlic and Butternut Squash Cassoulet Homemade freezer meal from Cooking Light. It was plain for our tastes.

Sautéed Red Onions (with balsamic and dates) I love Rachael Ray's Blue Cheese-Onion Empanadas. The last time I made then, I made miniature empanadas instead of the big guys and ended up with loads of extra onions. I used some defrosted ones for the first time on bleu cheese, caramelized apple, onion pizza. Yum!

Shredded Cheese A blend of food processor-shredded mozzarella and pepper jack to put on pizza

Spicy & Sweet Orange Sauce Leftover sauce from making this. This recipe took forever and the chicken was blah. The second time I made it, rather than following Pioneer Woman's instructions, I breaded and baked chicken cubes, served plain rice, and poured on the defrosted sauce. Quick, easy, and delicious! The sauce is worth it.

Tomato paste

Walnuts These are great for snacking on and cooking with.

Whole Fruit Bars Commercial kind. A yummy snack on a hot day. Really, I should make these myself.

Wine (red and white) Rather than letting a not-so-great or partially drunk bottle of wine go bad, we freeze it in ½ cup quantities for cooking with.

Wonton Wrappers For use in my favorite pumpkin recipe, Cooking Light's Pumpkin Ravioli with Gorgonzola Sauce.