Chili

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Cold weather has come to the California Central Coast this past week. Daytime temperatures are comfortable in the fifties and sixties, but nights are mostly freezing or below. That's why I covered my endangered plants with floating row covers yesterday, and why I made chili on Friday. Chili is one of my comfort foods during cold weather. I made the chili in the afternoon, but because of dietary restrictions, I made it with small white beans in instead of kidney beans. For some reason it seemed to take forever for those beans to soften, even though I'd soaked them overnight. I used a recipe from a cookbook I got at Campus by the Sea, a Christian camp on Catalina Island, at family camp one year. As long as we had children, we went every summer. I thought I didn't like chili, but the chili they cooked there was mild and it was tasty. The only change I made in the recipe yesterday was to substitute the white beans for the red kidney beans. After cooking the beans for much longer than the recommended time on the stove top, I decided to put them in the crockpot with the other ingredients and let them continue to soften there. I let them cook on high for four hours, and the beans still weren't as soft as I desired, so I put them on low and let them cook all night. In the morning I tasted again. I wasn't totally happy, but I was pretty sure more cooking time wouldn't help, so I moved the beans from the crockpot into storage containers for later eating. As you can see, there's one large casserole which went into the refrigerator and three small storage containers (BPA free) that I was able to put the hot food directly into and then put into the freezer. Then I went about the rest of my day that left me exhausted. (See http://www.mylot.com/post/3158303/i-cant-remember-ever-being-this-tired) By the time I finished my work yesterday, I was very grateful that all I had to do for dinner was spoon out some chili, top it with already grated cheese, and eat. Today we both had it for dinner, and we have enough for about three or four individual meals left in the refrigerator. If we get hungry in the future on a busy day, all I'll have to do is pull out a homemade meal from the freezer. I now have chili and two kids of soup to choose from. I like making food by the crockpot full so that I get a few meals from whatever I make the first day with several additional meals to put in the freezer. It means I don't have to cook so often, but I don't have to eat the same leftovers all the time either. So I think a full crockpot full of food is practical for even a family of two -- maybe even for one. Do you use a crockpot much? Do you store homemade food in your freezer? Do you preserve food some other way for future use? Do you agree or disagree that it's practical a family of two, or even a person living alone, to cook six to ten servings of a recipe at once and save some in the freezer to eat later when you are too sick or too busy to cook?