We buy our meat in bulk. It means we can buy directly from local producers which is good for our local farming community and good for the environment. It does work out to be slightly cheaper than buying from the supermarket which is a nice bonus.
One of the issues is that when you order a ¼ of a beast, you get cuts that you don’t gravitate towards normally. Our meat orders include big chunks of meat such as roasts or corn meat which once cooked, lead to a significant number of leftovers. Not an issue in and of itself, but cold meat is one of those things that can get lost in the fridge in our house.
Suddenly it’s 3 weeks later and it’s the thing that’s created that weird smell in the fridge. The solution came to us because of my son starting Kindy. I needed to provide ‘school lunch’ and wanted to have a ready supply of cold meat for a sandwich a day.
The roast or corn beef now gets sliced up a day or 2 after we have it for dinner, then laid out in a single layer on a tray for a couple of hours in the freezer (or to be honest a couple of days if we forget about it). This part of the process is so that the slices don’t get all stuck together in the freezer. Once it’s frozen, we pop it into a freezer bag.
Every morning when lunches are being made, I get out the freezer bag, make the requisite meat, cheese and tomato sauce sandwich (with the tomato sauce between the cheese and the cold meat otherwise apparently the tomato sauce is no longer noticeable and therefore, hasn’t been applied) and by the time it gets to lunch time, the meat has defrosted.
The meat is often also used for other things like frittata or toasted wraps on weekends or any other application we need it for.
