The Unexpected Ingredients You Should Be Freezing, According to Molly Yeh

I’ve been a fan of Molly Yeh for nearly 10 years. With her comforting recipes (hello, tater tot-topped casseroles), eye for aesthetics and flavor, and approachable personality, the cookbook author and host of Girl Meets Farm has established herself as a talented presence in the food world over the course her career.

For anyone unfamiliar with Yeh, her recipes and show often focus on what she’s cooking at home in Minnesota, where her husband is a fifth-generation farmer. She’s an expert at crafting delicious food that highlights — and often creatively combines — Midwestern, Jewish, and Chinese flavors and techniques, but because she’s so often working in her own kitchen, she’s also got a knack for making the most of what she has on hand.

If you’re looking for advice on how to make better meals at home, organize your food storage spaces, or prevent ingredients from going to waste, Molly Yeh is an obvious source. So it’s no surprise that she’s teamed up with Ziploc to collaborate on the World’s First Frozen Cookbook by Ziploc.

Related: Keep These 18 Ingredients in the Freezer — Your Future Self Will Thank You

We sat down with Yeh to learn more about how she uses the power of the freezer and other simple kitchen hacks to make her life easier at home, and we came away with quite a few tips that will help home cooks whip up more delicious meals while saving time and money.

If you’re making a freezer-friendly meal, double it

Making a big batch of lasagna or a casserole to keep in the freezer — either for yourself or someone else — isn’t a new idea. But Yeh has a simple trick for reducing the effort it takes to make freezer meals, and it involves preparing them before you even know you’ll need one.

“If I'm going to put all this effort into making these huge casseroles — and we always bake Martha Stewart's mac and cheese on Thanksgiving — then I'll just double the recipe and then freeze one for a later date,” the cookbook author tells Food & Wine.

Related: 21 Meal Prep Recipes to Make and Portion for the Week Ahead

This strategy works for baked dishes as well as soups or stews, which are easy to scale up and freeze for the future. Because Yeh loves to bake snacks for her two children, she’ll even store extra baked goods in the freezer, telling Food & Wine that “granola bars freeze totally fine and… we'll thaw them at room temperature or I'll put them in my daughter's lunchbox, and they'll kind of thaw throughout the day.”

You can use more scraps than you think

While talking with Yeh, I learned that she is, above all else, the master of using scraps in the kitchen. And if you’re on a tight budget, this is the best way to stretch your groceries.

To start, make sure you’re saving any bread scraps, whether that’s crusts that have been cut off sandwiches, the heel of a loaf, or stale slices that aren’t going to be eaten. Yeh explains that bread scraps “are a perfect ingredient to use for bread puddings. I like to do a savory crumble that can go on soups; add some Parmesan cheese in there and toss it with some olive oil, almost [making] like a bulked-up crouton, and put it on soups.

"Or you can go in a sweet direction… I have an entire bag of peanut butter and jelly scraps that still have peanut butter and jelly residue on them. You could do a sweeter version of that and toss those scraps with cinnamon sugar and coconut oil or butter and make a homemade cereal. You just toast it in the oven until it gets really crispy and you can use it like granola.”

Produce is perhaps even more versatile. “Even things like the ends of vegetables that you wouldn't want to eat, like where the stem hits the carrot… Or like the very end of an onion, little scraps like those can be saved and added to chicken stock. Or little cutouts of fruits… can be saved and put in smoothies,” the Food Network star explained.

Yeh also recommends always keeping the bones when you buy a rotisserie chicken. Along with the frozen vegetable scraps, you can make a batch of chicken stock, which tastes better from scratch and will prevent you from paying for several store-bought quarts.

Freeze ingredients that make meal prep easier

Besides saving scraps or prepping big-batch meals, Yeh uses the freezer to set herself up for success when cooking. For example, she says “I love to freeze rice, which I feel like is not a commonly known thing… I'll fill up a Ziploc bag and I'll flatten it so that it's really flat and thin and that way you could literally just break off pieces of [the rice] as you want to use it, and just reheat them in the microwave or throw them directly into a fried rice or something like that.” It's a handy trick, especially if you're trying to make dinner on a weeknight, when eliminating the 25 minutes it takes to cook rice can make a huge difference.

Related: The 1 Ingredient You Should Be Adding to Mac and Cheese, According to Martha Stewart

Other items that she suggests keeping on hand in the freezer include cookie dough — just roll it into balls, freeze, then bake directly from frozen at a later date — and even jalapeños, for when you need a spicy aromatic to add to something like chili. A whole jalapeño might break down a little bit in texture once you thaw it, but it’ll still be great for sautéing, and that’s one less reason to need to run to the grocery store.

If you want a little more advice from Molly Yeh, you can find three original recipes from her in the World’s First Frozen Cookbook by Ziploc, all of which will teach you tasty ways to use what you have on hand. Find more information about the cookbook, including when and where to buy it, on Ziploc.com. 

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