Try Freezer Cooking For Tasty, Economical Meals

By Christine Szalay-Kudra

A lot of people enjoy cooking every night but it can become
boring. If you have a busy day, having to think about what
to make for dinner can be stressful, especially if you are
going to have very little time to cook that day.

The easy solution is to cook once a week or once a month,
divide the food into portions and freeze it. Another name
for this once a month (or week) cooking is freezer cooking.
Imagine spending one day making a month's worth of dinners
and then having twenty nine days where you do not have to
cook. Looking at it like that, it is easy to see the appeal
of once a month cooking.

The Best Recipes for Once a Month Cooking

There are all kind of meals, which freeze well, and they
will taste just as nice when they are thawed as when you
first made them. Cooking big batches of food is a real
time saver and if you have a busy weeknight coming up, you
can simply thaw your family's evening meal in the
refrigerator overnight and it will be ready to warm through
in the evening.

You can often get great discounts when you buy in bulk. A
big package of boneless chicken pieces, for example, works
out cheaper per pound than buying a pair of chicken thighs
or chicken breasts. Perhaps you spot some ground lamb on
special offer one week or turkey another week.

There are freezer recipes for all kinds of meats, poultry,
and fish. Meat and poultry in sauces and soups keep for up
to six months. You might want to make some tasty family
favorites like
(http://www.bonelesschickenrecipe.com/Chicken-Recipes/international-recipes/chinese-curry-chicken.php)
chicken curry or beef stew. Beef bourguignon, chicken tacos,
and beef lasagna are other freezer cooking ideas.

Freezer Cooking Tips

Pick a day when you will not have many commitments or
interruptions. Make sure there is enough space in your
freezer and make sure you have all your necessary
ingredients ready. Remember too that you can save time
buying other frozen foods on special offer like precooked
meatballs or cooked shrimp. Simply add these to your thawed
meals to liven them up.

You can either cook one kind of meal at a time or have
several on the stove or in the oven, depending on your
cooking experience and what you feel comfortable with doing.
When you cooked meals are cool, divide them between freezer
bags or plastic food containers, seal them, and wipe the
edges clean. You will be able to fit a lot of meals in the
freezer if you store them flat in zippered food bags.

You will need a lot of plastic wrap and aluminum foil,
freezer bags or plastic containers. You will also need a
marker pen to write the name of the meal, the cooking date,
and any special cooking instructions.

Sometimes you can make a creamy dish but cream does not
freeze well so leave it out of the meal and add it when you
reheat it. Potatoes do not always thaw well either, so you
can either use slightly undercooked barley or pasta as a
replacement or add fresh potatoes when you reheat the dish.

Allergy Sufferer? Why You Need An Air Purifier

By Owen Jones

There are various forms of air purifier systems, so it can
be difficult to know what someone means when they are talking
about air purifying. For instance, all air conditioning
units and most central heating systems have some form of air
purification built in. In deed, the air purification filters
in most split air conditioning units are very advanced. A
similar add-on unit can be purchased for most central
heating and central conditioning systems.

However, you may not require heating or cooling units, but
you may want a dedicated air purifier. Air purification
units can greatly increase your quality of life,
particularly if you suffer from an allergy or live with a
smoker or pets.

Air purifiers or air cleaners, as they are also identified,
clean the air of pollutants and foreign bodies. However,
some air purifiers are more advanced than others, so it is a
good idea to identify what you want to remove from your air
before you buy one.

This is because not all machines will take all kinds of
filters and not all filters will eliminate all pollutants.
Some will, but not all. So if you want to clean pollen out
of the air because you suffer from hay fever, check with the
dealer that the unit that you like, can do the job.

Air purifiers will greatly help allergy sufferers and some
people do not realize that they have an allergy. Some people
are allergic to pet hairs, or dog and or cat skin particles
or smoke or traffic pollutants like tyre rubber to speak
nothing of the exhaust fumes that none of us like. So, if
you live near a road or a factory, or keep a cat or a dog,
you live with a smoker or you suffer from hay fever, an air
purifier would most likely be beneficial to you.

How you do this is clearly up to you. If you have a central
air conditioning unit already, it is probably better for you
to install an air purification system near your blower. This
method is relatively cheap ($300 - $1,000), but it will
purify the air in the whole house.

If you live in a bedsit, a trailer or a caravan and it gets
hot where you live, a split air con system is probably
better for you, but if you just want to purify the air
immediately around you, then a portable air purifier will
suffice.

One word of caution though, many of the cheaper portable air
purifying units are worse than useless because they are
burning your electricity without giving you any benefit.
These cheap models do not have the power to purify large
volumes of air and they do not have filters that are capable
of blocking the allergens that trouble us.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many
subjects, but is currently involved with
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split air conditioning systems. If you are interested in
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Conditioning Systems, please click through to our site.

Chicken Stew - From Then Till Now

If you are thinking about a warming, hearty dinner, chicken
stew is one of those recipes that always spring to mind. You
can make lots of different versions of chicken stew and this
dish has a very interesting history spanning thousands of
years.

A stew is two or more different foods simmered together in a
liquid. Hungarian goulash, beef stroganoff, coq au vin, and
beef bourguignon are all stews.

The "Apicius de re Coquinaria" is the oldest cookbook ever
discovered. It contains fish and lamb stew recipes, although
chicken had been domesticated by then too. There were three
Romans with that name living between 1 BC and 2 AD and the
book is believed to have been compiled by one of them.

You can actually go back even further because primitive
tribes used to boil foods together, which is what a stew
essentially is. Amazonian tribes used turtle shells as pans
and would boil the turtle entrails with some other
ingredients. Other cultures used large shells, such as
clam shells, instead of pans. Archeological evidence points
to this type of cookery going back seven or eight thousand
years. The invention of pottery, about ten thousand years
ago, made cooking stews easier.

Domestic fowl has been around for thousands of years and
chicken stew has been popular for a long time, with
different cultures having their own versions of this dish.
Examples include the spicy chicken stew found in Morocco or
the peanut butter chicken stew favored in parts of Africa.

Different Types of Chicken Stew

One very tasty chicken stew is called chicken booyah. This
is a cross between a soup and a stew and is popular in
northeast Wisconsin. In 1853, the first Belgian immigrants
arrived in Wisconsin and they spoke a language called
Walloon. It is believed that the word booyah comes from the
word bouillon and the non-French speaking Belgian just wrote
down how the word bouillon sounded to him phonetically.

Southern Chicken Stew

Perhaps you have tried southern chicken stew. It is a very
popular recipe in North Carolina. Southern chicken stew is
made with a whole chicken parboiled in a milk or cream based
sauce. Butter, salt, pepper, and other ingredients are used
in this recipe. The color of southern chicken stew varies
from white to yellow, depending how much margarine or butter
is used. It can be thin or thick in consistency and saltine
crackers are often served with southern chicken stew.

This dish is often served in the coldest months and "chicken
stew" can refer to a get together or gathering where this
food is served, rather than the food itself.
(http://www.chickennoodlesoups.com/Soup-Recipes/index.php#chicken-stew)
Chicken stew recipes are often thought of as comfort food
because they are comforting to eat and simple to prepare.
Chicken stew is commonly served at social get togethers,
such as church fellowships, community fundraisers, and
family reunions.

The chicken stew at these events will often be made in a big
cast iron or stainless steel cooking pot, maybe outdoors
over an open fire. You might get coleslaw, a grilled cheese
sandwich or rice served with the chicken stew.