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Did you make a huge pan of lasagna or big pot of pasta and don’t want to eat if for a week? Freeze those leftovers and have them ready for a convenient school lunch!
Here’s another great tip for saving time and adding variety to school lunches.
In a previous post, we showed you How to freeze rice to pack for school lunch.
So many of you LOVED this idea, the MOMables team thought it would be a great idea to show you yet another food you can freeze to make lunch packing easier.
PASTA! Next time you make a big batch of your family’s favorite hearty pasta, make sure to freeze some of those yummy leftovers for lunch next week.
4 Steps is all it takes:
1. Divide & Freeze. Place individual servings of pasta into ziplock baggies. Try to remove most of the air, and label with the date. Pasta dishes can be frozen up to 30 days. After that, they tend to dry out.
2. Prep. The morning you are ready to pack the pasta for lunch, run water over the frozen bag for about 15 seconds. This separates the food from the sides of the bag, allowing it to slide out.
3. Warm. Place frozen portion of rice in a microwave save bowl and reheat in the microwave.
MOMable TIP! Add 1-2 TBS of water to the dish before microwaving. This will prevent any dryness.
4. Pack inside a thermos. While waiting for the pasta to warm up, prep a thermos for the warm pasta (CLICK here to learn how to). Pack cooked pasta in warm thermos! There you have it! A yummy, warm lunch anyone in the family would enjoy!
My son’s complaint with pasta is that it has that steamed and continued cooking while it sits in the thermos and it is overcooked and it sits in the sauce and has that canned pasta kind of texture after so many hours sitting in the sauce. I have tried a number of ways to get around this such as undercooking the pasta and making sure not to put too much sauce in but I still am not getting around the sauce ending up just not right. If the pasta was plain it seems fine but not with the sauce. Even with our leftovers I keep the sauce and the pasta separate until we eat, except lasagna which somehow works. I guess that is my best option to send lasagna.
When I have a pasta or rice I want to save I portion it out by packing into measuring cups (1/2 cup or 1/4 cup depending on the child) then laying it out onto a lined cookie sheet like you would a batch of cookies. Put it into the freezer. Once it is frozen, transfer into a labeled large ziplock freezer bag. The portions freeze individually and you can skip and save the little bags. This works awesome for ziti, Mac and cheese, rice and chicken etc. Also if it is a lasagna or pasta that can be cut into squares once cooled, I just lay the squares out on the cookie sheet, freeze and voila! A bag of individual servings:)
love this girl!
thank you Alison!