Postpartum Freezer Food Project of Doom: Baked Burritos

Well, I’m not really fulfilling my grand ambitions. This has been mostly due to my just being GONE so much the past few months. I went to two church-related camps in June and July, which was wonderful but the camping+recovery period both times took a lot out of me. I also was just flat-out lazy many days.

However, a week ago today I was in full-blown nesting mode and made two pans’ worth of this delicious and wonderfully simple recipe for the freezer.

Easy Baked Burritos

8-10 whole wheat tortillas
8 oz can tomato sauce
2 14-oz cans diced or stewed tomatoes (with or without green chilies)
2 14-oz cans refried beans
Cheese of choice for topping

First, spray a 9×13″ pan with cooking spray.

In the bottom of the pan, put half the tomato sauce and half the stewed tomatoes and stir together. I like to chop up my stewed tomatoes a bit, because they tend to be huge. This particular flavour was original. I usually like to get the Mexican stewed tomatoes, but I’m at the mercy of my local discount store and they had original or Italian to choose from. At 49 cents a can I can add my own Mexican flavourings, right?

Next, spread the beans on the tortillas. (I was too poor to buy wheat or corn tortillas, so I settled for el cheapo white tortillas. I could have made some of my own, but didn’t feel up to it.)

Then you roll up the tortilla cinnamon-roll style and squish them into the pan thusly. I like to use 10 tortillas because there’s room in the pan for 10, and this was a pack of 10 anyway.

Then you spread the rest of the stewed tomatoes and tomato sauce on top. Since my stewed tomatoes were plain, I chopped up some green onion and cilantro to give it some zing in the absence of the green chilies I usually would have in there.

Finally, top it with your cheese of choice. I did a sunflower-based cheese sauce, but you could use Daiya or whatever kind you want. The above picture is unbaked, since the pan is currently in the freezer, but I’ll be adding a baked photo when we thaw and bake it to eat (which I hope will be VERY soon.)
Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Consume with relish*.

 

UPDATE on 25 September 2012:

This is what it looks like baked. Some of the topping peeled off with the tinfoil.

_____

*NO, NOT PICKLE RELISH.

Postpartum Freezer Food Project of Doom: Soup

I’ve been delinquent about keeping up with the blog; I know. I feel much guilt. The fact is, I’ve been dealing with all kinds of interesting things in my real life: I discovered I have asthma. I’ve been camping. I’ve been prepping for the arrival of Baby Lou Who (this involves a lot of lounging around in bed being too tired to do anything else).

The asthma seems to be under control (yay!). The camping I’ll post about next week (maybe). Our unfinished house now has temporary carpet and linoleum in our bedroom and bathroom respectively, there’s a toilet installed (it even flushes – with a bucket of water), and we have our mattress made up in there to sleep on. All is ready for the birth. I hope.

All this has put a damper on my Very Ambitious Freezer Food Project, but I’ll update you on a couple of the things I’ve done since my last post.

• Soup. I didn’t end up doing black bean soup (I may still, but that depends on time). I was making Chickpea Rice Soup With Cabbage to take for our Friday Bible study group and made a big batch while I was at it. I froze approximately half of what I made since we weren’t expecting a very big group and my soup was going to be supplemental to the main soup, and so now we have 14 cups’ worth of soup in the fridge.
• Muffins. I was going to make bran muffins, and then I found SO many bran muffin recipes I wanted to try that I ended up doing several different kinds. I tried Ginger-Raisin Bran Muffins and The Best Pumpkin Muffins from Vegan With a Vengeance. I made Pumpkin Bran Muffins and Cranberry Orange Nut Muffins from Vegan Brunch. All four of these were delightful. The Best Pumpkin Muffins I will definitely make again. My least favourite: the Ginger-Raisin Bran Muffins. They were really good when my friend made them, but mine just came out really blah. I’m not sure what went wrong with that.

I organised my freezer as well, which wasn’t too hard to do since it’s getting pretty empty: most of last year’s frozen fruit is nommed up, and that was the bulk of what was in there. I’m confident we’ll have plenty of room for all I make throughout this project. I’ve sent my husband after some more foil pans while he’s making a run to town, so I hope next week to get going on some of the casseroles and finish the other pizza crusts.

Next week I should have another post ready for you that Actually Has Photos. See you then.