Frozen Assets

Oh. Did you think this was about cold, hard cash?

Sorry to disappoint you. But this is about a cook book and the adventures of two kitchen-challenged sisters.

The cookbook?

Frozen Assets: Cook for a Day, Eat for a Month
by Deborah Taylor-Hough
(c) 1998
Published by Champion Press Ltd
209 p.

I took ten photos of the front of the book but none of them turned out--too much glare from the flash. So I resorted to using the scanner I've been using for the family photo scan project. Took a scan of the back too as I'm short on time for explaining this tonight. My brother's family are coming up from Portland to take us all out to brunch. We are to leave about the time my alarm usually goes off.

And it's been a long day. So this is primarily a photo essay.

For more detail about the book and the concept you can explore Deborah's web site.


The idea is to stock up their freezer with meals that need only to be thawed and heated so the first month or two after I go back to Phoenix OR will be easier on them. If Mom's recovery continues apace I'll probably be back home by the end of March.

My sister did a massive grocery shop over the weekend. We are going to do what Deborah calls 'mini-sessions' instead of making all of the recipes in a single day we are going to do a separate session for each of: pork, tuna, chicken, beef & vegetarian.

Today was the pork session. We made up five recipes each of which was big enough for two meals for the three of them. Though one was frozen down as one by accident--the Sweet Sour Pork--so we'll probably go ahead and use it while I'm still here. Yay.


Here's my sister's workstation when things were in full swing. She was the vegetable preparer. Also the meat preparer. And also the one who put pieces of the separate meals together and prepared them for the freezer.

See the crock pot? Had nothing to do with the project. That was tonight's dinner--a pork roast. My sister was especially proud of thinking of putting the meal for today in the crock pot before we got started on the big project.

I just had to take a close-up of that platter. Isn't it pretty?


This was my workstation for most of the time. I was the stirrer. My first task was to prepare two boxed rice dishes that were later combined with the pork in some fashion.

This was the cubed-pork for the Sweet Sour Pork waiting for the skillet to heat. I stirred it until it was browned and heated through and then emptied it onto a plate so my sister could dump the vegetables and sauce ingredients into the skillet for me to stir until the sauce thickened.



Up close picture of the Sweet Sour Pork sauce just before we took it off the heat. I'm not one bit sorry my sister goofed and put the whole thing in a single freezer bag. It was all I could do not to drool in it while I stirred.

This was another of my roles. Clean up. Or at least loading the dishwasher. I didn't take this picture today though. I took it a few days after I banged my shin into its lowered door on New Year's Eve. Kept meaning to post it with one of the posts about that incident or the resulting ER visit six days later but never seemed to think about it. It's hard to think about updating posts when it is so hard just to get each day's post up.

I wore my shin pads all day. Kept meaning to get a picture of them but it was never a good time. They are actually my sister's gardening knee pads. They attach with a velcro strap and I wear them just above my ankles instead of on my knees. It's definitely not a fashion statement.