In our little newlywed family, we have to be very conscious about how our money is spent each month. One way that we've been able to lower our monthly grocery bill is by buying some of our meat (mainly lean ground beef and chicken cutlets or chicken breasts) in bulk when it goes on sale.
I've NEVER been a fan of defrosting, though. Especially meat. I've taken too many microbiology courses to make me overly-aware of the possible bacteria that could proliferate if I were to defrost something in the wrong way or time frame.
Recently, though, I've started using an old trick of my Mom's that works perfectly for frozen meat! The morning of the day you'll be cooking, place the meat in the fridge. That evening when you're ready to cook, turn your tap water on very hot and start to run the meat (chicken, beef, doesn't matter!) underneath the faucet. Soon the styrofoam bottom will peel away very easily. At that point it's a good idea to seperate chicken breasts, etc., one at a time and run each individual breast under the very hot water until you are able to easily palpate it and it no longer feels hard and frozen. Obviously, with beef and other ground meat you'd just need to run it under hot water until you can peel it off its packaging. I usually like to run it under for about a minute more after that point to ensure that even the middle of the meat is properly thawed.
I've also been told that freezing vegetables works well, too; I'd assume you can apply all these same techniques to thawing them as well!
Happy cooking!
Brittany
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