It's still been pretty slow in terms of new, creative meals or dishes. I did make a nice, improvised, brothy creamy white chicken chili this week, but I didn't measure or photograph because I was improvising like mad from start to finish, and I'm not sure it came out the way anyone else would like.
But that's OK, because I'm way overdue in talking about Bell freezer jars, which a buddy turned me onto on Google Plus when I mentioned the whole tomato thing. I bought twelve of the damn things from Target - the 32 oz ones - and just fell in love instantly.
The Bell 32oz freezer jars are the Platonic ideal of the wonton soup takeout container. Most of you read that sentence and immediately ordered them online, but for the rest of you, I'll continue. Wonton soup takeout containers are a fairly high degree of awesome. They're a quart, they're heavy plastic, they stand up to the microwave, and they are one of the single most reusable takeout containers known to mankind.
The lids are a bit shit, though. They're soft, and they snap on, and while they're secure enough to get your soup home safely 90% of the time, they're not as trustworthy as I want them to be.
Ball freezer jars are just like that, only made out of an even harder plastic, and the lids are thick, hard, and screw on tight. If you're listening to these sentences with a porn music soundtrack, cut it out. You can fill them with your hot liquid... I SAID STOP IT. You can fill them with soups or stews or sauces or just general stuff, and that stuff will, with two minor exceptions, stay put.
Exception the first - dropping a full container from a height of four feet onto a Pergo floor will probably crack it, loosing raw tomato sauce upon the world and leaving you with eleven jars and twelve lids. Feel free to generalize that very specific example to your own life.
Second, it is possible to overfill them just enough, with, say, your woman's very nice leftove borscht, that when it freezes into a mound shape, the mound shape will push the lid off, forcing you to rethaw enough to scrape some off, reapply the lid, and refreeze.
But other than that, i liked them so much that the next time I was in Target, I also bought ten of the small, eight ounce jars, so that I could migrate my half gallon of pesto into more reasonable, thawable portions. I highly recommend them if you want to make stuff in quantity and save it, but shouldn't, like me, be allowed near the quantities of boiling water and glass that home canning require.