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Amy chats with Michelle Kallod, a piano teacher from North Dakota who has been running a freezer meal prep workshop for more than 20 years.
Michelle Kallod has been teaching piano to students ages 4-adult for 27 years. She teaches individual lessons to 65-80 students a week, at a school and out of her home. She is married and has 3 adult children and one son-in-law. When she’s not teaching, she enjoys spending time with her family, gardening, reading, accompanying choirs, kayaking and cooking for small & large crowds.
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Episode 102 – Freezer (Meal) Prep
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Amy: You’re listening to episode 130 of the Piano Pantry Podcast. I’m Amy Chaplin, a piano teacher who also enjoys the foodie life. As teachers, thinking ahead on what’s for dinner is an important part of keeping our lives sane, especially during certain times of the year. Since I cook for two people most of the time, I’ve not gotten into freezer meal prep myself, but I did share with you in episode 102 earlier this year on how to stock up your freezer.
Today, I’m excited to expand on this topic a bit more with my guest, Michelle Kallod, a piano teacher from North Dakota who has been running a freezer meal workshop for more than 20 years. If freezer meal prep is of interest to you, now is a great time to be putting some together, as the school year is less than a month away here in the U.S.
As you’ll hear Michelle suggest, you’ll enhance your time and build community by enlisting some friends. I also have a great freebie ready for you, thanks to Michelle, which I’ll share more about at the end. Michelle Kallod has been teaching piano to students ages 4 to adult for 27 years. She teaches individual lessons to 65 to 80 students a week at a school and out of her home.
She’s married and has three adult children and one son-in-law. When she’s not teaching, she enjoys spending time with her family, gardening, reading, accompanying choirs, kayaking, and cooking for small and large crowds. Welcome to the podcast, Michelle. I’m so excited to have you on today for this chat. Before we get started, could you go ahead and just introduce yourself to the listeners?
Michelle: Sure. I’m a teacher in West Fargo, North Dakota. I’ve been teaching for about 27 years, which seems like a really long time. And I teach students ages four to adult just depending on who wants to take lessons.
I teach anywhere from 65 to 80 students a week, which is a lot, but I get to teach at a private school. So the students can come to me during the school day for one. One-on-one lessons. That’s about a third of my kiddos. And then I teach about a third of homeschoolers, and then another third just come after school to my home.
So my lesson structure has been like that probably like since I started way back when teaching at a school, and just my teacher called me and said, Hey, I’ve got like 20, 25 students. I don’t want to teach anymore. Do you want to go to a school and teach two days a week? I was like Yeah, I could do that.And so that’s how I got started. And my studio has been, 30 was small to begin with and 80 is a little too big but it’s manageable.
Amy: The listeners can’t see this, but my jaw literally dropped when I heard her say 65 to 80 students. Wow. I am so impressed. And the fact that you’ve been doing that with that many students for the entirety of your teaching, basically.
Michelle: Yeah. I just know no different.
Amy: Do you, so I assume you do mostly 30-minute lessons, or do you do group classes too, to be able to do that many students, or what does that look like?
Michelle: They’re all one-to-one. I do teach four group lesson weeks throughout the school year. And then I limit those class sizes to 15 students, and they just come to my house, and we have a ton of fun together for those group weeks.
But yeah, otherwise, it’s basically one for 30 minutes. Sometimes 20 or 25, depending on what the school schedule allows. It’s really hard, a 20-minute lesson. But you do what you can with the time you’re given.
Amy: So do you, if you don’t mind me just talking about this briefly here, do you end up working six days a week or do you do that in five days?
Are you doing four full, like eight, nine-hour days, or what kind of does your schedule look like with that many students?
Michelle: Yeah. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are really long days. I’ll start before school, at 6. 30, at 6. 45, for some days. And go with tell pretty late in the evening. For me, like seven 30 or eight Thursdays.
A little shorter, I finish by six, and then Fridays I’m usually done by one or two o’clock. But they’re pretty much just back to back, like all day.
Amy: Now I understand why you’re the person I’m talking to about this today, because you really do need to have pre-made meals working that much.
Michelle: Yes. Yes, I do. Indeed.
Amy: So correct me if I’m wrong, but I first met you at NCKP in 2023 inside the Starbucks coffee shop. Is that correct? That is correct. Gotta get your coffee. I don’t know how it came up in our conversation, but you mentioned that you had done freezer meal cooking in the past. And right away, I was like, I need to have this lady on someday. So I asked you to take if I could take your picture. Do you remember that?
Michelle: I do remember that.
Amy: That is something that I do quite a bit. And I’m not shy about asking because it’s important to me to remember the names of people I meet. And it’s so helpful, like to take those pictures.
So, following the MTNA conference back in March, I actually did a Zoom follow-up session after the conference with Andrea Miller on music studio startup. And I can’t remember exactly what she called the. conference call or whatever, but it was basically a time to encourage people who had gone to a conference to spend time actually acting upon some of the connections that people have made. And that is what prompted me to finally contact you. I’m like, I have got to contact that lady.
Michelle: Yeah. And NCKP and MTNA are great for those little connections.
Amy: So tell me, when did you start doing all of this meal prep, and what got you started? Where did the idea originally come from?
Michelle: Yeah, I think I started way back when I started teaching, because one of my friends, whose name is Amy, too, which is funny; her mom was a librarian, and her mom had found this cookbook that got into the library.
Library called once a month cooking, and my friend Amy and I were like, hey, let’s just do this together. We are both crazy busy. I don’t think she had any little kids yet. But by that time, we had two small children, and I just needed something in my day that would. Made life a little easier for when I got home from teaching and wanted just some really quick meal prep. So we just started following the guidelines in that book and then everything just branched off from there.
Amy: Yeah, so the thing that I found most intriguing about the fact that you do these freezer meals is that you don’t just do freezer meals by yourself. You don’t just do them with your friend.
You have an entire two-day workshop. So, can you tell us a little bit about that process? Was that something you came up with? Was that like in the book, or did you have others help you organize this whole thing? Go ahead and describe it to us.
Michelle: So the whole process just started with my friend and I, and then my mom would usually come and watch our little kiddos.
And then we’d make meals for my mom, just while we were already doing it because everything’s just more fun with a friend anyway. And then our house got a little too small for us by the time we had three kiddos. So our new house, we were able to we just love hosting my husband and I.
So we just thought, let’s just invite like maybe four or six people could fit in our kitchen and do these meals together. And then I was like why don’t I just do them at church? And when I do them at church, they have a massive commercial-grade kitchen with a 10-burner stove, industrial-size fridge, and freezer in the big dishwashing system that you’d see at a restaurant.
So if I do it here at church, I can do maybe 15 or 16 people at once. And then that’s even more fun because as I said earlier, everything’s just more fun when you do it with a friend. And I love to organize big meals. That’s not daunting to me.
Our church does like an annual dinner theater. Where the youth put on a play and then I was in charge of the food. So it started with 200 people a night, and now it’s up to 350 people a night. So I’m in charge of organizing a two-day meal for 700 people. And I have a team of volunteers under me. So I think that the organizational process of doing that big of a meal, plus doing freezer meals at the church, they just, they kind of work in conjunction, and you just learn by trial and error what works well and what doesn’t work well.
Amy: Yeah. So I was so impressed. Like Michelle shared her document with me, and I’m an organized person, and I was like just sitting there reading like, Oh my goodness. This is so organized. I have to give you kudos.
Michelle: Oh, thanks.
Amy: And that is really impressive, to have that experience organizing meals for so many people.
Michelle: Yeah. That, like you said, played into this workshop thing being a success and already knowing how to run it and everything. Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Amy: But her document lays out what the attendees should bring, tips for what to do before they come, tips for actual preparation, freezing tips, cooking tips. It’s just very detailed. You have 15 recipes per day outlined, and there are lists of all the stuff that you’ll provide and things that they need to provide. It’s really impressive.
Michelle: Yeah, thanks.
Amy: So did you scout out all of those recipes on the internet, or did you guys create them yourself, or have they evolved over the years? What was that process like?
Michelle: Yeah, they keep evolving because I don’t like cooking the same thing every day. My family doesn’t always like eating the same things, but they all started just from the once-a-month cooking cookbook. And then, a good cookbook, when you open up a page and there’s like stains on it, right?
Yeah, we have some of those we don’t like, like orange chicken. My kids were like, do not ever make that again. That was just trial and error. For some of it my daughter and I did Whole 30 a couple of times, so when we tried Whole30, some of those recipes made it in. A lot of what I used to cook was more like cream soup-based because that’s just how I grew up.
As I grew up, I was like, that’s probably not the most healthy thing. So learning how to take those out of the equation and sub in other recipes. Lots of Pinterest searches. If I have some downtime, I usually just scroll through Pinterest and look at recipes or, in Barnes and Noble, scroll through new cookbooks.
And, one time, I think this is a funny story. We went to Montana to visit our son at college and went through a bookstore. And, of course, I bought a cookbook, and then all the way home, I had actually. leave it in the trunk of the car because I knew that I would read the cookbook instead of doing the work I needed to get done.
Amy: That’s funny.
Michelle: Literally just buried it in the trunk. I’m like, I cannot read that cookbook. Yeah. But I just love reading cookbooks too. And just finding different things that’ll work. Some of them are just family favorites and things I grew up with. And
Amy: so you enlist lots of people. Like you open this up to, do you announce this to your community, to your church? How many people do you have that get on board with this?
Michelle: Yeah, usually there’s… I announce it to the community. Like teachers that I work with at the school, or a lot of my piano parents are teachers themselves. And I’ll say, here’s an opportunity: bring a friend. And I usually just give them all the information upfront because I’d rather they read through that information and then ask me questions versus getting blasted with a ton of questions right away.
Cause that gets a little bit overwhelming, but most of them are teacher friends. That I have not so much like fellow piano teacher friends, because many of them, I maybe just don’t see the need for it when they have 20 kids that they’re seeing a week or 10 or 15, they have time during their day. But the teachers that I know from school don’t have that much time during the day, but the meals are really good just to have for a family in need. Like you hear of somebody with a health crisis or somebody has a new baby, and you’re like, Hey, I already have something in my freezer that I can help that family out with.
Amy: Absolutely. And even if you’re not using them, like you said, for yourself, like during the week, I just like having extras in my freezer. I always have a freezer meal of some kind on those busy nights.
Michelle: And if you can have one that’s already homemade, that’s just there is a fail-safe. It definitely makes life easier, so you don’t have to always grab fast food at the last minute or something.
Amy: Exactly. And actually, one thing that I do a lot is prep for meals ahead of time. In that, I literally just set everything out for dinner. After lunch, I’m like, what am I making for dinner? I set out my pots, pans, spoons, and knives. Spices I’m gonna need. I try to gather everything I possibly can. So that as soon as I am out of the studio and I hit my kitchen, I can hit the ground running. And that’s been a really big thing for me getting dinner on the table quickly and still teaching during those later evening hours.
Michelle: Absolutely. I did that yesterday. I had a pot of water sitting there ready for corn, and I’d already husked the corn and made the inside of stuffed peppers yesterday. And now, today, my counter is full of stuff to make taco seasoning. So yeah, you’re right. It’s super easy just to get that prep work out of the way.
Amy: You probably frequent, is it…do you guys have we have a GIS or like Sam’s Club or something like that where you buy bulk spices in the big containers?
Michelle: Costco is very close to my house, and Sam’s isn’t far away either. Yeah.
Amy: So, is there anything else we missed logistically about the process of putting this thing together? I think we covered most of it.
Michelle: Yeah, if someone is like really interested in doing this with a group of people, one of the things I found helpful is that I personally do not know cooking, but they I just am listening to people as they converse and am listening for things that they might need and I just do the dishes the whole time and try and stay ahead of people. And what you were just saying for meal prep is what I do the day of. I just gather as many ingredients as possible and all the utensils as possible and keep people humming throughout the day.
Amy: That’s a good tip. Like manage to manage the whole operation.
Michelle: If I get stuck doing a recipe and then get interrupted with a question, I’ll forget, did I just put one tablespoon of something in there? Or I have no idea where I’m at. I can’t do both, cook and run the event in the same day.
Amy: You have people come, essentially like you have all these recipes; it’s two days of time. You do 15 recipes one day, 15 recipes the second day, it’s like a nine to four kind of a deal. Is that correct? I remember from your documents.
Michelle: Yep. It’s a two-day thing.
Amy: Does everybody bring a certain amount of, say, one person is in charge of bringing all the chicken, one person is in charge of bringing all of the veggies? What’s that look like?
Michelle: So I send out before, once people commit to, like, attending the workshop day, I’ll send them out the document and be like, how many of each recipe do you want to make? And they’ll come back and tell me that. And each person is responsible to bringing Their own meat and that meat, I asked them to divide it up ahead of time.
And that just saves us a ton of prep work the day of. So you would buy your own meat, but then the meat becomes group meat. And then, for each person, I buy all the rest of the ingredients. Because I just thought nobody wanted to bring two tablespoons of cumin. That’s just silly. So I’ll buy, like you said, a big Costco size, Sam’s size of cumin. And then we just keep using that. And they pay me the fee to cover the groceries. I’m not trying to make any money off this. I’m just trying to invite other people to join me.
Amy: It’s a very efficient way of doing it, right? Where everybody brings the bulk of the expensive items, and then you just share. Those little detail things.
Michelle: Exactly.
Amy: And the fee is something like $60 or something like that?
Michelle: Yeah. And then every year afterwards, I total up the cost and be like, yep, 60 covered it. And I take home the leftovers. So it doesn’t like really matter if we don’t use the whole thing. Cause I just take it back home.
Amy: What do you like the most about doing this?
Michelle: Oh, I love seeing people get together and complete a big project. That is really fun. And then just the friendships that develop out of it. Some people come without knowing anybody, and then they go home, and they’ve made a bunch of friends. And then just The fact that you can open up your freezer and just be like, Hey, what’s for supper today?
And whatever’s on top is what’s for supper. But you can plan a little bit more. I just choose to open up the freezer and be like, Hey, what’s for supper? And then the fact that you like, if someone is in need that you have. Something available on a crunch day for you that you could easily put together. Not easily- more easily- put together for somebody.
Amy: So you said you’ve been doing this for, what was it, like 20 years or something?
Michelle: Over 20 for sure, yeah.
Amy: Have you had people who have done it as long as you? Like your friend, I assume, is still doing it?
Michelle: Yeah, I mean my mom has always done it with me, so that piece has always been there. But yeah, there’s a, like a smattering of people who keep, Doing it year after year, people that say, I can’t do it this year. Make sure you let me know next year. And yeah, keep inviting more people and they tell other people and it’s just word of mouth kind of thing.
Amy: That’s the thing, like you said, I think it seems so fun about it is just bringing people together. Like I love bringing people together for a good meal, and this is just preparing a meal. So that was one thing that you liked the most about it. What is something you like the least about it? What’s the hardest?
Michelle: I think the hardest is just maybe the, you don’t realize, like, when you do something really big like this, the amount of work that it takes to go into it.
The actual shopping and making sure you have the correct number of boxes of Uncle Ben’s wild rice mix. And having to go to five different stores to get that correct amount can get a little unnerving, but I’ve done that enough now that it doesn’t seem too daunting. But at first, when you start doing freezer meal prep, the expanse of your grocery list and trying to find everything in the store.
That you might not be familiar with takes a really long time, but now that process now that I’ve done it so many years in a row, it’s not that daunting. So that would be a tiny thing, but I’d say that was more of the least when I started and now I just find that part’s not so hard.
Amy: It sounds like you have it down to a science, like a well-oiled machine, right?
Michelle: It’s a well-oiled machine.
Amy: If someone was looking to get started with something like this and kicking it off themselves and maybe never done something like this before, do you have any tips for getting started?
Michelle: Yeah, I’d say go on Amazon and purchase the “Oonce-a-Month Cookbook” by…I’ll have to read their names here. Mimi Wilson and Mary Beth Langerbord. I have a really old edition, but I know they have an updated one, and they actually have another one because this book is chock full of freezer meal tips. What freezes well, what doesn’t freeze well. They have a 15-day plan and a 30-day plan that you can pick from and find a friend to go with you. Cause, like I said earlier, everyone, everything’s better with a friend.
Don’t be shocked at the sticker price because when you do shop like this, yes, it is a lot more money on the front end, but you’re not going to the store every week or every other day to get your two items and then to end up coming home with 10 because who doesn’t go to the grocery store and stick to their list, right? I’m not good at that.
Also, make sure that you buy freezer bags and don’t buy just regular storage bags because there is a difference in the thickness of the quality of a freezer versus a storage bag. Another tip is that you can do like 25 to 30 meals in a fridge freezer and have room for a gallon of ice cream if you freeze things flat and get all the air out.
And I’ve even had freezer meals….this might sound disgusting…but a year or two past like the date because they get buried in our freezer. And my thought is if they turn out, then great, we’ll eat it. And if we take one bite and we’re like, nope, this is not good, we won’t. But they always turn out because I’ve frozen them well, taking all the air out as much as possible. So there are more things that freeze well than don’t.
Amy: How many nights a week do you find yourself eating your freezer meals versus a freshly prepped meal on the day of?
Michelle: That’s a good question. When our kids were home, we’re empty nesters now, but I’d say we’d use about three a week when they were home and in junior high and senior high. Because Wednesday night was always pizza night at our house. So the kids would always just throw in a frozen pizza. We would have leftovers other nights.
Or actually, when the kids were little, we’d call it restaurant night. We wouldn’t call it leftover night. Because the kids, to them, leftovers were a term that was not so good. So I finally just wrote down, like on a sheet of paper, I’d write down, okay, this is, these are the meals in the fridge. And one of the kids would go around to the others and ask “may I have your order, please?”This is the menu for the evening. So sometimes we’d have restaurant nights and not leftover nights.
Amy: Creative.
Michelle: Yeah. But now that it’s just my husband I’d say I usually make two a week. Any recipe that I have for freezer meals, I usually just divide or freeze in half. So one recipe would make us two separate meals.
And then I, my favorite thing. When I have, it’s just the two of us to just open up the fridge and be like, there’s leftover peppers in here. What can I make with peppers today? Or what’s available in the garden that I need to use today and what we’re eating. So when we have just two freezer meals a week, that gives me the freedom on the days I can to open up the fridge and be like, what are we doing today?
Amy: Do you ever spontaneously create a freezer meal? Say you have stuff left over in your fridge that you know you won’t be able to use. Do you ever just, hey, I’m going to throw all this in a bag, and this will be fine, and we’ll eat it in a week? Do you ever create those just on the spot?
Michelle: Oh yeah. Those are the meals when your kids are eating it or you’re eating it later and you’re like this is good. How did I do this? I have no idea. Can’t do it again.
Amy: So I imagine some teachers might be interested in doing something on this scale, but I’m guessing a majority of teachers might prefer to just do some freezer meal prep on their own. Do you have any advice for someone who’s looking to just do this on a smaller scale as opposed to doing a big workshop type of deal like you do?
Michelle: Yeah, I’d say anytime you make a recipe, do it twice and freeze one because that usually you can most, like I said earlier, most things freeze well. So do double and freeze one. Or when you’re chopping an onion, and you only use half the onion, freeze the other half. Because then you always have chopped onion available in your freezer that you can just take out and use a little bit. Decide what your favorite recipes are and do a quick Google search, and see if what you have in those can freeze well. And then make, again, just make two of those.
Amy: Yeah. That’s great advice. All right. Now, if you could only pick one of these freezer meals, like you’re only ever going to get one ever freezer meal ever again, what is your absolute favorite?
Michelle: My favorite is the chicken wrapped in prosciutto with a lemon sage sauce.
Amy: Oh my goodness, that sounds amazing. Yeah. And fancy, too.
Michelle: It is fancy, but I only do that when I can find prosciutto on sale at Costco because it is more expensive.
Amy: So that’s your number one. Give us two more really good ones.
Michelle: When our kids were little, I’d say chicken packets. First place, hands down. It’s just chicken and cream cheese and chives, either fresh from our garden or freeze dried, and then you wrap that in a crescent roll. They’re really good warm and cold. So we take those camping, like I’d make them one night before we went camping and take them out, and they’re good both ways, hot or cold, and maybe the other one would be.
Maybe one of the comfort foods I grew up on was hamburger rice hot dish, which again uses those cream soups. But my grandma would always make that, and You take a bite of that, and you just feel, oh, this is comfort. This is home. The food just gives you a hug.
Amy: Any final thoughts? Is there anything that we didn’t talk about that you think would be helpful or anything you would like to add?
Michelle: Just give it a try. Just freeze one or two things that you already know. Oh, that you like. And if it works, great. And if it doesn’t, figure out what went wrong and, try something new and, grab a friend, do it with someone.
Amy: Thank you so much for being on today, Michelle. It’s been fun hearing about this huge organizational event that you run. I’m very impressed. I am very inspired to try some myself. So, thanks for being here today.
Michelle: You’re very welcome. Thank you.
Amy: As you may have suspected, Michelle has graciously allowed me to share her workshop organization document that she gives to attendees, as well as the recipes for the three favorite recipes she mentioned at the end of the episode. To get those free downloads, find the link in the show notes of your podcast app.
Or visit directly at pianopantry. com forward slash podcast forward slash episode 130. Before we go, a big thanks as always to those who support this podcast on Patreon. If you enjoy the content and would like to show your support, visit pianopantry. com forward slash Patreon to join today. You can join as a silent partner or get access to exclusive content for just a few dollars more.
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