Cooking For Engineers

[susanh]

Need help please! I plan to prepare part of a dish using the cooked ground turkey, country ham, onion, green pepper, garlic, and uncooked frozen peas and combining them to freeze without the seasonings (sherry, olives, capers, raisins, oregano, cumin) called for in the recipe. Then, I would thaw the above, add in the seasonings, and cook everything together before serving the dish at a large party. My question is this:
should I freeze the meat/veggie combo in the tomato sauce that the recipe calls for, or would it be best to freeze the meat and veggies "dry" and not put the tomato sauce in until I simmer everything together just before the party??
Some statements talk about frozen moisture exploding the molecules/particles and others talk about the advantages of pre-marinating meats (recognizing that marinades have a lot of stable oils in them which is different from tomato sauce). So.... freeze the meat/veggie combo in tomato sauce or not? The reason I don't want to make the entire dish and freeze it is to avoid some of the seasonings becoming too strong or losing their flavors (as the case might be for each of them). Thanks for your time and input on this!
Susan

[Dilbert]

what does the recipe say about cooking the sauce? typically a nice tomato sauce is a 2-? hour "simmer" thing.

some of the flavors/seasoning will benefit by longer cooking times - allows the flavors in infuse throughout the sauce... might be a thought to make the sauce with the seasonings and freeze separately. other than the sherry, don't see anything there that's like to "lose" its (intended) flavor

I personally would prep the turkey and ham "fresh" (cured country ham?) or possibly done&refrigerated. I try to avoid freezing meats on general taste/texture principles and ground meats especially.
a cured country ham I would definitely never freeze.

[jon]

seems you have so much going on, it wouldn't make much difference to the taste what you did. If you have to add all those flavours, the meat can't be up to much.