Friday, January 7, 2011

The joys of a fully stocked freezer

While I'm still thinking about the pantry challenge vs food storage idea, I'm hoping I can do both. I know I have several boxes of hamburger helper and I'm going to put it on my menu at least once a week for a while, then use a coupon and buy more. I realized though that I was out of ground beef.

The last time I was at Sams Club I saw that they were having a good price on ground beef if you buy a case of it. That's 80 lbs! I had been meaning to call around and see who wanted to go in on a case with me, but my friend Julie beat me to it and I got a case to split with friends.

I took 25 lbs. 10 got cooked up in the oven and put in 10 bags for tacos, spaghetti, hamburger helper etc. 3 lbs became 12 1/4 lb hamburgers, some of them bacon and bleu cheese burgers, some of them cheddar butter burgers. 3 lbs became 24 mini meatloaves from 2 different recipes.

I LOVE knowing I have a full freezer. I've got chicken breasts, thighs, drumsticks, fajita meat, pork chops, 2 turkeys and a ham. Not to mention the other miscellaneous stuff. I shouldn't need to go to the freezer isle for a while now! Feels great! I can use up my pantry, use up my freezer and just buy dairy and produce. We'll see how long it lasts.

My kitchen is mostly cleaned up, but not totally. That's the worst part of filling the freezer. Whether I'm doing a big freezer meal session or just doing my ground beef, I HATE cleaning the kitchen after. I wish there were a kitchen fairy that would magically do it for me. Or a husband in town who might want to help. Oh well, enough blogging...back to my kitchen!

1 comment:

Julie said...

I am trying to get my freezer pretty full right now too. I totally think that things in my freezer are part of my food storage, even though I have heard that technically you can't consider frozen items food storage because if you lost power, you would lose all that food. I figure I have a generator - so it is food storage - right?