Yay chest freezer!

[cjsmith]

Item	Sale today	Rob or I wanted	I purchased
Ground lamb	50% off	one pound	three pounds
One brand of ground turkey	50% off	two pounds max	four pounds
Store-brand frozen pretzels	on sale (%?)	two boxes	four boxes
Frozen Tater Tots	nearly 50% off	one big bag	two big bags

We have a chest freezer. :-)

Comments

[wildseakitten.livejournal.com]

I love my chest freezer too! cause its nice to be able to take advantage of good sales like that and buy for a better price, and save money later!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Absolutely! If I had a vacuum sealer I probably would have bought every ounce of ground lamb and ground turkey that the store had. But I can't count on keeping this stuff for six months, so I reined myself in. :)

[wildseakitten.livejournal.com]

I bought the Reynolds hand held model. It works quite well... and the bags are not terribly expensive, considering how much they save you from food going bad.

one of the nicest things for me is there are months when i can reduce our food budget because I've bought so much previous months. The times hubby has been out of work, it has been really nice to have the freezer and pantry stocked with food. That's the one thing we never worry about for the most part. And its also nice to be able to help someone out from my stock of food, when they are low on funds.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I want to do a bit more looking into vacuum sealers. It'd be handy to know I could have bought out the store today, at good prices, with the confidence that I could keep that stuff good for months.

[busysuzy.livejournal.com]

Yay for the new chest freezer! You'll be amazed at how fast it fills up. I never thought I'd fill mine, but alas it is full. Which is a good thing; I've always got something to eat.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

If everything in there is 50% off when I get it, I won't complain! :-)

[grandiva1968.livejournal.com]

Yay, tater tots!!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wish I could have some of those right now! On the other hand, I've got a six-egg frittata in the pan, with peppers and onions and a whole bunch of herbs, so I'm not feeling too deprived.

[quasigeostrophy.livejournal.com]

Tater tots. Food of the gods. ;-)

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Don't rub it in! ;-)

[lindalee.livejournal.com]

I'm jealous...we really wanted a chest freezer, but our fridge died unexpectedly (3 days before our wedding!), so that was the unexpected appliance purchase for the next while. We'll have to make do with the freezer space we have for a while longer.

On the plus side, with the new counter-depth fridge that was specially chosen to work with the strange layout of our kitchen, we can finally open the basement door a full 90 degrees, for the first time we've lived here. Exciting!

I'm curious about vacuum sealers, too.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Whoops! That must have been pretty annoying, especially timed the way it was! Were you able to save most of your food?

[lindalee.livejournal.com]

Nope, not at all. I noticed it when the milk in my cereal was cool, but not cold. I brought the beverages to the office, but everything else was lost.

Just to make things more exciting, given the layout of our kitchen, it would seem that there is exactly one fridge on the market that will fit, and it's a special order, so we had to wait extra-long for its arrival.

I want one!

[justetthon.livejournal.com]

I wanna chest freezer! BUT LK says we'd just fill it up with stuff and forget about it, and keep buying more fresh. I personally think it would be great, to make big batches of STUFF and stick away. One question for you: what type of containers and labels do you use, to clearly delineate what you have? After a while, a frozen block of one thing can look just like something else. I remember years ago, when my mother sent my little brother off to school with something frozen (to thaw in his lunch pail) for lunch, he arrived at lunchtime facing some kind of raw fish in his pail! eewww! My mother was aghast, of course, as she never labeled anything (neither do I) in the freezer. So, how do you label your stuff?

Re: I want one!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

In a few weeks I'll know whether LK is right, at least in my own case! :-)

My two favorite container types are Rubbermaid plastic tubs (I think they're called "seal-n-save" or something like that) and Ziploc bags. I have better long-term luck with the Ziploc bags, because I can squeeze out the air, avoiding frost and freezer burn for a little longer. But the Rubbermaid things are more easily reusable, and they carry well on my way to work.

I label with masking tape and a Sharpie. The masking tape sticks only if I put it on the container when the container is room temperature. If I put the hot food in, pop the lid on, and then stick the tape, it'll curl off. If I forget and pull the thing out of the fridge and stick the tape, it'll curl off. There may be better ways, goodness knows!