Let's Excavate the Freezer!

This is something I should have done in January during the Pantry Challenge... but I never got around to it. Then yesterday I was searching high and low for the salmon I was supposed to make for dinner, and I couldn't find it anywhere! It's not like the freezer is a huge cavernous space; there were only a few places where the salmon could be located, but I couldn't find it to defrost it before I dashed out of the house for the first time in days. It was time!

There was a lot more food in there than I had expected.

Prepared Items: 1 serving lasagna, 2 cups tortilla soup, 2 cups chopped cooked chicken, 1 loaf banana bread, twenty-four sixteen mini pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, 7 containers Bone Soup, 4 Mini Beef Wellingtons (I thought we had eaten them all!)

I also had 6 bags frozen vegetables, 4 bags frozen fruit (plus 4 frozen bananas), 1 package ground beef, 1 package Italian Sausage, 2 packages turkey meatballs, 3 boxes pie crusts, 1 dozen mini bagels, 5 hamburger buns, 3 hotdog buns, 1 gallon size bag of single-sized baguette potions (to heat and serve with soup, etc.), 5 loaves of bread (belongs to my spouse who takes it to work) 8 bags of various types of nuts, 4 cans orange juice, 1 1/2 bags peanut butter chips, 4 types of coffee, and a bag of frozen portions of garlic scape pesto that I made last summer when we had a CSA share. Oh, and 1 container vanilla ice cream, a boo boo bunny, my husband's frozen mug, and a few ice packs for coolers.

I cleaned the freezer out, and carefully loaded everything back in except for 2 packages of buns that had freezer burn, and the garlic scape pesto. (It wasn't that great when I made it 8 months ago, and I don't think it has improved much since then!) I stored the nuts all together in a container and tried to sort things by type/use.

Much better. The best I can do, really with a freezer space that is only 10 inches wide and two missing shelves (they were missing when we moved in). I do not recommend this type of refrigerator. I can barely fit a 13 x 9 pan inside!

I should explain that I keep the one shelf empty because that it where I chill my cookie dough before cutting it. I also use that space to freeze bags of liquid foods flat so that I can store them easeier.

Now you know that when I say that my freezer is packed full yet doesn't have much in it, I'm not kidding!