Frozen in time

I’m a bit slack when it comes to keeping the food in the house organized and rotated. I do, every few months or so, empty out the pantry, reorganize the shelves, donate the cans & boxes that will be expiring soon and put everything back with the nearest expire date toward the front.

Then I go buy whatever we are out of or running low on and put it all away in it’s precise place.

From that point on the pantry goods get shoved in and piled up willy nilly wherever they fit until months later I can’t find the jar of pesto sauce I know darn well I bought when I first restocked the pantry.

Repeat.

I clean the fridge a couple times a month, though the jars of mayo, salad dressing and assorted sauces may wait awhile before I go through them, usually when someone reaches for the little used mayo and discovers it was ‘best by’ a month ago.

The freezer though… Maybe twice a year I clean out the freezer.

It’s cold in the freezer. Pulling all that stuff out chills my fingers. Trying to wipe up frozen spills is a PITA. So I just don’t do it unless forced to.

I was forced to this week. Two different grocery stores had sales on ground beef, boneless chicken breasts, london broil cuts and thin pork chops. These are a few of my favorite things. The catch was you had to buy Dugger sized packages to get the deals. I don’t mind repackaging into smaller sizes, even with buying the Ziploc bags it was still a heck of a price

But.

There was no room for all that food in the freezer. I forgot to take a before photo but this is halfway through emptying it

Frozen fruit & veggies anyone?

Here is the problem with frozen veggies…we don’t eat them that often, yet I am stocked up for a year.

You see that big bag of fish sticks? It was buried under & behind so much stuff I forgot we even had fish sticks.  And I am left wondering why on earth I have a bag of brussel sprouts. We all hate brussel sprouts. If I am going to try one of those “This will make you love brussel sprouts” recipes with all the garlic, bacon & butter, I use fresh sprouts. We never end up liking them though. There is not enough garlic, bacon & butter in the world to cover that cabbage-y taste.

These are the bags of frozen foods that were half eaten & then were left to get freezer burnt. This does not include 8 bone in chicken thighs from October 2008 & 3 bags of ground beef from early 2009 that were also freezer burnt

Please note the snowball that has grown in the bag with the leftover pancakes.

This is some of the stuff we are keeping. The opened bag of potatoes is recent & will be used again next week so I feel safe keeping it.

This is freezer cleaned out, some things were tossed & some things put in the chest freezer.

I have to do the chest freezer next…sigh

This was the oldest thing in the freezer.

This was when it expired

It’s not that I haven’t cleaned the freezer out in 2 years; it’s that I don’t always check dates. Especially if I can remember why I bought the item. I assume, given my memory, that if I can recall why a specific item was purchased, it must be recent. I bought these to make a breakfast casserole. Then I remembered it was for breakfast the morning after our NYE party..in 2007.

What is the oldest thing you have found in your freezer?