Tuesday 22 January 2019

Eat the Stores - The Freezer Challenge


I've decided ... it was a spur of the moment type decision and the sort I'm really good at, the sort which usually get carried through ... but not always.  Well anyway I've decided to concentrate the final part of this Eating the Stores Challenge on eating down the contents of the freezer in the kitchen.  So if you will, it's a Challenge within a Challenge.

To be totally unique and to simply say it like it is I am calling this part of the Challenge ...The Freezer Challenge

The reason for deciding to narrow down the margins of the January Challenge is that I have discovered there is quite a bit of food in there that I don't really want us to keep eating in the future.  Things like the 'No Chick Fillets' for instance that were pulled out of the freezer for my tea tonight.  If you've never tried them before ... don't bother.  They were bloody awful ...and that's swearing!!

Alan's Gammon Steaks with Cheese and Pineapple was much more successful, although it was a meal I wouldn't have bought if it hadn't been boasting a yellow sticker.  Both were served with simple boiled potatoes.

In the cupboards we have tins and jars of foods that we pretty much know we like to eat, are pretty standard and have long dates on.  The freezer food has been left in there far too long, so much so that the freezer in the workshop that is supposed to trickle it's food forward into this one has not been getting much of a look in except for bread and a few bulky items.

So to start this Freezer Challenge off I took some photos of the freezer shelves in close up.  It's hard to play spot the difference from the full length door photos I published yesterday.


Shelves 1 and 2

As Joy mentioned in her comment yesterday this freezer has very useful door shelves/pockets.  I used to use them for all the tall narrow things and then over the last few months lots of bitty bits have crept into them.

Shelf 1 is holding our replacement Conkers. 

Conkers on windowsills keep the majority of spiders out of your house, this is a proven fact as far as I'm concerned ... we've been doing it for a few years now with brilliant results.  You need just two conkers per windowsill.  After a few months the conkers gradually dry up and start to lose their effectiveness, so having a fresh supply in the freezer means we are able to replace them all and keep ourselves going until conker season comes around again :-)

Shelf 2 has some yellow sticker pastry (if I see any ready rolled pastry in the reduced cabinet and it is one pound or less I buy it as it is a great standby for a quick meal), some fresh ginger wrapped in foil and a tub of home grown garlic cloves.  Freezing ginger as soon as you get it keeps it fresh and means that you can grate it skin and all into any dish you need to direct from the freezer and put back all that you don't need but it needs to be wrapped extremely well.  Garlic cloves whether homegrown or bought from the shops, freeze extremely well and can be grated or chopped finely straight from the freezer again, meaning no waste.

Shelves 3 and 4

On shelf 3 there are two more ys packs of pastry, some ys Rosemary and Sea Salt Foccacia bread (ooh ... posh) and a bag of lemon slices for my morning water drinks, a habit I need to get back to for sure.  

On shelf 4 we have a single Magnum white chocolate ice-cream lolly, a pack of pate, a pack of nut cutlets behind which hiding completely from sight there is a pack of Linda McCartney sausages and there is also a multi-pack of salmon fillets.


Shelf 5 simply has a pack of pate and a ys pack of stuffed mushrooms.

Tucked into a few of these shelves you will have noticed ice packs, as we really don't need these at the moment my first job after taking all these photos was to remove them all from the freezer and leave them on the draining board to thaw out.  Once the freezer has been cleared out they will probably go back in and be kept in just the bottom door shelf ready for use.

So that's it the freezer door in all it's detail.

I will be back tomorrow with the next food that have been taken out and a close up of the shelves in the main body of the freezer.  I will not be moving things around in the freezer as gaps appear or be adding to it at all, so no leftovers are going in and no new purchases are to be made as the main Challenge of Eating the Stores is still in force.  Hopefully between now and the end of the month (which unbelievably is only next week) this freezer should start to look very different.


🍲


16 comments:

  1. I've never heard of freeing conkers before! Once again you surprise me!

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    1. We tried it for the first time a couple of years ago after I realised that a lot of seeds appreciate going through a frozen dormant state before germinating. It worked fine, so we've done it ever since :-)

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  2. Where IS the time going????
    xx

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    1. I know ... I was shocked when I looked at the calendar and realised that next Friday is the start of FEBRUARY!!

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  3. Good luck on not replacing things!
    My problem is that if I see a bargain,( we don't have yellow stickers), and it's something we use regularly I can't resist it.
    At present I have enough fruit to make a year's supply of jamand a huge quantity of soup made from bargain vegetables.
    Thanks for the tip about wrapping ginger. Mine ended up soggy when I tried freezing it. Sue

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    1. I am not going to the shops for anything except milk and all leftovers will simply be in the f ridge and be made use of the next day ... I am being firm with myself.

      Yes ginger really needs to be wrapped really well. I use good quality cling film and then lots of foil pressed tightly around the ginger to exclude any chance of air getting it.

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  4. Next time conker season comes around I know what I'll be doing. Another great idea I will take from your post is to freeze ginger as I end up throwing so much. It is snowing heavily here, but I guess it shouldn't be a surprise as it is January and I do live up on the moor. I currently have 4 packs of pastry in 1 of my chest freezers, last week I made cornish pasties one day and 2 days later fidget pasties for hubby and son, it is so handy to have them in the freezer. Helen S.

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    1. Yes, it's always worth freezing ginger, especially as you can use it from frozen. And a few packets of pastry can turn everything into a good meal ... you can't beat a pie or a pasty :-)

      Snow on the hills here too, I'm just back from a hair raising trip to Manchester, the A55 was like an ice rink in places.

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  5. When I was making room in my freezer I focused on food that wouldn't go back in, I called them single use foods lol. As I'm a ys shopper I'm constantly replacing food in the freezer. This week a 10p chicken buttered malsala curry came out, 25p garlic chicken kievs, 39p battered haddock. But it's been replaced with 2 portions salmon £1, southern fried chicken 75p, salt and pepper dusted sole 95p. I really do have a lot of stuff in my freezers, I make the biggest impact on them when we go away on our cheap static caravan holidays and take our cheap ys food with us. I'm hoping I may pick up on some tips Sue. I'm still enjoying my low spend challenge xx

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    1. It doesn't sound like you need to pick up any tips from me, you seem to have cornered the market in clever yellow sticker shopping :-)

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  6. Hi Sue, I'm so glad that you published the link to your new site, I've got a lot of back-reading to do to catch up, but thanks! Just wondering if you've any thoughts on stocking up for a Brexit debarcle? I'm not too worried about food being a bit limited as my husband and I have always said that in lean times we could live for a short while on HM bread, HM soup, porridge and jacket spuds (we've never ACTUALLY done this though!) and I hope that there isn't a problem with those basic supplies. However I am stocking up on the things that would be a flippin nuisance if they went missing like loo rolls, kitchen towels, washing tabs, cat food, UHT milk to make yogurt, tinned tomatoes etc. I'm not buying lots of these so I don't think that I'm causing a shortage but enough for 3 or 4 weeks

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    1. I've not really thought about stocking up for Brexit. In fact I have stopped watching the news completely as I'm fed up to the back teeth of hearing about it. I will have my usual good supplies of rice, pasta, beans and tinned tomatoes. Non-foody things that I always have a good supply of are toilet rolls, tissues and toothpastes. Pets at Home have said they have invested eight million pounds in making sure that pet foods and supplies won't be in short supply ... so the dogs and Ginger will be fine too :-)

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  7. I'm honestly trying to eat down my freezer but just yesterday I ended up adding a ziplock bag of two chicken thighs in a lovely sweet & sour sauce, 3 ziplocks of mushroom barley soup and 3 containers of apple/cranberry crumble! Tomorrow I intend taking out and cooking some salmon fillets that have been in there long enough! I really need salad greens and some frozen veg but I'm waiting until Thursday when my new Loyalty point offers will be in place as I'm hoping some of these items will be included so tomorrow the salmon will be served with some mini potatoes & frozen broccoli!

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    1. Salmon, potatoes and broccoli sounds lovely :-)

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  8. I'm interested to see that you've frozen some stuffed mushrooms. Were those from the chill cabinets originally? I love stuffed mushrooms but have never picked them up on yellow sticker because I didn't think they would freeze well. If they are ex chill cabinet, do you cook them straight from frozen or defrost overnight? Upset now that I've missed some bargains LOL.

    I'm also on eating down the freezers. I actually have so much stuff in my two (and I'm on my own) that I can't use any of the Christmas Eve YS veggies I bought to make soup, because there's no room for the made soup to go back in the freezer. Have not bought anything for the freezer for the last couple of weeks apart from a loaf because we are forecast snow.

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    1. Yes they were. I find they are okay as long as you try and use them in around a month. Any longer and the texture really begins to suffer.

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