Thinking about improving our freezer use
| cooking, kaizenWe have a 5.3 cu. ft. Haier chest freezer in addition to the freezer drawer built into the fridge. We’ve had the chest freezer for two years now, and it’s been really useful. I want to see if we can make even better use of it before we consider scaling up. There isn’t that much space to grow in the current place we have the freezer, and moving the freezer elsewhere would make less convenient. I’d rather figure out how to use the freezer space more efficiently.
One easy way to to do that is to shift more of our freezer space from ingredients to prepared meals, giving us more time between cooking sprints. We tend to do a cooking sprint every third weekend. If we organize our space better and add more recipes to our cooking sprints, we might be able to cook once a month and enjoy more variety, too.
I spent some time this morning taking an inventory of what’s in the freezer, so I can plan to use those ingredients up. Here’s what we’ve got.
| Baking | ||
|---|---|---|
| Butter | 2lbs | Cooking and baking; rarely goes on sale, so I could just get this on an as-needed basis |
| Crisco | 0.5 block | Mainly for baking vegan treats for tea parties. I haven’t been hosting tea parties lately, though. |
| Lard | 1/4 cup | Pies and egg tarts – more useful during baking season |
| Pie crust dough | 2 discs | Left over from the last baking season |
| Yeast | 1 bottle | Coconut buns, mmm |
| Bread | ||
| Bread | 1 1/3 loaf | Very handy |
| Burger buns | 4 | For burgers; useful in summer |
| Breakfast | ||
| Bacon | 500g | Mm, breakfast |
| Longganisa | 1 pack of 12 links | Breakfast |
| Steamed buns | 5 packs | Delicious – we tend to go through 1 pack / person |
| Cheese | ||
| Cheese ends | 0.5L | To be grated for lasagna |
| Grated parmesan | 8 cups | Gift from Tania – I use it in lasagna and other pasta dishes |
| Nacho cheese mix | 1kg | Great for potatoes, fries, nachos, and so on |
| Romano cheese | 497g | To be grated for lasagna |
| Shredded mozzarella | 120g | Quick way to make lots of things better |
| Dessert | ||
| Strawberry rhubarb tarts | 8 | From my experiment. A bit sour; needs a spoonful of sugar each. We don’t usually have dessert, though. |
| Turon | half pack | When we feel like frying |
| Vanilla ice cream | 1 cup | Just a little bit left – must finish it while the weather’s warm |
| Fruit | ||
| Fruit | 3.5kg | For smoothies; must have this while the weather’s warm |
| Mashed banana | 3 cups | For banana bread and for smoothies |
| Herbs | ||
| Basil | 1 cup | Raw ingredients for pesto. Can also be added to pasta sauce. |
| Cilantro | 1.5L | Stir-fries |
| Curry leaves | 1 pack | Thai curry |
| Dill | 2 cups | For… umm… mixing with cream cheese? We don’t cook fish often. I saved this from the CSA box. |
| Lemon zest | 0.5 cups | For banana bread |
| Oregano | 1 cup | For pasta sauce. |
| Ingredients | ||
| Carrot tops | 3 cups | Vegetable stock? But we have so much stock already. |
| Chickpeas | 680g | Curry, someday |
| Chopped onion | 1 cup | Also good for instant noodles or quick recipes |
| Green onion | 2.5 cups | Great for instant noodles |
| Parsley | 4 cups | Soups and sauces |
| Peeled ginger | 1 cup | Stir-fries and other Asian dishes |
| Red beans | 1 kg | Chili, someday |
| Meals | ||
| Chicken nuggets | 460g | J-‘s lunches |
| Garlic scape pesto | 2 cups | Dinner |
| Jamaican beef patties | 12 | J-‘s lunches |
| Lasagna | 8 portions | Dinner |
| Pesto | 3 cups | Dinner |
| Roast chicken with couscous | 12 individual meals | Lunch |
| Spaghetti with sauce | 1 individual meal | Lunch |
| Stuffed chicken breasts | 5 | J-‘s lunches |
| Meat | ||
| Beef mix (ground beef, onions, garlic) | 4 cups | For nachos, burritos, or pasta sauce |
| Burger patties | 4 | Must finish this while the weather’s warm |
| Dry salt bellies | 412g | For baked beans, because the pork bellies are sometimes not stocked at the supermarket |
| Italian sausages | 4 | For pasta sauce |
| Misc. | ||
| Bag of ice cubes | 1 L | Drinks |
| Ice packs | 3 | To cool things down |
| Seafood | ||
| Basa | 1 fillet | This one’s pretty old. I should throw it out. |
| Crab sticks | 2 packs x 340g | The occasional sushi; probably should use this up and then just buy on an as-needed basis |
| Halibut | 1 L | Gift; must defrost and fry sometime |
| Shrimp | 340g | Mm, pad thai. |
| Stocks and sauces | ||
| Bones for stock | 3 chickens | From our last cooking sprint |
| Chicken gravy starter | 1 cup | This must be from the other time we roasted chickens. We don’t often make or eat gravy, though |
| Chicken stock | 14 cups | We have so much stock. We should use it more often. Maybe I’ll use it to cook rice. |
| Turkey stock | 2 cups | This is from last year. I should toss it out. |
| Vegetables | ||
| Carrot sticks | 340g | From my let’s-freeze-the-carrots experiment |
| Chopped carrots | 380g | For chili or other dishes |
| Mixed vegetables | 1.5kg | For frozen lunches |
| Okra | 520g | For pinakbet. Hard to get at the nearby supermarket, so we keep a stash. Dependent on bittermelon availability, though, and that’s also rare. |
| Shredded zucchini | 2 cups | Zucchini delayed is zucchini denied. I should sneak these into brownies sometime. |
| Spinach | 0.5 L | For smoothies; must have this while the weather’s warm |
| Steak-cut fries | 1kg | Regular fries or chili cheese fries. Yum, although frying is scary. |
| Vegetable ends for stock | 1.1kg | When I figure out how to get through more stock, I’ll cook this into a vegetable stock |
Some things are clear candidates for tossing. Some things are there because the community-supported agriculture box had more produce than we could finish in a week (dill, etc.). For many items in our fridge, though, it’s more of a shift from stocking up to buying ingredients as we need them – not a bad idea, particularly if we scale up and plan recipes well. I estimate that prepared meals take up a ninth of our current freezing capacity. There’ll be room to grow once we get through these raw ingredients.
We’ve adopted a few freezer practices that have turned out to be quite useful. Standardized containers make food easy to stack. Grouping loose items into large bags (red for meat, green for vegetables, and so on) makes it easier to dig through the freezer in search of something. I can figure out a better way to index the infrequently-used frozen items so that we get visual reminders to use them up – maybe in that home dashboard I’ve been building. Hmm…