Freezer experts - give me some tips!

[GlitteryShoes]

I have nearly cleared my freezer, which was full of oddities and really want to make it work better, and be filled with homemade family meals, emergency bread etc. How do you organise your freezers and what do you put in them please?

I aim (although it tends to get disorganised as time passes!) to have a drawer with frozen veg and fish fingers, a drawer with bread and then a drawer with meat etc and a drawer with already batch cooked meals. But it doesn't always last like this!!

I've a six foot chest freezer so you have to be organised or you cannot find bugger all

so I have the slidey baskets on the top with mince/sausages/prawns....small stuff in, I try to categorise it, chicken/beef/fish ....etc

Underneath I have a few big shopping bags ...one for bread, one for big joints of meat, veg.....you get the gist

The main thing I have found that works is to get a book and Keep A List, and be utterly ruthless about checking stuff in and out, AND make sure you label all the boxes and tubs of homemade stuff ...otherwise you dh get soup out for a work lunch, along with a couple of rolls and then once it is defrosted you find you have something else onion gravy and toasty muffins

We currently have a small Tupperware of Brown in there, it might be casserole, it might be pulled gammon, it MIGHT be veggie burger mix....who can tell???

I do the menu plan in the book too, with little memos and stuff so everyone knows if something needs lifted out to defrost.

I also quite like to put the book in my handbag and peruse it as I am shopping, I think it makes me look efficient and super organised, but I do often write shopping lists in it too.

Right - a list seems a good idea. Now to put something useful in there ( having just eaten kilos of breadcrumbs, ostrich steaks and unudentified freezer burned meat)

I have a big six foot chest freezer too :) , and have 4 baskets that slide along
mine is organised in boxes that stack on one another, underneath the slidey baskets.
Bought ready stuff eg frozen pastry blocks, packet of fish fingers, uncooked chicken breasts, bacon, ice cream
Bought frozen veg - peas and sweetcorn mostly
a small amount of bread - a sliced loaf, some bread buns and nan mostly
I have an allotment , so I have boxes of frozen fruit and veg!
The rest (most of it ) is home made batch cooking - stews/casseroles/soups/pasta sauce etc. Sounds hard work , but isn't . If I make a stew or soup or casserole, I just do loads more than I need for that meal, and then bag up into usable portions. I label very, very specifically on portion size and date.
And yes to keeping a close eye on things.
About every 3 months I try to have a good sort out

Useful stuff. Some nice ready meals for when too awful to cook. I like the Cook range. Frozen fish, breaded and white. First for n chips nights and the other is quick cook from frozen. Always have salmon in for stir fry and prawns as they can be cooked from frozen. Stuff step kids can take out and cook themselves. Emergency bagels as they defrost well.

Ice cream.

Mine has:

• top shelf: ice cream, ice cubes, tubs of frozen chopped herbs

• 2nd shelf: frozen veg (peas, green beans, broad beans, cauli rice and spinach are the staples)

-3rd shelf: meat and fish (often cuts of meat frozen raw out of multipacks)

• 4th shelf: pizzas, bread and the odd ready meal / convenience food

• bottom shelf: things for Asian cooking: kaffir lime leaves, birds eye chillis, green chillus, leftover curry pastes, lemongrass, galangan (sp?), coconut, tiny dried shrimps etc.

...I occasionally freeze leftovers but more usually take them to work for packed lunches so that's why there's not really many home-cooked things in my freezer.

My freezer works for me more as providing essential ingredients for cooking throughout the week.

...oh yes and I label everything that gets put in there in freezer bags or Tupperware. I have a roll of sticky white labels I use, since the special pens that write on plastic never seem to work half the time.

if you have a slow cooker it's worth investigating Dump Bags.

The gist of it is you spend a couple of hours prepping your veg, portioning up the meat, bagging it all up so it is ready to defrost, tip into the slow cooker with tinned toms/stock

so I did a sweep on the reduced counter the other week, picked up some diced chicken, some chicken breasts and some casserole beef

I don't like SC meals where the stuff is just hurled in un cooked, so I chopped and sweated a huge pile of onions and celery and also some red onions and celery, and let that cool, I usually also brown the meat but I didn't want to risk that and tbh that certainly did not seem to make a difference, whereas I do think the onions and celery are never right unless they have been sweated off properly.

I ended up with

Spanish chicken....sliced breast, good dollop of onion mix, left over chorizo, plenty of seasoning, some crushed garlic ...put into bag, and when it goes into the SC you add passata and tinned white beans and a splash of wine

Country Chicken...diced chicken, sliced leeks, bacon, seasoning, onion mix, BAG and freeze. Add tinned toms and white wine as it goes into the SC

I also did Chicken Satay, a beefy chilli curry effort, a beef and mushroom thing....that ended up as a pie filling, and Sweet ginger beef....that's loosely based on HFW sweet/sour beef.

I baught milk crates for my chest freezer,
1 for meat/fish/shrimps
1 for emergency frozen dinners
1 for frozen fruits
in the free space around the crates : frozen pizza

Hamster baskets - google. No, I don't work for them.

We grow a lot of stuff that we either freeze or prep into casserole/soup etc. We're in the process of rejigging the garage to get a big chest freezer in and I'm planning to get a whiteboard so I can write what's in there and cross off/add as we use and replace stuff.