Freezer Clean-Out Challenge: Update Week 4 Before & After Pictures

*Note: This post was written about a month ago, but due to computer and website failure, it is just getting posted.

After working on cleaning out my freezer for a whole month,  I’m shocked at how well we have eaten and yet I still have so much left in my freezer.  There is a large dent in it and the freezer is looking so much better, but there is still a lot left to eat.

Today, I was making pizza dough for pizza for lunch.  When I went into my freezer to get out the mozzarella cheese, I was very disappointed to find out that I had actually run out.  I always keep that on hand, but with working on cleaning out the freezer I must have used all of the bags up. I ended up switching gears and made a calzone like pizza thing and stuffed it was cheddar cheese, bacon, onion, tomato sauce and eggplant. Nobody seemed to mind too much that it wasn’t pizza for lunch. However, I  am going to go to my bulk food store and purchase a bulk amount of cheese.  That is one item that I never like to run out of.

You can see the back of the freezer now!  I don’t have a picture of my chest freezer, but that has also gone down considerably. I can also say that living off of what is in my freezer has certainly helped the grocery budget.  There have been a few weeks where I didn’t go shopping at all and just made did with what we had.  It feels so good to purge and really know what is in my freezer.

During the last few weeks, I did find a few questionable items.

One of those items was this bag of dried herbs.  I think it may have been parsley(?????), but it didn’t smell like parsley and the bag only had written on it, “Enjoy Life”.  Obviously, I had reused the bag but hadn’t labeled it with the current contents. Oops!

Then there were these bags of peppers.  I was glad to see that I had labeled these bags. Can you imagine if they were Jalapeno’s and not Bells!!!!  But, I didn’t put a date on these bags so I can not tell you how old they really are.  I thawed them out and the banana peppers were completely usable but the bell’s had this freezer smell to them.  Out to the compost they went!

These were probably some of my worst offenders.  Most everything has been completely edible, albeit a little older than it probably should be.

I have learned a few this from this challenge.

1.  When you freeze some food, make sure you label and date what the contents are.  You think that you will remember what is in that bag months from now, but the honest truth is that you won’t.

2.  There is a price you are paying to storing food in your freezer in the way of electricity.  Storing food for long periods of time until it is no longer edible is wasting not only money in the form of electricity, but also the time it took for you to prep/process the food for the freezer as well as the freezer bag.

3.  The freezer can be a great tool for a family, but you must use it wisely and not as a catch-all or delaying the inevitable.  If you don’t like something and just freeze it so you don’t have to throw it out, save yourself the money and time and just get rid of it!