I’ve been hearing rumors of a grass fed, free range beef deal that *might* be coming my way, and if the tales being told are true, I’m going to need some freezer space. I also have a line on a couple sources for wild hogs, another reason to have some freezer space available.
While my fishing results have been less than stellar, fish are NOT a reason to worry about space in the freezer, but the possibility of going shrimping in the future could result in the need for more cold storage…
And if nothing else, we have NO idea what all we currently have. And if you don’t know what you have, you don’t know what you need… And we are now in hurricane season, the time of year that pressures me most to be ready.
So we cleaned out the freezer a few weeks ago.
And now that it is over, we have a much better idea of what we have, what we need…..and what we should never buy again.
Our current frozen food storage consists of a side by side refrigerator/freezer, and a small chest freezer. The refrigerator/freezer offers 10 cubic feet of freezer space.How much food can you hold in 10 cubic feet?
This much:
As you can see, I’m a BIG fan of vacuum sealers. That works out rather well, as air is a big part of what causes freezer burn in items that stay frozen for a long time. Therefore, vacuum sealing extends your storage life.
And since some of the items we found were up to 4 years old, I’m rather happy I’ve gone the vacuum sealer route.
Our freezer inventory also revealed some item we weren’t aware we had. For instance, I found some rabbit jerky from earlier this year, some ramps from several years ago, and a whole ham that was Cryovac‘d and neither the wife or I recall ever purchasing it.
What this has taught us mostly is that we need a better system.
So we cleaned it out, sorted what was still good and what was freezer burnt. We shuffled things around and tried to group like items together. I now have a box in the freezer full of my smoked rabbit road food snacks. All the veggies are in one location. And the deer burger has all found a home together.
And having sorted out the mess we have, we now have some order. More importantly, we now have some extra space….
Time to go fill it….
Not every article I write is going to be a great “How-To” on turning discarded tire treads into indestructible footwear. Some of my writing has to be about the mundane parts of daily life, things like sorting and cleaning. Don’t tell my wife this, but I think that order is important for being ready for emergencies.
It’s just that her version of order and mine have conflicts from time to time, and when it does, we need to back up and regroup, doing things like cleaning out the freezer. Boring, I know 😛
But we are now in a better spot in our preparedness, just knowing where we stand………
……..just in case.
Peace,
db
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The problem is if one hasn’t any power [ via hurricanes or what not ] nor a generator all the frozen food will go bye bye .
I should have elaborated on that, you are correct.
By knowing what we have, in the event of a long term outage, I’ll be able to come up with a plan to cook, preserve, or ignore whatever we know have.
Like they used to say on the old GI Joe cartoons, “Knowing is half the battle”.
db
Last year we switched from a chest freezer to an upright freezer and it has been a lot easier to keep track of what we have and to FIFO our stock of food. I have recommended this to family and friends since our switch. Thanks for the blog I enjoy reading it.
We have both, a chest freezer (with food just being dumped in, and the stuff at the bottom from the last Ice Age), and our side by side ridge/freezer. It is MUCH easier to get things out of the upright…but I still wish it had a door on the back to load things into, making it a true FIFO setup…
And thanks for the kind words!
First, loving the bigger blogs photos and congrats on your possible grass fed beef deal! Second, thank you! You cleared up an annoyance I’ve been having in my life- all my frozen food is freezer burnt and I had no idea why until now!
I was storing food in freezer ziploc bags and most of it is now ruined. I’m like dude, why is this happening?? I bought the freezer bags thinking they would keep food for 6 months+. I never knew it was the air in the bags that caused it to go bad. All of our japs are freezer burnt as well as our collard greens among many other things. So depressing. At least now I know why. I have GOT to get a vacuum sealer! Which kind do you use?
All of my pictures should link to larger versions if you click on them….
We use a FoodSaver V3460 as our main one, it does auto-sealing, great for production line processing, like 6 rabbits all cut up and quartered.
We also have a smaller FoodSaver that I picked up at a yard sale for $10. I only pull it out for one-shot sealing.
The bags are a big part of it, I’ve found. The best prices I’ve been able to locate that work well with FoodSaver sealers can be found at DC Sales
I’ve been ordering from him for a couple years. I’ve placed 4 orders total, buying 2 packs of 100, two different sizes each time, switching up sizes so I have a variety.These bags are all pre made and work GREAT! The trick is to place the rough side up when trying to vacseal these bags.
I also use both Vacsealers with my jar attachments for storing dry goods for long term in canning jars…