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Organize Your Freezer - Part One

© Kerri Bazzell

Sherrie knew what it was like to be over-worked, over-stressed, and over-booked. As a busy working mom of three, there was never enough time in the day to get it all done, and something was always overlooked. That something was usually dinner and fast food became a way of life for the family. Then Sherrie discovered cooking ahead, and life became a little bit easier. Getting a hot meal on the table with just a few minutes of preparation time each evening always made her smile with satisfaction. The all-day sessions even turned out to be fun, since she rediscovered her love for cooking. Everything was going so great!

But after Sherrie's most recent once-a-month session, she wasn't sure it was working out so well. It seemed that she had gone a little overboard and things weren't fitting so well in her freezer. There had been about a week's worth of food already in the freezer in addition to a couple of gallons of ice cream and the usual frozen juice and a few bags of frozen vegetables. With the new food from that day's session, the freezer that had once seemed so big was just too crowded. With a little rearranging, she just managed to get it all in, but she wondered how she would find things now. She set to work on a plan to organize her freezer.

Sherrie decided to tackle the job on the next Saturday. She first took a look at the freezer to see if it needed to be defrosted. A buildup of more than 1/4-inch of frost inside the freezer is a good guideline to tell if a freezer needs to be defrosted. She decided her freezer could wait on that for a few more months. Then she took inventory of what she had in the freezer. Sherrie decided that for her, the easiest way to do this would be to take each thing out of the freezer and make a list as she did so. She used her ice chest until she filled it up, then she used some empty boxes to hold everything else. She packed things in tightly so she didn't have to worry about the food thawing.

Once she had everything out, she began by putting the largest items back in. She started with her big casserole pans. The bottom shelf of her freezer seemed to be the biggest, so she used it first. She also put the ice cream buckets here. Next, she put in all the rectangular packages. She finally decided to arrange them sideways, like books on a bookshelf, so they would be more accessible. She found that she needed to re-label the packages so that the name would be on the end where she could see it. She saved her flash-frozen, bagged items until last. They could fit in the leftover, uneven spaces that were left.

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