- What if by Wednesday I don't want pork chops?
- What if nothing on the plan sounds good?
- What if you had a crap day and you don't want to cook anything and everyone is left to fend for themselves? {Please tell me you have "Fend for Yourself" nights?!}
So, I buy stuff as I think of it. Most of the time an item or two will go in the fridge and I will at least commit that *a* day that week will see those items cooked, maybe even served. The rest goes in the freezer and of course we have the inside freezer and the chest freezer, because, you know, Armageddon and all {not really}.
Let's leave the busting at the seams pantry for another post. That actually hits on other topics like "No, you can't eat that can of pineapple chunks! I bought it for the pinterest recipe for... for... whatever, eat the pineapple. I can't remember."
This week we hit the hamburger lotto! We buy a particular brand of ground up cow that I don't have nightmares over. It is really yummy and always looks like meat should. {If you have anything bad to say about the beef industry, please don't share. I have enough phobias at this point. I think MyMister would snuff out my tiki torch and kick me off the island if I develop another.} So, each pack was marked $2.25 off! SCORE! So we bought six! And into the chest freezer they went.
You would *think* we'd be having hamburger this week. Nope. Chicken. It was a chicken kind of night Friday. No, I don't know why - it just was. And it was my favorite brand. {Tiki torch disclaimer here over the poultry industry, too, please.} Sadly, the brand is no longer available at Winco, so I am having to scour for a replacement product - so far, Trader Joes seems to have the front runner. Here we were, Friday night and I'm using the last of my favorite chicken. DENIED. Turns out, it was a pack that had gotten buried in the bottom, carbon dating probably around Neanderthal ago. As it thawed it was screamingly evident that it was severely ruined by freezer burn. We ended up being vegetarians Friday.
So while I pushed my mushroom and asparagus risotto around on my plate without a hunk of chicken to mop up the sauce, I realized I needed to come up with some sort of a system where all that wonderful hamburger doesn't go missing in our arctic tundra in the garage. Honestly, there really could be a Wooly Snuffleupagus suspended in time in the frozen walls of our freezer. I knew we had shelves in there, but those have usually just been catchalls for anything smaller that I didn't want falling through the cracks into the abyss. Turns out, they can ALSO be used in OR-GA-NI-ZING. Yep! I know, I was shocked, too!
The packs I had already in the freezer are in the front {truth: I asked MyMister to dig through all the randomly collected frozen foods and gather any and all hamburger}! Oh my word, IT'S ORGANIZATION STEP 1! AND with a double whammy of "Shelf is full, so I don't need to buy more yet" built-in indicator!
Clearly, by the view to the right of the shelf o' beef meat {another truth, I rarely buy any other beef type meat - I have no clue how to make it edible}, I need to continue with my organizing. There's three other shelves and the entire bottom of the freezer. All willy nilly thrown in. For those of you that know me, that isn't a surprise at all, is it?
