Grow your own tomatoes, herbs and lettuce year round!
Unlike the fridge, the freezer works better when it’s full. Everything in the freezer is frozen, and this helps to keep the temperature consistently low. In order to be very thrifty with food, we need to take advantage of deals when they come our way. Pickling, curing, canning, or jarring, and all other ways of preserving are key to saving. Freezing is the most time-efficient and simple way for us to preserve food. So, how do we use this tool effectively? We want to be able to access the frozen foods easily, so packaging is important; no huge frozen blocks of meat that take up all of the space. Freeze your meats and fish (or any foods for that matter) in two meal portions, based on the size of your family. Pulling out two meals’ worth of an item will give you enough for that day’s dinner and leftovers the next day. This is a great and thrifty habit to get into; time and money saving in the form of cooking more with less energy. I like to wrap meats tightly in plastic wrap, in my two day packs, and then put all of the packs into a large plastic, Ziploc bag with the name of the item written on the bag.
Example: you have made perfectly uniform 4 ounce burgers. Now, stack them with 4 inch by 4 inch parchment in between them and with eight in a stack (for a family of four). Wrap the stacks in plastic and then put the stacks into large Ziploc bags. Pull out one pack, thaw them, and BBQ all eight for dinner. If only six are eaten, then the remaining two can be used in lunches the next day. Wash and reuse the Ziploc bags over and over whenever you need to freeze something.
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