My Frugal Freezer

Originally Posted 6/23/06 here.

Inside my freezer you can find evidence of frugality. Join me for a look inside. Upon opening the door the first thing you notice is bread, lots of bread. The bakery thrift store had whole wheat bread on sale for $0.33 a loaf. I stocked up.

Then there is meat. Some of this meat is repackaged from family size purchases. Almost all of it has dollar off stickers on it. You know it was marked down because it was at the end of the sell buy date. The jewel of all these is the whole spiral sliced ham, purchased at Aldi for $8 off. I bought two of these both around $7. The first one was delicious and we got four meals from it.

Of course there is your standards frozen veggies, butter, popsicles, chocolate chips and nuts. There are also a couple of bags of frozen strawberries. These were pick your own for $0.75 a pound. Didn't get nearly as many as I would have liked because it was hot and the kids were impatient!

Now dig a little deeper with me and you will see a sour cream container. No it isn't sour cream. (can you freeze that?) On top is written chicken broth. There is another that says beef broth. In these recycled containers you will find the broth I have kept from cooking. Say I do a roast in the crock pot. I will strain the drippings and keep the broth frozen for later use. Same from boiling a whole chicken. Then I have free broth for later and it tastes so much better than canned!

You will also find a bread bag that doesn't quite look right. Well it is bread, but not a loaf of bread. In this you will find heels from previous loaves, buns that didn't get used and crumbs from our homemade bread. I shove all these things into a old bag and then pull it out when I need day old bread for something like meatloaf. You can also make your own breadcrumbs and croutons from bread like this.

Under this bag there is something that looks disgusting. It is a bag of something that looks black and is very slimy when thawed. And yes it does belong there. It does look gross, but what it is frozen bananas. When we have bananas that are starting to get over ripe I throw them in a freezer bag, peeled, two or three at a time (that is what most recipes call for.) They do turn black and look gross, but work wonderfully in banana bread or other baking! I promise!

Here ends the tour of the freezer. Do you have any other frugal ideas from your freezer?