On the side I have odds and ends, and I keep cheese, fruit, pizza toppings, and leftovers in my kitchen freezer. Your freezer is going to look a little differently than mine, but I’ll show you how I put it all together. Now that you’ve got your containers with labels, you are ready to organize the freezer! It is time to put it all together! Easy! (This is a bag of partial ingredients for copycat Cafe Rio Lime Ranch Dressing … heaven on a spoon!) I grab a bag and add the wet ingredients and blend. Salad Dressing doesn’t freeze well, so I freeze all the individual ingredients of our favorite dressing that does freeze well. I pull these out at night and they are perfectly thawed by morning for my kids to devour. I love quart size zipper bags for hearty breakfast muffins. I even freeze big quantities of soup flat … double bagged! I arrange them on cookie sheets and stick the cookie sheets in the freezer until they are frozen flat, and then I can re-arrange like this, where it is very easy to access my taco meat and pre-made creamy chicken taquitos: I like to flash freeze all of my freezer foods to be flat so that I can access them like files. Make do with the freezer food you already have prepared, but as you continue to create freezer food, create it with your new baskets and space in mind. (Oops!!) Permanent markers are the way to go. Important note: If you are going to use cute chalk labels in your freezer, DO NOT use chalk pens on the labels, because it will look like the pictures below after a while. Bonus, this also lets people help you put away the groceries into the correct place! Win! To be sure that everyone in your household can use the freezer as easily as you, label the containers with the categories you came up with during the planning phase. I had already used them around my house enough to know I liked them and I tried one in my freezer and I liked that I could pull it in and out with the handle at the end. I like these same containers I use in my pantry and laundry room. Take the tape measure to the store with you! To make sure you get containers that fit your stand-up freezer space, measure your space before you shop for the containers of your choice. This is an important step – don’t skip it! Getting the Right Containers
What you are doing by figuring out these groupings is figuring out how to divide your freezer into sections and baskets (if fitting). Do you have a lot of marinating meat? A lot of casseroles? A lot of veggies or cheese? Write down everything that is in your freezer and see if you start to notice groupings.
I have a FREE Freezer Inventory Printable you can use HERE or just use a piece of paper – that works too! Frozen things do not look more appetizing! This is an important rule to remember when you are organizing the freezer, because it as true in the freezer as anywhere else in your house: you can’t organize clutter! The Planning Phaseīefore you start buying bins and moving things around, make an inventory of what’s in your freezer. If you were “so-so” about something before, you will never feel like thawing it and eating it after it is frozen.
You feel like you “should” save this, so you put it in the freezer, but then it just gets weirder and ickier in the freezer.
Always the first step of organizing …įirst of all – stop trying to store stuff you won’t really use. Over the years, I’ve figured out a thing or two about organizing a stand-up freezer in the most usable way. I’ve really come to appreciate the stand-up freezer, so when the cheap bachelor-pad one was looking sad, I finally replaced it last year with another stand-up freezer.
After we got married, we bought a full-sized fridge and the stand-up freezer went to the garage. The mini-fridge was for drinks and condiments, the stand-up freezer was for all of his frozen meals. He had a dorm mini-fridge and a stand-up freezer. And because he didn’t cook at all, ever, I mean he only heated things in a microwave … he didn’t think it was worth it to buy a full-sized fridge for his home. When I married Matt, he was a bachelor with a full-blown bachelor pad. My husband’s old bachelor pad is the reason I ever came to be a “stand-up freezer person”.
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