I just finished something I’ve been avoiding for years. And when I say years, I’m thinking 2018 or before. I have called my freezer the “black hole” for that long and still continued to buy stuff and shove it in, never to be seen again.
My black hole of a freezer was taunting me
Today I fixed that. I motivated myself to clean the freezer with “just one shelf” and it worked. The empty shelf was motivating and I kept going. Now I have a few things left in the freezer and plenty of cleared space.
I go way back with freezer stories, including a recent kitchen drama when a sausage link came out of my ice dispenser at the worst possible moment. We are not completely recovered from that yet, although it has provided several people with snorts of laughter at my expense.
A freezer is easy to clean if you can be ruthless
Today’s haul included things labeled “best by June 2016” if that gives you an idea of how much was freezer burned and trashed. The one thing that kept me from mulling over possibilities for too long was that we had a big power outage in August of 2020 and I was able to tell myself that anything prior to that needed to go. And it did. I carried bag after bag to the trash.
So the vow I mentioned? I’m making a list – an inventory if you will of what’s left in the freezer and I vow to plan my eating around those things and then replace only what I truly will eat. And the rest of that vow is that I will not buy anything, no matter how “on sale” it is, that I don’t have a plan to use before the expiration date.
What’s next if the freezer’s clean?
Watch out pantry, I’m coming for you next. It has to be easier than thinning either bookcases, right?
