ShareThisThrift is in. Budgeting is cool. Cleaning out your freezer? That's still something you'd rather not do until you move or buy a new one.
For most people, including me, the freezer is the appliance version of the kitchen drawer full of the odds and ends you don't know what to do with but don't want to throw away. There's a lot of useful stuff -- leftover pie dough, almonds and walnuts, half a brisket from a local farm -- but it's in such a precarious jumble that I mostly pretend none of it's there.
It turns out the freezer is a pretty useful tool for saving money on food and coming up with better meals to show for it.
In "Can I Freeze It?" (William Morrow, 2007), Susie Theodorou offers up the freezer as a tool to transform planned leftovers into extra meals. Cook an extra chicken or a double batch of sauce and turn the excess into a different dish -- twice the meals for almost the same amount of work.
To begin: clean out and organize your freezer. Wipe down surfaces with a warm water-and-vinegar solution, but make sure that it's dry before turning the temperature down. Freezers function best when about three-quarters full, so add a couple of bags of ice if yours is suddenly empty.
Keep a roll of masking tape and a permanent marker tied to a magnet on the freezer. Use a notepad, a small dry-erase board or a printed list to keep track of what's in the freezer. This way you don't have to open the freezer door to assess what's inside.
The idea of freezing leftover ingredients and dishes is easy to grasp, but the real trick is knowing what to put in your freezer to ease future meal planning. Don't freeze small amounts of ingredients that you almost never use, because odds are they'll just take up space in your freezer until the next time it's cleaned out. Instead, plan to use the ingredient as soon as possible. Do freeze leftover stock, canned beans or tomatoes, cooked beans and grains, or whatever easily freezable items you consider staples but don't have an immediate plan to use. It's better to do a little extra defrosting than to constantly throw out moldy tomatoes or sour stock you forgot you had.
Freezer burn is not inevitable. The right storage containers and techniques will go a long way toward preventing it. The goal is to minimize exposure to air and moisture.
When possible, store items in reusable containers such as freezer-safe glass, ceramic or plastic. Make sure you know whether your containers can go straight from the freezer into the oven or microwave, or whether they need to defrost a little at room temperature first. (Pyrex, for example, needs to sit at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before going into a hot oven, or it could break.)
Good-quality glass and ceramic containers often can be found at garage sales, outlet stores and online for reasonable prices.
For bread, fruits and vegetables, sauces and stews, keep freezer-safe plastic wrap, heavy-duty foil and freezer-save resealable bags on hand. Create a flat space in your freezer that can fit a baking sheet for individually quick-freezing (often abbreviated as "iqf") berries, sliced fruit, ravioli and more. Simply place the items you want to freeze on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, freeze for a few hours (until the items are hard to the touch) and then store in resealable bags.
Most vegetables benefit from blanching (immersing in boiling water for 30 seconds to a few minutes, than plunging into ice water to stop the cooking process) before freezing. You can also freeze fruit and vegetable purees, soups, sauces and stews in plastic bags. Freezing in smaller portions gives you more flexibility about how and when to use them.
(China Millman can be reached at cmillman(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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