Frugal Freezing

Once again Jean-Luc and I have been bartering although perhaps not as formally as that might suggest.  Jean-Luc helped out a friend by cleaning, debugging and updating her daughters laptop.  A couple of days later we mentioned we were on the lookout for a small freezer and guess what?  It turns out said friend had one sitting idle in her garage and would be glad to get rid of it.
A quick car trip and said freezer now resides in our pantry.

Now I use the word Pantry advisedly.

This was it when we moved in.

 It's basically a shed, the opening to the right is the old coal hole; I scrubbed, brushed and swept and we put in some shelves and a cupboard and now our new freezer.

Basically it contains all the preserves and preserve making equipment, the stock cupboard, teh  stock of jars and demijohns, the  laundry liquid and soap making equipment and stocks and our general bulk stores.

And as you can see on the left - the freezer.

I still want to clear it out and white wash it at some point but that's not an immediate priority.

As you can probably see it's also home to Jean-Luc's Black & Decker and golf gear as our shed is less than secure and in the process of falling down.  It's next on our list of priorities after the veggie beds are all soiled up.

One of the things we tend to do is buy meat in bulk, cook a whole load of meals and then freeze them;

and this is where my confession comes in.... the new freezer is our third (yes dear reader - THIRD) freezer.

We have a fridge freezer in the kitchen for everyday stuff, a chest freezer in the coal hole which we use for big stuff like bread and joints of meat; while the new freezer is used for meals and seasonal produce.

It was a good job we got the freezer....

......as Jean-Luc decided to spend the weekend cooking - in bulk. 

A lasagne.

 Beef and mushroom stew

Fish pies, Cumberland pies, tandoori chicken breasts and lamb rogan josh.

This lot should last us a few months and means that after a busy day we can just pop a healthy, home cooked meal in the oven and just add accompanying veggies - hopefully homegrown veggies this year too!