Using up everything out of the freezer.

I am doing something similar. Charged to look after 2 children at school over Christmas and have MASSIVELY under estimated how much a teenage boy can eat. I am delving deeper and deeper into the freezer to find things to cook. By the time the catering staff come back, it'll need a complete restock!

GagaJo It is impossible to overestimate how much a teenage boy can eat. Every parent of a teenage boy has discovered that.

And they continue to eat massive amounts in their twenties.

I can't believe how much he can pack away. HUGE plate of pasta and then his puppy dog eyes look up at me and he says, 'I'm still hungry.' I have never known anything like it.

DS went from being a finicky faddy eater, who was underweight at one point to being a one of those garbage hulping machines, almost overnight. I came closer to putting padlocks on the larder and fridge. It was not unusual to come home from work to find DS had eaten several key ingredients needed for that nights supper.

My daughter makes pasta dishes which would be a large meal for us, but they are sat in the fridge as snacks for her two sons. She churns these out week after week, as a healthier alternative to what they would choose.

I think it is best to keep the freezer nearly full - it runs best that way and it is a safeguard against unforeseen shortages.

I will be having some strange meals over the next couple of weeks I think. Odds and sods cooked and frozen as well as a fair amount of prawns and fish. I need to empty each drawer and then restock it.

I have two freezers. I can run one down and cram things into the second - to defrost and clean the first.

They waste electricity if they become iced up. They need a regular clean, too, as we store food in them.

Things don't keep forever in them, so a regular cycle of using up and restocking is necessary.

I'm puzzled (and somewhat horrified) when people say they keep them full. Don't they clean them?

I have had to start locking the kitchen door. Happy to provide food, but yes, he keeps eating ingredients for the next meal!

We got a new freezer recently, it’s the undercount sized one I use to store meat and fish. I got a black one because it was cheaper than a white but I put a sheet of sticky back blackboard plastic on the door. I now have a complete, up to date inventory of what’s in it. It’s so easy to update with the chalk pens. It’s the best thing I’ve done.

We have an old 3 drawer freezer in the garage plus 3 drawers in a fridge/freezer in the kitchen.

I like to move things from the garage to the kitchen freezer with the intention of emptying the garage one but that rarely seems to happen!

It is quite possible to empty the freezer, keep the frozen food frozen in insulated bags for a short time, defrost and clean the freezer then return the frozen food to the freezer without any of it thawing out.

We have had some unusual meals of late. Killing two birds with one stone, firstly, an opportunity to clear out the fridge freezer and a freezer we have in the garage and secondly, one less outing to the supermarket. Makes for interesting meals ?

My friend has three daughters, I have two sons (and a daughter).
She couldn't believe me when I said they got through a loaf of bread a day as teenagers.

Oh and my Mum once found that my brother had scoffed the big bag of dried fruit she'd bought ready to make the Christmas cake ?

I had a light bulb moment last year. Instead of trying to use up everything in my freezer, I pack most of it in my insulated picnic box and it is all still frozen by the time my freezer is defrosted. The older stuff that doesn't fit I use up the following couple of days.

If you use a hairdryer the ice is melted very quickly before anything can defrost!

I'm puzzled (and somewhat horrified) when people say they keep them full. Don't they clean them?

A full freezer uses less energy because frozen food keeps the temperature low.

I only clean mine once a year when I defrost it. Why would frozen food need cleaning?

I don't think it's necessary to clean the freezer very often. In my main frost free freezer everything is packaged really well so is not in contact with anything else. The packaging that is reused, eg Tupperware type stuff, is washed.

I also have an American fridge freezer in the kitchen which I use as a half way house and for stuff that I use regularly.

I think it depends who you live with! My son is forever going in the freezer for stuff and spilling crumbs because he is too lazy to take the whole packet out, he just takes out what he wants. I’ve got a frost free freezer, so I tend to empty one drawer at a time and wash it out rather than do the whole thing.

I resolved early last year and have kept it, to stop storing bits and bobs in the freezer. We use up leftovers either the next day, or the day after, I got fed up with small containers of stuff that just got moved around. Our freezer is frost free, it doesn’t take long to empty and wipe around each tray individually with no risk of defrosting.

I don’t eat everything out of the freezer before cleaning it. I sort through the drawers, cleaning as I go, then clean the inside of the cabinet then put everything back. It doesn’t take much more than half an hour.

It leads to some interesting meals, as someone said. Yesterday I had children’s cottage pie ready meal, left over from a GC’s visit. It was fine with some baked beans to pad it out!

I also made an amazing soup with various ends of bags of vegetables that had accumulated. It lasted two of us for three days. I also used up apples from two years ago and made this Christmas’s cranberry sauce from a pack of frozen cranberries that I also unearthed.

I only clean my freezer when it's so full of ice that I have to dig out a hole to put something in.