How I Made My Freezer My Frugal Friend

Copyright Laurel Fan 2005 Creative Commons

Our fridge used to be full of food and half of it would go to waste.

If you opened it now, you might think it looked a bit bare.

There's dairy and juice but not much more because almost everything else has gone straight in the freezer.

And doing this, we save money because less is thrown away and actually eat far more fresh fruit and veg.  A real win win.

The five things I have found most helpful in this approach are:

1. Put all veg in the freezer
We're lucky to have an old school green grocers round the corner who sells locally grown produce at a great price.  As soon as we get back from the shops, we wash, cut up and freeze our big bag of veg for the week.

It's so much quicker to do all in one go and massively cuts the time to get food on the table.

And a greater variety of veg to choose from every night makes it much more appetising.  For speed I usually follow Crystal and Comp's tips on how to cook frozen veggies and just cook with a little butter and garlic or oil and chilli flakes.

2. Freeze seasonal soft fruit
Soft fruit out of season is pricey and doesn't taste great.  I try to buy and pick in season and freeze it.  At the moment, our freezer is full of rhubarb we're making yummy puddings with.

Even in season all berries go straight in the freezer as they just don't last in the fridge.  I love to grab a small handful in the morning to top my porridge.

3. Cook double helpings
I batch cook pasta and curry sauces to save time and money.  But I also try to cook double helpings of other meals so there are several good servings leftover to in the freezer, rather than a tiny dish that sits in the fridge until it goes off.

4. Monitor the bread bin like a hawk
Everyone in our house is paranoid of running out of bread which results in far too much that doesn't get eaten.  I don't mind feeding a few slices to the ducks but not a whole loaf!

I find keeping one loaf in the freezer helps plus constant monitoring so as soon as there is more than a day's worth in the bread bin, the freshest stuff goes in the freezer and anything slightly dry gets frozen separately for making bread and butter pudding and breadcrumbs.

5. Keep emergency dairy in the freezer
We have a similar problem to the bread with dairy.  Even though the milkman comes twice a week, people are convinced we might just possibly be about to run out of milk and butter (!) so buy some "just in case".  Result = lots of waste.

An "emergency" supply of milk and butter in the freezer is solving this problem.  It's rarely needed, but the fact it's there stops all those panic purchases.

What about you?  How do you use the freezer to save time and money?

If you're looking for other meal planning tips check out this Pinterest board ...

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