I’m going to share with you how I organise my freezer space today as an organised freezer really does help me massively with meal planning!
You might (or might not) know that I actually have three freezers at the moment – one is part of the fridge freezer, one we bought as an under counter freezer for the kitchen and the third is a big larder freezer which lives in our garage and was a gift from my Dad.
Fridge Freezer – Top drawer
This drawer is mainly filled with healthy food that’s perfect for me as I’m on Slimming World at the moment. I have a couple of ready meals to help me avoid temptation when I’m hungry.
Fridge Freezer – second drawer
I did consider rearranging this drawer before taking the photo as I know what’s on top is not the best example but I thought I’d be real and not rearrange it to hide the crap with the good stuff. 😉 This is basically my drawer for things that go with meals and aside from what you can see, there’s some bags of cauliflower rice (amazing stuff), some bags of normal rice and some jacket potatoes.
Fridge Freezer – third drawer
This is my frozen veg drawer and it’s filled with everything from peas to peppers and from diced onion to mixed veg. I love frozen veg because it’s not only great value for money but it also means that I can serve veg with every meal without having to prepare it or worry about making sure we have veg in through the week which would usually mean a mid-week trip to the shop.
Fridge Freezer – fourth drawer
At the moment the fourth drawer in the fridge freezer is filled with bags of ice – one bag of crushed ice which we bought for 99p if I remember and a couple of IKEA sandwich bags filled with ice cubes that we made using the ice tray in the freezer in the garage.
Under the counter freezer
The top drawer here is filled with things we like to do for an ‘easy tea’ – things like burgers, chicken fingers and there’s a few shortcrust pies in there too I think. We snapped the pull-down front a few weeks after getting it but one day we’ll get it put back on!
The middle drawer here is filled with our Muscle food chicken breasts which we divide into portions and freeze in IKEA sandwich bags and there are some Quorn mince and Quorn chicken pieces in there too. There’s also space in this drawer to pop any supermarket reduced bargains
The bottom drawer has what’s left of our freezer fruit smoothie bags along with a couple of other frozen fruits like black cherries and raspberries.
The larder freezer in the garage
The freezers in the house are filled with things that are handy to have close at hand but it’s the freezer in the garage where most of the meal planning magic happens. 😉
I have one drawer which has, from memory as it’s raining so I’m not going outside to take photos, a batch cooked lasagne and two batch cooked cottage pies. There’s also some sandwich bags filled with my homemade tomato sauce on the same shelf.
*Top Tip* Freeze sauces and soups into re-usable freezer bags (the kind you can seal) and lay them in a rectangular container to freeze. When they’ve frozen solid, you can pop the bag out of the container and they’ll stack easier in your freezer and take up less space.
The next drawer is filled with bread buns that I got reduced to 9p at Tesco one night. I think I bought five or six packs of 12 which in hindsight was way more than I needed and it will last us forever.
I have one drawer which I try and keep emptyish so I can fill it with supermarket bargains when I come across them as I hate to leave things in the reduced section because I have no space in the freezer.
The final drawer two draws in the freezer are for my batch cooked smaller portions and leftovers. I splashed out on a set of re-usable plastic containers so I can portion things up and pop in the freezer easily. For example, if I batch cook a big lasagne I might pop one whole in the freezer but I might also divide it into individual sized portions and freeze them for nights when I’m not cooking for everyone or not everyone fancies lasagne. I might also freeze a small portion of leftover meat (in gravy is the best way to keep it moist) so I can do mini midweek roasts using by heating that up.
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