What a Week!

No soccer meals to post this week. Husband and I had date night one day this week, and the others were super simple meals- sandwiches with vegetables, fruit, and leftover meals from the freezer. It's been a busy week, full of unexpected appointments, planned mornings out, and...most anticipated of all, for the last 12 years...the delivery of my deep freezer!

This is super exciting for me. We used to have one before we moved here and had our family, but it died in the move, and up till now haven't had a place to actually put one. It's an 8.5 cubic feet (I think) tall freezer with 3 shelves and door storage. While chest freezers are more energy efficient and are easier to just throw things into, this one fits the space we have available. I've gotten so adept at packing our fridge freezer I don't think lack of space will be a problem for me. I certainly won't lose things in it! It was so exciting emptying out my fridge freezer to move some of my less-used things downstairs, such as bags of chicken stock, large packages of proteins, and frozen concentrated juice. I bought extra bread during my shopping trip this week, so I will never have to run out just to buy bread again. In our family, most of us eat toast for breakfast, and my second son eats a sandwich for lunch, so running out of bread is a small (first world) crisis.

I can now keep my fridge freezer full of wonderful other things, like homemade muffins and loaves, and frozen fruit for shakes or smoothies. I can keep my leftover main meals ready for warming up for lunch or quick buffet-style dinners. I'm excited to keep leftover cooked meats sliced and ready to go for wraps, sandwiches, and soups.

I'll post pictures when I get my new freezer stocked up and ready to show the world. It probably sounds a little ludicrous to be so excited about such a mundane thing, but this has been the number one item on my wish list for more than a decade.

To return to the subject of homemade muffins and loaves, I'm trying something new this weekend/week ahead. I don't like baking, but I'd rather the family eat homemade sweet treats then ones bought from the store. I like controlling the type of flour and the amount of sugar, fat, and salt we eat. So tomorrow morning I plan on premixing all the dry ingredients of what I want to make in containers or storage bags, label them, and have them all ready to pull out when I have a few minutes to throw something together.

So far my list looks something like this:

-2 loaves of chocolate zucchini loaf
-2 loaves of pineapple zucchini loaf
-2 loaves of hazelnut eggnog loaf
-2 dozen vanilla/pear/pecan muffins
-3 or 4 dozen mini chocolate and walnut brownie bites

If it works out well- if I find baking less of a hassle and I actually do it before we're desperate- this may be something I do to prepare for summer baking. I'm not a fan of heating up the house when it's really hot, so if I'm halfway done when the inevitable cloudy and/or rainy and/or stormy days happen, I may actually be able to get a whole lot of baking done in a short period of time.

What do you love about your deep freezer? What kinds of things do you store in your deep freezer, and what do you keep in your fridge freezer? Do you have a plan in place for cooking and baking this summer?

Enjoy your weekend, friends,
Stacy