A freezer bummer

I have a freezer loss to share this week, and it’s the worst kind: meat.

Before we get to that, here’s the group of freezer stuff I started with a week ago:

I’ll get the loss outta the way first: the chicken.

I opened it and thought, “Hmm, the texture on the surface of the chicken feels a little weird.”

I salted the thighs, though, and left them in the fridge overnight, just to see.

Well, I opened the container the next morning, and whew, the smell was strong enough for me to know the chicken was clearly bad.

I did not return it to the store; I bought the chicken a while back and had promptly thrown it in the freezer. So it’s impossible to go back and say, “This was bad!”

I think in the future, when I buy meat markdowns, I’m going to open the package when I get home just to do a sniff test. That way I can bring it back if it’s bad.

Anyway, this chicken hit the trash. Food poisoning is a terrible experience, and in my opinion, it is not worth the risk.

I did use the whole bag of cranberries by making some cranberry bread.

A friend saw this picture and said, “You should put ‘oven door cleaning’ on your to-do list.” Ha.

Adequately shamed (ha!), I scrubbed it down with an SOS pad:

It’s looking better now, but unfortunately, some of the funk is inside the panes of glass and is unreachable. So this is as good as it’s gonna get.

Luckily bread still turns out fine, even if the door isn’t perfectly clean. 😉

If you read Friday’s post, you know I used the flatbread and the mozzarella for BBQ chicken pizza:

I used the gnocchi in a pot of soup; I based it loosely on this chicken gnocchi soup, but since my chicken was bad, I used some marked-down hot Italian sausage from my freezer.

I also used some of the broth I made last week (yay me!), and since some of those chicken carcasses were the mango habanero sort, the broth was a little spicy too.

The soup was so good! I had it for dinner one night and then also packed it in my lunch for two days. That was a solid freezer challenge win.

So, the only thing I didn’t get to was the tomato sauce, and that’s no big deal.

Next week’s challenge foods

My chest freezer is looking gooooood. I might only need one more challenge week after this one!

Here’s what I pulled out for this week:

I found more bread cubes, so, hmm, I can either make some croutons, or more baked French toast. Decisions, decisions.

The jerky is a bag from Sam’s Club (I think), and it was at the very bottom of the freezer. I didn’t even know it was there!

But now I do, so I will slowly chip away at it when I need a little protein-heavy pick-me-up.

I think I will make a chickpea salad for my work lunches this week so I can use the edamame.

The Ziploc bag holds frozen peaches (which I sliced and froze, using marked-down bruised peaches), and I will just use those in smoothies.

The marked-down ground meat…maybe I will use it to make some spaghetti and meatballs.

And then lastly, I have three pita breads, which I’m guessing are going to be pretty dry. My first inclination is to use them for some scrambled egg wraps, but if they’re too dry even for that, maybe I will try making some pita chips.

How are your freezer efforts going?

Have you gotten inspired to join us? Let us know what you’ve been using up.

And as always…thank you for following along with my freezer challenge. Knowing I’m gonna report back to you guys is really keeping me on track. 🙂