I give myself an A- (freezer challenge, week 3!)

You know the drill; first I’m gonna update you on how I did with last week’s items, and then I’ll give myself a new assignment.

Here’s what I tasked myself with this week:

I ate all of the applesauce, and it was great timing because I got a cold last week, and the chilly applesauce felt nice on my throat.

I used the spinach and the blueberries in a smoothie.

I drank this while working on a quantitative research appraisal assignment. THRILLING.

I feel happy that these two bags are empty now!

I cooked up the potstickers last night to go with dinner, so those are gone now too.

My one failure: I did not get to the gnocchi, but I feel like that is an easy thing to add on to next week’s assignment.

ALSO: remember all the chicken carcasses I had?

I cooked them all into broth! So now those bags are empty too.

Someone asked if I was using an Instant Pot for my broth, but nope, I use my very non-instant pot. And that’s because I don’t have an Instant Pot. Ha.

Here’s the process I use to make my chicken broth.

So, here’s where we stand:

Overall, that was a pretty successful week!

Next week’s assignment

What should I tackle from my chest freezer this week? Hmm.

(I typed that sentence, went down into my basement, pulled together a group of food, and then sat back down at my desk. Real-time blogging here!)

Here’s what I came up with:

I aspirationally purchased those cranberries last fall, thinking I would make cranberry bread.

I did not, in fact, make cranberry bread.

But, I am going to this week, because I know Zoe would definitely appreciate that!

(Here’s the cranberry bread recipe I use.)

Next, just some marked-down chicken, which I need to use because markdowns are only money-saving if you actually use them. I’m going to grill those with some BBQ sauce.

The marked-down flatbreads (do we see a theme here??) will be pizzas for Zoe and me. The bag of 2023 mozzarella (literally at the bottom of the chest freezer. I didn’t even know it was there!) will go on the pizzas. And I can use the tomato sauce from a previous week’s challenge.

(The cheese will probably be fine, even though it’s three years old. The bottom of the chest freezer is a very chilly place.)

Zoe prefers BBQ chicken pizza, so I will save some of the grilled chicken to use on her pizza, and I know I have BBQ sauce in the fridge.

Lastly, there’s the gnocchi from last week, which I swear I will eat this week. 😉

I feel freezer happy already

I’m only three weeks into this, but woo, I feel like my freezers are already much less of a disaster. Yay!

It really, really helped to get those rotisserie chickens out; those are bulky, but the resulting broth takes up very little space in comparison.

A nice side-benefit of doing a freezer challenge is that it forces me to actually look at my freezer regularly. That means I know what’s in there, so I sometimes find myself using up things that aren’t even part of my official weekly self-assignment.

It’s also much easier to see things in there when it’s less crowded with chickens. 😉

How did your eat-down-the-freezer efforts go? Do tell!