Kitchen freezer challenge: the results

Allllrighty. Last Monday, I rummaged through my kitchen freezer to find all the odds and ends that needed to be used up.

So, today I’m here with an update on my progress.

Let’s start with this little group photo first:

I did use up some of the corn by making chili/rice bowls for my lunches.

I still have some corn left, but hey, it was a start.

I used up the cheese in the pan of baked ziti that I made.

I threw the peas away because they were a rock-hard, freezer-burnt lump. 😉 Even in my book, not everything is worth saving.

I made a single-serve smoothie with the fruit.

I did not do anything with the chicken broth cubes, but soup season is coming, so I’m not too pressed about them. I may just throw them in my chest freezer so that they don’t get freezer-burnt.

So, here’s what’s left from that group:

I started with three partial jars of tomato sauce last week:

And I am down to one now, because I used two of the jars in my baked ziti.

On to this group of breadstuffs:

I toasted the waffles and ate them as is. Not as good as fresh, but workable.

I cut the two bags of bread ends into cubes, and then I remembered I also had a bag of frozen bread cubes in my chest freezer.

Those ones happened to be from some kind of cinnamon bread….sooo, I combined them with my other bread cubes:

And I made a pan of baked French toast.

Healthy? No.

Delicious? Yes.

I was going to use the random container of cream in the egg/milk French toast mixture, but I sniffed it, and it was funky. So, I decided not to risk ruining the whole batch of French toast; that would have been more wasteful!

I had planned to make mini pizzas with the naan, but I used all my cheese up in the ziti. So, instead, I used them to make scrambled egg wraps.

So, the only breadstuff left is…tortillas. And I’m not too worried about using those up.

Although maybe I should be, because I am fairly sure that my chest freezer is also home to some tortillas. Ahahaha.

Full disclosure: I did nothing with my frozen tomatoes or my whole wheat flour.

Bonus effort (from the chest freezer)

When I last made my grandma’s cinnamon rolls, I froze five unrisen, unbaked rolls to see how they would fare.

This week, I put them on a baking sheet, covered them with a wet tea towel, and let them thaw and then rise for a good long time, like several hours (this is never a terribly precise science, so I recommend doing this on a day when you have a lot of flexibility). Then I baked and frosted them.

They turned out really well!

And this is a nice trick to have fresh-baked rolls for a small household; a whole batch of cinnamon rolls is too much for just Zoe and me! But this way, I can make a batch all at once, freeze them, and then take them out six at a time to thaw and bake.

That’s much more manageable for the two of us.

Week Two: Starting on the Chest Freezer

Now that my kitchen freezer is in reasonable shape, it’s time to tackle the chest freezer.

Luckily, it is not as big as the one at my old house, which means that it is not going to be such a gargantuan task.

However, I cannot possibly do even a small chest freezer in a week, so I’m just going to pull out a set of items each week and keep it reasonable.

One of the worst things clogging up my freezer: my chicken carcasses. 😉

Yup! Four of them.

I’m gonna pick the coolest day this week and turn them into chicken broth.

(If I had a crockpot, I would use it to reduce kitchen heat. But I gave mine to a classmate back in nursing school because I used it so rarely.)

In addition to the chicken bones, here are some other odds and ends.

Starting from the top left:

• homemade applesauce
• blueberries (I opened the bag and they are rather frosty.)
• spinach
• gnocchi
• chicken potstickers

The plan? I will:

• just eat the applesauce
• use the blueberries and spinach in a smoothie
• eat the gnocchi with some kind of sauce (perhaps the rest of the tomato sauce?)
• cook the potstickers to go with dinner one night this week

Thanks for following along on my freezer efforts; it is seriously so helpful and motivating for me!

How did your freezer efforts go last week?