Save money on groceries by cleaning out your freezer.

I opened the door of my freezer last Thursday and a carton of ice cream fell to the floor. Yikes...

It was time to clean out the freezer and refrigerator.

I started with the freezer. I worked quickly to remove everything. I put the food in a cooler so things didn't melt too much. I filled up my sink with lukewarm sudsy water and I scrubbed the freezer until it sparkled.
I pulled together like items, like bread, veggies, fruit, etc and separated them into plastic bins. I am fortunate to have an upright freezer in our basement where I keep overflow like chicken, more bread, homemade stock and other stock pile items. Surprisingly that freezer is relatively organized.

I did the exact same thing with the refrigerator. With the fridge, I organized each shelf. The top is now designated for drinks, the middle is for things of yogurt, deli turkey and cheese and the bottom shelf is for ready-to-eat foods like leftovers and bowls of cut-up fruit or veggies.
In both my freezer and my refrigerator I found foods that I had forgotten about and I came up with a menu so the foods won't go to waste.

Here is what I came up with:

1. I found a bag of blueberry crumble bread and a bag of cinnamon raisin bread that I am going to use for french toast. I crossed waffles off of my grocery list.


2. There were 2 packages of English muffins in my freezer. I'll make egg sandwiches for myself for breakfast and mini pizzas for my daughters for lunch. I also found some shredded mozzarella and an opened jar of tomato sauce that was still good for the pizzas.


3. Breakfast sausage links were hidden underneath some stuff in the freezer, so I made a big breakfast on Labor Day morning.


4. I found a container of leftover cooked taco chicken that I am going to use to make white chicken chili for dinner some night this week. I will also serve my parsley zucchini Parmesan muffins.


5. I freeze all of our bread items. I found that bread was going bad before we finished a loaf so I put it in the freezer to keep fresh. I found several bags of the ends of the bread. So I consolidated the bread into one bag and I will now use that bag to make my own bread crumbs. I can cross that off of my shopping list.


6. I had feta on my shopping list and guess what I found as I was cleaning my refrigerator... an unopened container of feta. I crossed that one off too.


7. I also found 2 packages of cream cheese. I'm not sure what I am going to use those for and they expire very soon. I don't even remember why I bought them in the first place. I'll search the web for some ideas.


8. One bag of hotdog rolls and one bag of hamburger rolls. I crossed those items off my shopping list too.

I don't know why I didn't look in the fridge or freezer before I made out our shopping list, maybe because it was too chaotic in there. To my surprise I didn't find too much that needed to be thrown out, just some jars of "stuff" that were almost empty anyway. My refrigerator/freezer is now clean and organized. I was able to cross several items off of this week's grocery list and I now have some menu ideas from things that I had forgotten about. Cleaning and organizing my fridge just saved me some time and some money. I now just have to keep it that way.

Have you cleaned out your refrigerator lately? What have you found?

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photos: FamilyBalanceSheet.org

This post in linked to Tightwad Tuesday at BeingFrugal.net