Freezer Organization 101

Freezer Organization 101

I’ve been embarrassed about this for a long time. No, not my weight. Not my relatively recent inability to dance (I used to really shake my tailfeather. Now, I’m kind of like Elaine on Seinfeld, only less rhythmic). Not even the fact that I’ll often wear the same jeans for an entire week. My friends, I’m embarrassed about this:

You just gasped, didn’t you?

That is the inside of my freezer. If you’re old enough you’ll remember what happened every time Fred Flintstone opened his closet—well, that’s precisely what my freezer’s like, only when things fall out they tend to be frozen-solid blocks, and they invariably land on one’s feet. Who knew how important steel-toed boots could be in the kitchen?

If you’ve been reading for a while, you may recall I blogged about my freezer about a year ago. Sometimes I, uh, let things slide for a while, and I’ve found organizing the freezer to be a particularly daunting task. But this month I’m working on the Big Batch chapter of Parents Need to Eat Too, which means I’m cooking a big ol’ pot of something every day, sometimes twice a day, and roughly half of each recipe needs to fit into that overstuffed freezer. Good luck, right? I had no choice. Something had to be done.

Hello, Container Store.

What you see here is that same freezer, reorganized thanks to a Container Store sweater box and a handful of shoe boxes. The sweater box holds almost all our ready-to-go food, things that just need heating, both homemade and store-bought (you can see, it didn’t all fit—there are some Morningstar Farms and Trader Joe’s items nearby). The shoe box at top left holds uncooked meat, and the three lined up on the bottom hold bags of fruit and vegetables.

It ain’t perfect:

  • Because the boxes themselves take up space, I don’t seem to be able to cram quite as much in as I used to.
  • I like to freeze larger quantities of raw meat in zipper-lock bags, and those are too big for the shoe box.
  • There is no official home for popsicles (the horror!).
  • And when I lined up the open bags of frozen fruit on the bottom shelf, it made the freezer look unpleasantly jam-packed again:

But heck, at least nothing’s falling out on my foot now. Maybe someday I’ll get around to peeling all those labels off the boxes, huh?

Now it’s your turn: How do you organize your freezer?