Cleaned my freezer and took inventory

[razz]

It was cool today so DH and I cleaned out the freezer as part of annual maintenance.

I was surprised at the amount and variety of meats that we had on hand especially the precooked. Going through chemo, DH had limited number of things that he was able to eat so I kept freezing up the leftovers, I suppose.

Won't need to buy much this summer. Yay!

I won't need to pick and freeze as many strawberries as other years as we still have about 12 packages.

Anyone else do this annually?

[Greg44]

Yes, I do a annual and sometimes semi-annual defrost of the freezer, it seems to go quicker if I do it more frequently. Our freezer is pretty low right now - so I should do it now before we start stocking up this summer...

[H-work]

I do it every 2 years, as that is how long a side of beef lasts us. I always find things I forgot about. Like a bread pudding cake from Schott's from our CA trip. Yum, that was a nice surprise! Like finding $20 in your pocket :)

[Mrs-M]

I approach this on a different plane. Rather than an all out annual clean-out, I'm at it all the time. Pulling old stuff to the top, other things to the side, and generally making heads or tails as to what exactly I have on hand and where I need to add or replace.

[cdttmm]

Similar to Mrs-M's approach, I am constantly trying to rotate stuff from the bottom of the freezer to the top so that we eat it up. So far that approach has been workign pretty well for us!

[iris lily]

Not exactly, but when we moved everything out of the kitchen a few months ago I found a can of home canned cherries from about ten years ago. I didn't want to eat them.
Last night we ate canned tomatoes from but they looked perfectly fine and I wasn't afraid to eat them. DH is the Head Freezer Person here and he keeps things somewhat well rotated, yet we eat meat from some years ago, but it's been fast frozen all of the time.

[Float On]

My extra freezer is a smaller unit so it is easy to rotate and keep cleaned out - it mainly hold meats and baked goods as well as the occasional lizard, bird, or even an owl we were keeping to take to the conservation agent. I probably shut it off 4 times a year while waiting for the next visit from my parents. They have bigger freezers and keep most of the beef, turkey, antelope, deer, trout and other fish and then restock my smaller freezer when they visit. They were just here earlier this week and it is nice to have a freezer full again - I was down to 2 trout, one antelope steak, one roast, and 3 T-bone steaks (which I'd moved to my kitchen freezer but made it a bit crowded). I need to spend a weekend doing a huge amount of baking (cookies, cakes, treats, breads) and add that to the freezer since I hate running the oven in the heat of summer.