First, my dinner plan last went pretty well. Unfortunately, the pot pie never came to be on Thursday. The day just got a bit too hectic, but that is okay. We always have this week.
Monday: Leftover turkey tenderloin and stuffing. We had this for Sunday dinner.
Tuesday/Wednesday: Vegetable lasagna and green beans.
Thurs/Friday: Chicken Pot Pie
Saturday: Pizza crescents (saw a commercial) and chips. It's a cheater day.
Sunday: I've yet to figure it out.
On to glaciation. We have two freezers in our house. We have the refrigerator freezer and we have the deep freeze in the basement. Both had become a little crammed with what I was sure were a lot of things that just needed to see the interior of our outside can.
Was that ever the case.
You see, where I have completely stripped the upstairs freezer clean (a couple of times a year), I've never done a full-on-at-once purge of the basement freezer.
:Insert an admission here. We've had the deep freeze since Nov 2002.:
Okay, now that you've completely shuttered in your seat, I come to promise you that I've ditched things on occasion. It's just that I had never thawed it out to remove the glacial grooves that we had developing. I think that if I ignored it enough, it would go away.
Rest assured, it did not.
Hubs and K- were out at the "little museum" and I did some errand running ALL BY MYSELF.
Yes, it is true. I was ON MY OWN.
After I did all the running, including the grocery, I decided to tackle the beast. If Hubs wasn't home, I wouldn't have him hovering. If K- wasn't home, she wouldn't be yelling about what I was throwing away.
I took a laundry basket and started pitching things that were far past their prime. I mean, I know it's a freezer and all, but it doesn't preserve things forever. It did take a few laundry baskets to clear the yuck out. (A chunk of it were those popsicles in the plastic tube, because my neighbor bought them in bulk for a girlfriend and then the relationship went south.) I boxed up our remaining food in Rubbermaid totes and took them to the driveway. It was 22 degrees. That was definitely cold enough to handle my frozen goods.
Now that the purging was done, I still had to de-glaciate my deep freeze. I decided to boil a pot of water and place it in the freezer with the door shut. I placed the boiling pot on a folded up towel on a flipped over pyrex baking dish. It took about two hours to fully work, but it loosened the ice jam up enough that I could break it away with a scraper. I sopped up the water at the bottom with a big bath towel and wiped everything down. Once it was all clean, I plugged it back in again. Since I'm short (just a hair under 5' 1") it was no easy task. I had myself all balanced with both feet off the ground. It reminded me of my days in glass blowing. There was a guy who thought that I fell into the big annealer that we had. (It was cold, don't worry.) All that was sticking out were my feet. He ran across the shop, grabbed a hold of my ankles and was going to yank me out until I yelled that I was getting a casting set and I was okay.
Back to the topic at hand. The freezer is humming along so nicely. I even think she thanked me.
To note: My basement sink is still full of ice. I filled it with the freezer ice at probably 5 PM. It's 9:30 PM now and I've even run a couple of loads of laundry that have drained into the rinse tub! That's some pretty thick ice!
My people were excited to go out to see the International Space Station fly by, so I mandated a freezer tote carrying session on our way back in. We only had two boxes, but K- held the door open for us. I let the freezer run for about an hour before bringing the things back in.
My oh my, I don't think that my freezer has ever been so organized!
It has taught me something. I have vowed this year to be less wasteful. Cleaning out the freezer was a pain in my behind, but it needed done. Now that it is done, I can see everything I have, what I don't and I can fix meals accordingly.
And thank God for cold days to allow me to do so!
Smiles in my weekend:
- While the migraine on Saturday was certainly not a smile, I took an Excedrin Migraine and laid down across my bed with my fleece pants over my eyes. K- came in at the end of her time out and asked what was wrong. I told her and she said, "Oh Mommy, can I bring you a glass of water?" I told her that I appreciated it, but what I would love to do was to take a nap. She wanted to go outside to play, but I told her that she couldn't since I had to nap. I asked if she wanted to lay down with me. She got me a pillow and covered me up with a blanket and snuggled on in. We slept for about an hour. We would have probably slept longer, but someone was calling for the attorney in town with the same name as Hubs. Darn.
- And yes, K- did play outside in the snow.
- Getting a lot done today.
- Taking back the enormous ball curtain rods to Kohl's and being able to get two rods at Lowe's on clearance for $4.99 each. The original price? $24.97 each! Now that made me very happy!
- Though our Ace Hardware was out of the $1.00 CFL's that they had on sale, they took a special order and said that they should have them in shortly. How nice of them to do that!
- The space station just flying on by. Wow. It took less than two minutes.
Have a great day!
2 comments:
I have had my freezers cleaned out for me a couple of times due to hurricanes and power loss for more than three days. I can assure you, it is NOT the way to clean a freezer--it is nasty and gross. A frozen wonderland outside would have been preferable, I assure you.
I had to laugh at that. One particularly frozen and frigid winter in the 'burg, we lost power and my mom was worried about the food. I bagged it in plastic and hung it all in the apple tree out front, lol! The fridge items I kept in a cooler packed in ice.
You know, looking back on it, I sometimes think it might be better to lose power in the winter than in summer. You can have a fire in the fireplace, snuggle under blankets and huddle together to stay warm. You can melt snow to flush the toilets. At my dad's house, we had a wood stove and we could cook on the top of it. All in all, not too bad.
And, I have no idea where in the world I was going with that tangent...sorry. ;o)
I'm glad you are feeling better, and that you got the freezers done. What a job!
And, hooray for shopping alone. Isn't it wonderful?? :o)
I so need to do that. We've had ours since 2001 and I've never Un-Froze it. Yes, I too have cleaned it out there is nothing in there that has been in there longer than six months. But we have lots of ice too. I'll have to remember the tub trick. Thanks for that!
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