Chest Freezer

So I have joined the realm of people who use chest freezers. It's weird, we never used our freezer much growing up and I have never been in to frozen food per se so I never would have pictured myself having one of these. I always thought they were for suburban moms with huge families (ok so I guess I am a suburban mom, but I don't have a have 6 kids or anything). What brought me around to the idea of the chest freezer was the fact that our old freezer (the one attached to our fridge) is teeny tiny and we were always running out of space for stuff. As part of my baby preparations I really wanted to make a bunch of bagels and English muffins to freeze so that I would have easy breakfast foods on hand for me and Echo after baby Clover arrives. It just wasn't going to happen with our current freezer so Eric cleaned out a corner of the basement and went shopping for the freezer this week.

We got a good deal because it was a scratch and dent price. This freezer has a pretty sizable dent in the back of it but it lives in our basement so we could care less what it looks like. Now that it's here I am actually pretty excited about the freezer. Honestly it is a great tool to have when you are trying to be frugal, enabling you to stock up on meat, veggies and other items when they are on sale. This is why Eric wanted the freezer but for me it was all about the bread :-) I pretty much make all our bread from scratch now which is wonderful but since it doesn't have the preservatives of store bought bread it goes bad very quickly. Once I discovered how easy it is to freeze bread and that it doesn't adversely affect the taste I was all about making larger batches of bread and freezing it.

I made my first batch of English muffins yesterday and stored them in our shiny new chest freezer.

Here is an inside view, this freezer is massive! I'm sure we will have no trouble filling this baby up however. I'm already keeping my eye out for good deals on meat so we can stock up. For some reason it always makes me feel good to know we have lots of food on hand, you know just so we are ready for when society collapses (haha, kidding!). It's seriously going to be so great though to enjoy home baked goodies for breakfast any time I feel like it! I have a feeling that the chest freezer will really pay off in the long run.