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One of Michael Pollan’s many Food Rules that I love is “If you have the space, buy a freezer.” We took Pollan’s advice and bought a separate freezer (pictured below) that has allowed us to stock up on good sources of local meat as well as lots of other stuff. My three favorite things to store in our extra freezer are the following…
1. Ingredients that would otherwise go rancid
You see, just last year I was cooking with white flour (don’t remind me!) and that wonderful white, fluffy stuff could just sit on my pantry shelf for years and never spoil. In fact, that was one of the reasons so long ago that manufacturers started making white flour as opposed to the whole-wheat variety. It’s hard to beat that shelf life! It actually reminds me of one of Pollan’s other Food Rules “Eat only food that will eventually rot.” He also says “The more processed a food is, the longer the shelf life, and the less nutritious it typically is.” That just sounds so appetizing doesn’t it!?
So the moral of this story is that when you buy nutritious ingredients like whole-wheat flour and other whole grains it is best to store them in the freezer (or at least the fridge). The same goes for things like nuts and seeds. We even keep our unsweetened coconut, extra local goat cheese, homemade whole-wheat breadcrumbs, and extra loaves of sandwich bread in there, too.
2. Meat that we stock up on at the Farmer’s Market or our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm partnership
Anytime you find a good source for local, organic, grass-fed meat (you know, the whole nine yards) why not stock up?
3. Leftover homemade meals
Eating real food can sometimes require a lot of cooking, and who wants to spend hours in their kitchen making every last meal? That’s why I absolutely love the stock of homemade food I’ve worked to add to our freezer. Some of the things we’ve saved up include: whole-wheat pancakes, whole-wheat crepes, leftover soups, spaghetti sauce, cooked meat, homemade pasta dishes including ravioli, pesto, veggie burgers, applesauce, and pumpkin bread. Just tonight I was feeling a little lazy so I boiled some homemade whole-wheat butternut squash ravioli and 4 minutes later dinner was ready. Real food doesn’t get much easier than that!
We are a family just starting out and we do are best to eat local/organic foods but are biggest problem is cost. How do you afford to buy so much at one time? I don’t see how are budget can allow