Frugal Food #1: Tour de Freezer

Frugal food is a topic of interest to many these days.  How do you feed a family affordably without sacrificing quality?  Well, of course first you need to cook rather than purchasing your meals ready to eat!  And then, once you find that cooking isn't all that mysterious and difficult, comes cooking from scratch.  But today, my post is not going to focus on cooking.  It's going to focus on the frugal food tool known as a deep freeze.

I'm not talking about the small freezer compartment that comes attached to your refrigerator.  No, I'm talking about a separate, free-standing freezer.  Be it upright or chest style (I have both :) ), to really be able to take advantage of food at the lowest possible cost (in season, or on sale), you need a deep freeze.

Mine is huge.  It's about the biggest non-commercial one they make.  You can fit bodies in there.  And we do: cow, pig, deer, chicken and turkey bodies, all neatly wrapped into meal-sized packages  And lots of veggies and fruit too.

Now, don't go rush out and buy a freezer as big as mine.  We had four young children at home when we bought this, anticipating the day when they'd be teenagers with humongous appetites.  Assess the size and food needs of your family.  Maybe you are single and a very small chest freezer will do the trick.  Maybe you are the average size family, get a medium to large freezer.  Maybe your family is 6+ and still growing.  You might need two of these monsters!

Remember, we're talking frugal here.  No impulse freezer buying.  Take time to do your research and find the best price before you invest in a freezer.  Because it is an investment, a tool you will have and use for many years to come.  That being said, our first freezer was an avocado green upright bought at an estate sale in 1991 for $20.  Definitely not the most efficient model for the time, but the price was right, and 20 years later it still works great.  It has become our 'overflow' freezer: whatever doesn't fit in the chest freezer in the fall--our peak freezer filling time--goes into the upright until there is sufficient room in the chest freezer, at which time the upright is emptied and unplugged.

Keep an eye out at garage, moving and estate sales.  Keep an ear out for coworkers who are looking to off-load their unused appliances (we got a nice second fridge that way).  Look on craigslist.  Ask appliance stores if they ever get scratch-and-dent freezers (our huge one was scratch-and-dent--we figured cosmetic damages were no big deal because with four kids it wasn't going to look pristine for long anyway).

Once you have a freezer, then you can take advantage of sales to stock up on meats and other foodstuffs that take well to extended storage in frigid temperatures.  Or, you can expand into raising some of your own food.  Lots of vegetables freeze well, as do many fruits.

Let's take a Tour de Freezer and see what's currently in mine:

• beef: everything from soup bones and burger to roasts and porterhouse steaks (raised by my mil)
• pork: sausage and bacon through spare ribs and smoked hams (raised by my mil)
• chicken raised and processed by your truly
• turkey, same as the chicken
• venison: burger, steaks, stew meat, jerky strips and whole loins, harvest from our woods last fall
• lard, from mil's pig, rendered by myself--no preservatives!
• chicken, beef, and turkey soup stocks, homemade
• whole wheat flour bought on sale
• rye flour bought the same way
• blueberries bought in season at the farmers market last summer
• cherries from my mother's cherry tree
• broccoli, peas, squash, pumpkin and zucchini from the garden last summer
• cheese bought in 5 pound blocks, then shredded and packaged into common recipe sizes
• hops from last summer's hops harvest

To purchase all that, one meal at a time as needed at current grocery store prices would cost upwards to 5 times what it actually cost me to raise it or buy it in season/on sale.  And we eat well.  You can too.