Sorry – like everyone else – I lost track of the day of the week and did not post yesterday.
Okay – we are all getting tired of the pandemic. I hope that you and yours have either been lucky enough not to be affected or have survived any illness and are well again. I thought I would mention some things we have been doing to deal with a variety of things that arise. This week, one of my favorite subjects – Food!
I recently wrote about finally ordering food and going out to buy food - http://wheredidileavethat.blogspot.com/2020/05/covid-19-11-food-delivery-and-shopping.html
But what the heck does one do with all the extra food! We have a rather small house, with our kitchen and dining room also being rather small so of course our refrigerator and freezer are small – 18 sq ft fridge with top freezer – which we bought last summer - see -
http://wheredidileavethat.blogspot.com/2019/06/replace-refrigerator.html
http://wheredidileavethat.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-refrigerator-saga-contines.html
http://wheredidileavethat.blogspot.com/2019/07/refrigerator-at-last-and-on-to-next.html
We also have a dorm fridge sized freezer in our basement. Both are full to the point I could not keep track of what is in them. I cut scrap sheets of paper (all those papers that get printed out of the computer by mistake or run 4 pages when you thought they were one page or only need one page – I use the backs for scrap paper – good for the environment and cheap scrap paper as it would just be thrown out. into quarters across the width so I got 4 from a sheet of a paper and made lists. I have a list of the meats and entrees which are in the basement freezer and how many I have of each. I also have a list of same for the kitchen freezer. I have a list of the frozen vegetables, breads and such in the basement freezer. ( I pack things very well.) I don't have a matching list for upstairs – but I rebag frozen vegetables into quart zipbags – label each bag with which vegetable is in it and mark the end date (not that vegetables sit that long) and I stand them in alphabetical order in the door shelf of my freezer – empty bags (we have run out of some vegetables) are at the front of the bags. It is easy to see how much is in each, generally a new bag of vegetables fits into the quart zip bag – if not I am generally using some when I start a new bag from the store anyway – they are in an order so I can find them, hey are at my eye level to make it easier to figure out and since the bags zip closed, they stay fresher than open bags with bag ties on them. I know that we have a started bag of biscuits, and I know most of the other items in the freezer. I also have a plastic box that fits on about half of the top shelf in the freezer to hold odd shaped items – like freezer paper wrapped meats, open bags of things like fries and pancakes, meal sized amounts of stew meat in small zip bags, etc. the other half of the shelf is boxed and bagged items and the stack of ice cube trays with a bin for ice over them on a wire rack. We did not want to wast the limited space we have in the freezer with an ice maker as we tend to use ice only for cooking related chores – such as cooling down food quickly to put in the fridge.
We have a small closet in our kitchen which holds a variety of items including 3 shelves being used for can, bottle, jar and other storage. What husband bought would overwhelm the entire closet.
I have left most of the items which were in the closet in it. I covered my dining room table with thick towels and stood the cans, bottles and jars in rows sorted by what they are – all of the lentil soup cans together, all of the evaporated milk cans together, both of the soy sauce bottles together (somewhere around 3 years worth or more of same I estimate), etc. Having had ants and mice over the 31 years we have been in the house I do not have food items which are not in sealed cans, jars or bottles out on their own. Normally I will put unopened packaged items in two large boxes under the kitchen table. But this is now too much for that. Small packages such as individual packages of instant cereal, packages with 4 servings of instant mashed potatoes, and the like have been put into plastic boxes the size of a gallon of ice cream would come in. These boxes are also on the dining room table. The two boxes under the kitchen table are fuller than they have ever been. We also have larger plastic tubs in the house which we use for purposes unrelated to food. I gave up one of the tubs I used to store my bear village pieces in and husband gave up one of the tubs he uses to store finished items he has woven and they are filled with food items – such as bags of dry cereal (threw out the boxes), boxes of assorted dry pastas, cake mix boxes, mac and cheese mix boxes, and the like. They are also in our dining room – on the floor.
When one has this much food one has to deal with managing the food and keeping perishable food from going bad. Anything which could be frozen to keep it longer was frozen. I am keeping an eye on the end dates of other items. One problem is eggs. Husband was buying 3 dozen eggs from BJs on our first try at ordering food delivered. That is a lot of eggs for us – we don't eat breakfast so they are eaten for dinner some nights and used in things such as the cake mixes. To make it even worse, BJs did not have the packages of 3 boxes of a dozen eggs each – so he ordered 5 dozen eggs and these eggs came in restaurant style packaging – 2 open sided trays of 30 eggs each stacked on each other – and the expiration date was June 15. While I know that eggs do last longer than they are dated for (if unsure if an egg is still good – put it in a pot of cold water – if it floats it is not good), how long could they last. Then I remembered – eggs can be frozen if they are opened and the white and yellow mixed together and will keep much longer that way. So earlier this week we started freezing eggs. I put a small plastic sandwich bag in each of several (4-5) pudding sized plastic storage cups that can be frozen. I then break an egg or two into a one cup measuring cup (husband's idea to use the measuring cup) and mix it together with a fork. I then pour the egg(s) into a storage cup and repeat. I put the lids on the cups and put them in the freezer. By the next day the eggs are frozen. I take out each eggs – or pair of eggs and knot the bag closed (single egg) or put a bag tie around the bag to close it (two eggs). I then put them into half gallon zip bags – the single eggs in one and the double eggs in a different one - and label which is in the bag – and put them back in the freezer. I am down to 14 more eggs to freeze. Why two and singles? If we have eggs for dinner we have 2 each – so 2 in each bag is good for that. But in cooking sometimes I need one egg and cake mixes need 3 eggs, so freezing some eggs as singles allows for odd number of eggs to be used easily while taking up less little plastic bags by having two in a good number of them. And of course if all the 2 egg bags are used up – 2 singles makes a double. :-)
THOUGHT(S) OF THE WEEK -
Make sure that you keep track of expiration or other end dates on the food in your house – normally also but especially now. Freeze items that can be frozen before they go bad or use them if their life cannot be extended.
Also – just because areas are being reopened from stay at home orders – does not mean to run out and about willy nilly. The corona virus is still here and still dangerous. How terrible to get so ill and risk one's life to get a hair cut, go to the gym, shop for items which are not crucial or eat out in or outside a restaurant. The number of cases is rising rapidly in some states which either have reopened too much, too seen or its residents are going out before they should. Health and life – yours and others – are too important to rush the return to normalcy. Stay well! (I have too few followers now – I don't want to lose any.)
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