For my entire adult life, I would only buy a big freezer that was not frost free. I still believe they’re better for the food and have less things to go wrong but they are not better on old ladies! Our newest freezers are frost free and I’m very thankful for that “technology” – even though they’ve probably been around since I was a child.
Yesterday was freezer defrosting day. It was warm enough that it was comfortable working in the garage so I figured I’d better get it done before it gets cold again. By the way, we still have no heat. The repairman will be back tomorrow. We have to be the luckiest folks around. Towards the end of this week, our lows will be back down in the teens. I guess I shouldn’t say we’re lucky til we get that unit either fixed or replaced!
Back to defrosting the freezer – this was the second time this freezer has been defrosted since we moved here (4 years ago). I try not to open our freezers much. Since I do menu planning for a week, I’ll take out everything we need at one time. Some will go into one of the fridge freezers and some will go into the fridge to defrost for the first few days of the week.
Oh, the things that get buried in our freezers! The worst was a roast with a best by date of 11/2019. That means it was a year past the best by date when we brought it here from Texas. The best thing I found was a big bag of leaf fat that I didn’t remember was in that freezer. I had taken some out of a different freezer earlier in the week and got it all rendered so today I got the other bag rendered and I think I’m done with lard for at least a year. I’ll get more when our pig gets butchered in January so that should be enough to get me through deer season in 2026 when fat is hard to find. The post above was the lard I rendered Friday and today’s amounted to three full quarts. I think I still have four or five quarts in the freezer.
Another good thing I found was four containers of seasoned white meat chicken. It looks like it would have come off a rotisserie chicken but it was way too much for one chicken. It looked like it hadn’t been in there very long – no freezer burn or frost damage, and it still looked juicy and was quite tender. This morning I used some of it to make an egg scramble with chicken, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, onions, eggs and ham. Delicious!
As soon as we finished breakfast, I started a gumbo. I usually prefer to eat it the next day after making it but today was a busy day in the kitchen and since the gumbo was made, we had it for dinner. I ended up with three containers for the freezer. Each container will have enough for us to have it two days. We served it over barley instead of rice – barley is lower carb and I like it a lot better than rice.
See the green file’? If you aren’t familiar with file’, you can read about it here. I can hardly eat gumbo without file’. We make it from dried sassafras leaves. Wherever we move, we always plant a magnolia and a sassafras tree. Here we planted three sassafras and there was already a big magnolia. In about mid-fall, a buck was scraping trees and he broke several branches off one of our sassafras trees. We know they do that so we have our fruit trees wrapped so they can’t but Vince didn’t think they would bother the sassafras trees because they’re small and wobbly but . . they did. I gathered up the broken branches, tried to root a few of them (one might be ok), and I dried the leaves from the broken branches. Fresh file’ is so much better than what we buy in the store. Some folks put it in the pot of gumbo but we put it in our bowls. I like more in mine than Vince likes in his. It’s so good!
Then I made cookies. I had actually made the dough yesterday and kept it in the fridge overnight. I love Homesteading with the Zimmermans. I had watched her video either Friday or Saturday about making Christmas cookies so I used her sugar cookie recipe and I think it’s the best I’ve ever made. There are other cookie recipes she shares on that video that I’d like to try too.
The last thing I did was get all the lard into jars and clean up that mess. Then I went downstairs to stitch and fell asleep on the sofa before making the first stitch. I think I was still tired from defrosting the freezer yesterday!
My plans for tomorrow, Monday, are: make the Tangerine Lotion Bars, whole wheat bread, dinner (meatloaf from the freezer, broccoli/barley/cheese casserole, roasted Jerusalem artichokes) and . . stay out of the way of the heater guys and pray they get this unit fixed or can get it replaced quickly (like before Wednesday!).
What are your thoughts?