On the Importance of Meal Plans

I just cleaned out my freezer and threw out enough food that I’m twitching down to the very tips of my thread-bare Scottish roots (maternal side).

You know how you’ll see a good price on chicken breast or pork loin at the store and pick up an extra to freeze for later?* That’s a normal thing to do, right? Well, I don’t know if most people move the meat into a special freezer container or what, but I just tend to toss it in there supermarket styrofoam backing and all. I have a feeling that’s not the best method for longer term storage, but I always plan on defrosting that meat within a couple weeks anyway.

Plan on defrosting — no, that’s a total lie. If I actually had a plan, then I would be able to say, “Oh, look, tomorrow’s chicken night. Let me defrost these chicken breasts in the fridge overnight so that when I start cooking dinner at 5:35 it will be ready by our 6:20 family dinner time. Instead I suddenly realize sometime after 4pm that the kids need to eat and what will I do and is Ed coming home and where is that takeout menu when you need it!? At which point, you see, it’s too late to defrost the bloody chicken.

So the freezer is already kind of full when there’s a strange knock on my back door at 3am and I happen to be up because I’m crazy and I peak out and see my neighbour. I call to my husband who is also crazy and tell him that I’m not opening the door at 3am. He walks over and opens it and then calls out, “Do we have any freezer space?” Wha? It turns out my neighbour has a minivan full of frozen meat and has run out of freezer space and we’re welcome to whatever we can fit in ours. How, er, nice.

“I don’t want frozen 3am minivan meat,” I hiss. “The freezer’s actually pretty full already,” I call out. My husband walks into the kitchen with two plastic bags full of breaded, frozen meat. Fantastic. Into the freezer it goes. Then, a couple weeks later, there’s another knock on my door. It’s 3pm this time and it’s a giant box of frozen fish in the van. “Quick! Grab a bag and help yourself to some fish!” he’s grinning from ear to ear. What could I do? I took a plastic shopping bag and stared into the box of name-less white fish fillets. I put a couple handfuls, a polite amount, into the shopping bag and call out a thank you while holding up the bag on my way back inside. “Take more,” he insists. “Oh no, this is plenty for us. Thank you. Hey … where did you get all this?” He looks at me blankly, “From my work.” I shove the frozen fish into the last remaining crevice to be dealt with at a later time.

Then, a Diet Coke explodes in the freezer. There is frothy brown-black frozen crap over every surface. I stop using the freezer entirely. For months.

Today I reclaimed my freezer, but not its contents. So I pitched it all, but it still hurts. I really don’t think I can afford to shop these sales anymore.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to write down my meal plan for next week. I think we’ll stick with vegetarian.

*This seems to be quickly devolving into a bargain shopping blog. So here, let me steer things back on course: a picture of my kids!