The saga of my Energy Bill and the Freezer: Part 2

I can not handle not having a deep freezer. I buy food in bulk, it’s much less expensive and I get to grocery shop less. I loathe grocery shopping. If there is a good sale on some item I’ll  buy massive amounts, pre-cook, or portion out the food and then freeze it for later. It’s a great way to have something always at the ready.

English Muffins on sale for a $1. Looks like my freezer just earned itself a few packages of home made breakfast sandwiches.

And butter. I use massive amounts of butter. I buy it in bulk…like three for four Costco packages at a time, and keep it in the freezer until needed. Cheese is also picked up in bulk. We eat cheese by the bag full. Last grocery buying excursion I bought only a few bags (three), I think we almost made it a week on those three bags. Then every time I tried to cook something I had to run out, or send Husband out to get cheese. It was annoying. Next time I went grocery shopping and cheese was on sale I picked up nine bags….this is a light amount. When cheese is on sale for a good deal I stock up!

But, alas, I have no freezer.

It’s driving me slightly nuts. I’ll go to buy something from the grocery store that’s on sale and as I’m about to toss three for four of an item into the cart I have to stop and remind myself that there is no freezer, and back everything goes to the shelf.

My little freezer is chock full, constantly. The top half of freezer is full of my frozen berries. I would have gladly doubled my berry storage if we would have kept the freezer running, but I knew we were trying to empty it at the time. The bottom section is just general food items. I’ve had to try and completely re-learn how to buy food and cook just because of the lack of having a deep freezer. I really do not know how people do it without some type of a secondary freezer. Spend all their time in the grocery store I suppose.

I can learn how to deal without the deep freezer but one thing I am fretting about that involves the freezer is pumpkins. Yep, pumpkins.

*Random aside and personal pet peeve is how the second “p” from pumpkin gets dropped. It’s pumPkin people, not pumkin, or punkin. It’s not a silent p nor did half the m go on a bender and pass out thus getting kicked out of the alphabet resulting in two n’s. “Would you like some punkin pie?” Uh, no I would not, because there is no such thing as “punkin.” And people wonder why I had such a hard time learning to spell as a child, because it’s not pumkin or crans or fer (pumpkin, crayons and for, if you were wondering). Trying to correct my own accent so my children do not have to suffer the same misfortune is a dauting task. And for the record I did not know that crayons was a two syllable word until well into adulthood when my co-worker/writer friend asked me to say “crayon” which I promptly pronounced as craans (one syllable). My response to them was something along the lines of “You’re shitting me, it’s TWO syllables?”

But I digress.

It’s pumpkin season! Pumpkins are one of my most favorite things EVER! I love just about everything pumpkin. Pumpkin latte, pumpkin pie, stuffed pumpkin, pumpkin pancakes, pumpkin french toast, roasted pumpkin, pumpkin cookies, oooooooooohhhhh the pumpkin. I wait all year for this delicious squash to be in season, and then I go squash crazy in the hope I will start to hate pumpkin until the next year.

I forgot pumpkin beer. Love that too.

I buy pie pumpkins wherever I see them on sale. Roast them up (yes, roast) and then freeze the purée, in mass, but this year, if I don’t have a freezer what am I going to do for all my pumpkin-ing needs! Oh, the horror (of lack of pumpkin).

Learn to can it I guess, but that means investing in a pressure cooker, or buy the pumpkin purée. Ewwwww. My pumpkin purée is the best, and makes an absolutely to-die-for pumpkin pie. Something shall be figured out. It may be that my mom’s freezer gets a abnormal supply of pumpkin purée, because let’s face it, this laundry room isn’t getting completed any time soon.