Yesterday I got the kids on the bus and sat down at the laptop to work up the weeks menu plan to post.
Yes, I had the best intentions in the world. I want to use up some more of the venison, so I headed down to the freezer to pull some out to defrost before I finished up the menu.
So I flick on the light, troop down the stairs, and pull on the freezer door. But something isn’t right. . . it just swings open without any resistance.
Because it wasn’t closed.
It swings open and it is like looking into a snowbank. Solid white. Full of frost.
I frantically think back-when was the last time I was in the freezer? It was at least before Yankee Bill had headed to Myrtle Beach. . . and that was 9 days ago.
Crud. The freezer has been open for over a week-and I’ve got 100 s of dollars of meat in there.
I swung into action. First order of business, round up all the coolers and get ready to transfer. About 90% of the freezer contents were still frozen solid, buried in frost. Those went into the 2 hardsideded coolers. The items that were defrosted (but still luckily at a refrigerator type temp) went into the disposable white styrofoam cooler.
Note the meat tenderizer and bamboo rice paddle-I used them as a hammer and chisel to get the worst of the snow out of the freezer.
Once I had chipped away as much of the frost as I could I set a space heater on a tv tray table and aimed it straight at the open and unplugged freezer.
While that melted and dripped, I transferred the semi defrosted stuff that was still mostly frozen into the fridge to be used this week.
There were some items that were fully defrosted that needed to be dried off-packaged cheese, hotdogs and the like. I set them on the counter on a towel.
Then there was the stuff that needed to be cooked. Here you can see the stove in full fledged post freezer tragedy.
Inside the oven were chicken thighs and breasts baking away.
There were several quart freezer bags full of tomatoes I had seasoned & roasted at the end of the summer. As you can see, many of them were the yellow tomatoes. I threw those all into a crockpot on high to cook down for sauce.
There was also a package of sausage that was partially defrosted, so I put them all in my cast iron skillet on a low temp (so they wouldn’t burn before the insides were defrosted & cooked) and then covered them. When the sausage was done, I cut them up into small pieces and tossed them in with the tomatoes.
There were 3 bags of cranberry orange relish left over from Thanksgiving that were defrosted, as well as a jug of wild blueberries. . . about 2 cups worth. I decided to cook those all down together along with a couple of jars of the rhubarb ginger jam that I had made last year (that came out wayyyyy too gingery) for a sort of fruit compote.
I made some oatmeal fruit bars with a portion of the compote. They came out well-I’ll probably make more for coffee hour on Sunday. . . since I’m the hostess for that this week.
Luckily I was able to save almost everything! There was some ice cream that was a goner, as well as a couple of odds and ends.
That was NOT how I had planned on spending my day.
Whew! What a big job you had! Thank goodness you could save so much. I bet you will check and re- check that door from now on. Wish they would make a beeper to go off if the temp starts to drop in a freezer, could save people a lot of money!
Quick moving on saving so much!!!! I have had this occur with bad resluts!(freezer in garage during summer in Phoenix) Kudos to you!
Thank goodness it was a cold day yesterday and the basement is even colder. . . really helped with keeping the stuff in coolers frozen.
So did you end up canning or just refreezing the cooked sauce and fruit compote, chicken, etc.?
Wow, quite a day. I doubt I would have been able to think up all those solutions within that time frame.
It might not have been how you planned to spend the day, but you certainly put your frugal principles into action! Way to practice what you preach!
Wow! When that happened to us, we threw all the thawed stuff away š Shame on me. You did a great job saving everything!
-Kitty
Wow-impressive! I had that happen, but didn’t notice it for even longer (it was in the garage). I can still smell that stench…needless to say, nothing was salvagable!
HUGE applause for your swift action, m’dear. I can’t imagine that happening to me.
I had a fridge/freezer combo die once, but by the time it happened, the food inside was also dead. Sigh.
It was a lot of work but sounds like you did an awesome job of saving most everything. How fortunate that your menu planning encouraged you to open the freezer so that you made your discovery before even more was lost. Great save!
Well done, Jenn! Now that you’ve cooked a lot of that food, it can go back into the freezer–that’ll be a good time-saver.
Back when I was single and in college, I had a fridge/freezer die on me. I got home from class, opened the fridge for a glass of nice cold water, and it wasn’t cold. The freezer was thawing, and me and my roommate called all our friends and cooked everything in the freezer. I think I ate more than I had ever eaten before. Especially of meat since the majority of things that were in there, were of the meat variety.
Oh goodness! Our refrigerator/freezer croaked one evening a few years ago, and we lost almost everything. I’m so glad that you were able to recover most of your food.
What a big job!
Jenn, that took quick thinking and quick action. It does not sound like you lost much food, if any. Be sure to check the freezer door in future. I once brought home a lot of groceries and put the frozen food into my refrigerator freezer, and it was so full the door didn’t close completely. So I can empathize.
I really was blessed that most of it was still good. It is a good point to know that food that can’t be refrozen raw usually can be refrozen once cooked. I however was able to just use up most of it within a week instead of bothering with refreezing. To be honest, I was sick of the freezer at that point š