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Video Summary
Hey everyone! In this video, I’m giving you a complete tour of all four freezers in our house and our food storage areas. I know it sounds like a lot, but we have a main freezer in the kitchen, one in the garage from our last home, and then a standing freezer and chest freezer in the basement.
I walk you through each freezer showing you how I organize everything – from single serve meals (since my husband and I aren’t home together for dinner very often) to bulk meat storage, homemade breakfast items, and garden produce. I also share some of my favorite products like Zone Perfect protein bars and show you my pantry organization system.
As a bonus, I take you through all our extra food storage areas including my bulk ingredient storage, canning pantry, and various cabinets where I keep backup supplies. I explain why I store things the way I do and share some tips like keeping brown sugar in the freezer to make it last forever. It’s a comprehensive look at how we manage food storage for just two people in our home!
Video Transcript
Hey everyone, welcome back. I’m Kari, this is Keep It Simple DIY. Today I wanted to show you our freezers and what we have inside of them. We do have a total of four freezers in this house. We have our main freezer inside, we have a freezer in our garage that came from our last home, and then in our basement I have one standing freezer and then one chest freezer. So let me bring you in close and show you what we’ve got.
All right, so we have this top drawer and I do like to keep butter here. These are blocks of cream cheese. I probably won’t freeze cream cheese again. It just comes out a little bit funky textured. But this next section over here, I just keep frozen bananas. We got some sliced strawberry. This is more of like frozen fruits and veggies that we’re going through currently.
Then this next section down, I have my yeast and some extra yeast, and then I’ve just got all the kind of sweet snacks. So we do have quite a bit of grapes left from last year’s garden, and then I was sick a bit ago, there’s a ton of popsicles. And then we have ice cream sandwiches. We have some cookie dough that I’ve made and frozen, one little coffee cake piece, and then just some freezies. I do like to keep my brown sugar in the freezer as well.
All right, this is where I keep all of our single serve meals. We are not home together for dinner very often, and so it’s nice to be able to have options. Now most of these options are kind of breakfasty, but I like breakfast for dinner pretty often. So I do have some chili burritos, some barbecue pizzas that I like to put in the air fryer, and then this is just a stash of breakfast burritos. My husband really loves breakfast burritos, so I make them by the million.
Then over here for our single serve, of course, is our quickie snacks from the store. And then I like to have prepped, I have some homemade sourdough English muffins. Is this a bagel? Yep, I have one homemade bagel left. I’ve got pancakes, which I love. The pancake recipe I’ve been using for years. Some waffles, and then there I have french toast on homemade bread. I’ve got some breakfast sausage and some different shaped breakfast sausage, and then some potato patties, leftover hot dog buns, and then some broccoli that just didn’t have anywhere else that it fit.
In the door I’ve got some homemade naan bread, and then I have just a few of these meringue cookies left from when I made them this Christmas.
All right, to the garage freezer.
All right, this freezer doesn’t have a whole ton in it right now, but I do like to keep a little bit of extras of the junky foods and then any meals that are more for both of us at the same time. Inside I like to keep those single meals since we’re not together all that often, and then out here for when we are.
So up here I have some tortillas, quite a bit of corn tortillas are starting to get freezer burned, and then I’ve got some taquitos that have been in there forever. And then I have some orange juice and milk that I froze because we don’t drink those that often. I bought them when we had guests in town and they don’t drink them either, so I’m using it little by little for cooking.
I did just restock my brown sugar, so I have light and dark brown sugar here, and I just keep it in my freezer and it lasts forever. This is an extra bag that I like to keep anything in, but I like to reuse it because it’s huge. I mean, it’s definitely a huge bag. We’re running really low, but these are individual meals so we can take if we’re on the go.
And then here’s all of the freezer meals, just a few, but realistically we eat like one of these once a month maybe, so this actually lasts us quite a while. And occasionally I’ll get on a kick where I make more than one because I want to start using them up. But you’ll see here, here’s the enchiladas that we made together a few weeks ago. Of course, more junky food, junky food, a store-bought pizza. I was just feeling lazy and bought them from the store one day, and then a bunch of tortillas.
I probably will go back to just making my own pizzas, and honestly I think I’m gonna stick to the smaller size pizzas that we can just stick in our air fryer, because then we can choose what kind of pizza we want and we don’t have to like share the same pizza or have leftovers.
All right, downstairs we have this one chest freezer and then over here on the other side we have our stand-up freezer. Over in the chest I have three baskets. One of them came with the chest and two I bought separate. But I keep chicken thighs boneless skinless, and then I also like to have chicken thighs diced. And then I’ve got some chicken breasts, and I like to have chicken breasts diced too, but these are the only bags of chicken breasts I have right now. I’m waiting for a good sale, but there hasn’t really been any good sales on chicken in a while. And then I just have a few carne piccatas portioned out.
Over here, this was a project that I did recently. These are all different kinds of sausage that I made, and so we’re working through them. Let’s see, we have country sausage, Italian sausage, that’s also Italian sausage, that’s a different kind of Italian sausage, and then Jimmy Dean sausage copycat of course, and then some breakfast and maple sausages.
Down here I’ve got some drumsticks, and then over here I have a bunch of bone-in skin-on chicken thighs. I did also have different bones and such down there to make stock, but I actually made that recently so they’re no longer in there.
And then in this freezer I like to have veggies on the side. I prefer to have homegrown veggies on the side or have them canned even better, but I do still have a few from the store. But let’s see, it’s April now and I still have a little bit of spinach from the garden. I’ve got some peas from the garden, some shredded carrots from the garden, also some green beans and another bag of spinach. I’ve got celery as well, so that’s all on the door from the garden.
And then in here on the second shelf I have a ton of green onions, a ton of zucchini, and a ton of squash still. I keep beef up here, so I have a few beef roasts and I have a few steaks, and everything right now is actually pretty low compared to how it normally is. And then down here I have some pork chops, and then I’ve got all my ground beef over here. So I’ve got just a bunch of rolls of ground beef, and then there were these packets of ground beef for chili. I don’t know what the difference is. Does it have like seasoning on it possibly? But it was pretty cheap. It was $3.96 a pound and the cheapest I can typically find the 93/7 is $3.97 a pound. I mean, it’s the same, it’s a penny, but still. And then I just have one thing of prepped taco meat there.
I go on spurts. Sometimes I have a ton of taco meat prepped and sometimes I have none. And then this little drawer I found is really hard to figure out what to do with, but I have a little bit more breakfast sausages, some hamburgers, some turkey. I think that’s ground turkey. Let’s see, yep, ground turkey, and then some apple and Gouda sausages.
And last up, down here I just have a bunch of shredded cheese. I recently bought blocks of cheese when they were on sale and shredded them, and I keep them down here.
All right, bonus footage for those of you who are still here. I wanted to show you all of our extra storage and our pantry, so let me bring you in close. I’ll show you everywhere we have food around the house.
Okay, you’ve probably noticed in my videos that I do keep a lot of my bulk food here. And now bulk for me is this, and then I do keep some to the side, but I don’t have any big five gallon buckets or anything. We’re just two of us here, so we don’t need quite that much. But I do have some panko, tapioca starch, instant oats, hash browns, cornmeal and peppers. We don’t really eat a lot of peppers, so once those run out I will not be repurchasing. Sugar, sweet rice flour. You use that to make mochi and rice flour, grits and powdered sugar.
Then we have two different kinds of rice, Jasmine and Basmati, and then of course flour. And then I do like to keep powdered milk. You saw the milk in our freezer. I don’t drink a lot of milk, and so this is the best way for us to use it since I typically only use it in my cooking. And then of course taco chips, cocoa, salt, potato starch, cornstarch, baking powder and baking soda.
You’ll notice I have all those different kind of starches, and that’s because for a while I was eating gluten-free, and so I learned a lot of gluten-free recipes using tons of different flours.
So let me show you one of the messiest parts. And so just right over here I have a few more of these shelves where I just shove everything that doesn’t fit. So we’ve got instant potatoes up top, some extra panko, some spinach and sour cream powder, and then a few of these Augason Farms buckets that are actually open and I’m using. I did buy nutritional yeast that I haven’t tried yet, but parmesan doesn’t get along with me, and so I thought maybe that would be a great option for when a recipe calls for parmesan.
Then I’ve got masa flour for making tamales, which I haven’t done in years, but hopefully I’ll be doing that again soon. Xanthan gum, empty container, another empty container back there, but recently I did buy these Swerve sweeteners. They’re okay. And then I’ve got almond, oat, cassava flour, and then just a regular gluten-free mix. I’ll have to show you guys my mix for gluten-free flour. I have the best ratio for making banana bread. I actually don’t really like banana bread, but when I made it with the gluten-free flour that I mixed up myself, it turned out phenomenal.
All right, so just coming down from here I’ve got a little bit of extra things. We’ve got some coffee, different kind of coffee, and then a bunch of extra oil.
And then this here was the canning pantry. You guys have already seen this. I’ll link that video below. And then this side I keep breakfast items up top. I’ve got a bunch of cereals. I’ve got old-fashioned oats and I have some rice cakes. And then the next two are more snacks and crackers, and then the next two are cooking, so any canned goods and then any bottled or boxed goods.
I’ve got two drawers, and this drawer is where I throw all of the breakfasty bars in here. So I’ve got breakfast bars. There’s also popcorn back in there, but I just throw it all in. No one sees it except for you guys right now, and you won’t judge.
And then a whole drawer of candy. It’s actually not full right now, which is, you know, a win. Recently though, I found these things, the Pure, let’s see, Pure Protein candy bar bites. They have them in two different flavors and they’re both fantastic. Also with that though, sometimes I’ve been, not that one, that one’s good but not the same. Let’s see, this one. All right, this Zone Perfect chocolate chip cookie dough bar. This is my absolute favorite protein bar I’ve ever had. Doesn’t taste like that weird protein bar taste, and honestly I feel like I’m just eating a hunk of cookie dough when I eat it, so big win there.
This isn’t food, but I’ll show it to you anyways. Well, it is food. This is just where I store the cat food, so cat food here, and then there’s extra in our other cabinet.
I have pastas, rice noodles, rice, and then down here some soy milk and extra open flours that aren’t white flour. Right now there’s only whole wheat. And then I also have a bunch of these little quick packets because I can mix them up and make six muffins inside of those reusable muffin tins and just stick them in the air fryer and make a really quick early morning muffin. And thinking about it, there’s a lot of room there. Maybe I should put my extra gluten-free flours there.
All right, remember me talking about tamales? I have all the things to make it. Let’s make it happen. Then I’ve got extra jellos and creams, tuna and soups, and then here’s just a lot of extra baking or breakfasty things. Molasses, syrup, chia seeds, shortening. Ooh, what’s in there? Oh, more molasses. And then chocolate chips and then chocolate chips, and then some peanut butter, and it looks like some white chocolate chips behind there. Well, okay, flour and cat going in here.
Let’s show you how it looks now. Much better. So glad I had that idea. There’s this side, here’s this side. Cat and tall, we’re gonna let him just stay there. We’ll close the door later.
All right, I have this cabinet where I have a few of these Augason Farms jars that aren’t open. This is where I keep the extra cat food, and then I do keep some highly caffeinated drinks for my husband.
I also have these cabinets in my drop station. This area is a mess. Don’t judge. Well, inside the cabinets is clean, so I’m gonna try to show you only the clean parts. There isn’t any food in the farthest one, but I do have some right here. This is where I keep all my extra condiments, extra gluten-free flours and baking supplies. And then I have two cabinets down here that I keep supplies in. I have rice and beans in this one, and I have a cat in this one. No, no, no. And this is where I keep extra flour and sugar.
So I do have right now two stacks of five, five-pound bags of flour, and so that’s 50 pounds of flour. And then I do have, I don’t know, one whole row of sugar. What’s that look like? It is, all right, five, four pounds of sugar, so 20 pounds of sugar there.
Now the reason I buy my flour in five-pound bags, even though it’s cheaper to buy it in 25-pound bags, is one five-pound bag will just pour really well into my flour container.
All right, that’s all I have for you today. Thank you so much for hanging out with me, and I hope to see you next time. Bye-bye!
