Mission Impossible: The 3 Week Empty Freezer Challenge

I mentioned in my last post that I haven't been cooking or baking much because I've been busy both learning to decorate cakes and knitting.  Truth is, that's only half of the story.

One of the real reasons behind my lack of kitchen creativity is that I need to empty my freezer.  Like completely.  And immediately.  Not just my small fridge freezer.  My honkin' deep freeze.

In only three weeks.  Or so they said.

Big undertaking indeed. 

I've mentioned before how full my freezer can get.  It very often has a case of Diet Coke sitting on top of it to keep all of my wonderful meals from defrosting.  

Let's face it.  I like to cook and bake and there are really still only two of us to eat it.  And we just can't eat all of it.  A friend of mine e-mailed me once after reading one of my posts in which I had said that I had no space in my freezer.  She told me how much she loves her deep chest freezer and recommended that I get one.  I immediately burst out laughing because I had been referring to my chest freezer. 

And the state of my freezer about a week ago when I started this challenge was no different than it usually is.  

Packed.to.the.brim. 

Last weekend, Jérôme and I decided that we were going to get our contractors to come back to level off the floor of our garage so that we can get some storage units in there.  We have discovered that since turning half of our garage into a waiting room for my clients, our storage space for kid junk is a bit too tight.  Our aim is to the garage with all sorts of shelving and other organizational tools so that we can actually one day walk in there.  

I will not post a picture of its current state...

All of the other times we got our contractors to come in, they were already booked months in advance.  When I called him this time, he announced that they would be here in three weeks.

Um... say what????

PANIC!!!

Not only is there no way we'll be able to clean out the whole garage in three weeks, there is NO WAY IN THE WORLD we'll be able to empty out the chest freezer in so little time!!!  Well, unless we just stick it all in the garbage and that clearly isn't happening. 

For a split second, I thought we just might be able to do it.  

Until I actually opened the freezer.  And realized that there was enough food in there to feed an entire small country for at least 3 months.  

So I called the contractor back and got him to agree to the end of summer instead.  However, I'm even doubtful that we'll be able to finish off everything by then.  Since then, we've been doing our darndest to eat our way through this honkin' freezer.  Which is, by far, the biggest reason I haven't been in the kitchen much lately.  

Instead of creating fabulous new meals, we've been eating through all of our frozen homemade meals and barbecuing the meat we have frozen.  And Logan has become quite fond of the idea of having ice cream after every dinner.  In fact, now that he's had a small scoop three days straight, I'm pretty sure he's convinced that he will enjoy this for life.

We are now a week into our empty freezer challenge.  Here's what it looked like a week after the challenge started:

check out the French cheese for fondue on the left there ;)

The pictures don't really give you an idea of how much food is still in here.  To give you an idea, the freezer come up to at least my waist.  As you can see in the first photo, the left side is still completely full.  But at least we've made little dents here and there.  

One semi-bonus - our fridge busted on Friday.  And everything in its freezer defrosted.  And yes, it was just as full as our deep freeze.  And to the garbage it almost all went.  Almost three garbage bags full between the fridge and the freezer.

So unfortunately, we had to buy a new fridge.  And are just waiting for its delivery as I type.  On the plus side of things, it means that it'll free up so much space in the deep freeze once I can transfer things into the fridge freezer.  Maybe we'll be able to make this three week challenge after all???