It all runs downhill

Finally, the tomatoes are getting some color.  Still not enough to preserve yet, but hopefully soon… .  At least enough to eat all we want. 🙂

 

My daughter is now old enough to do some preserving on her own, and she gets real interested if it’s something she actually grew.  Sometimes I pay attention, sometimes I don’t.  The other day in the midst of the “hay salvaging”, I went to get some fruit out of the freezer for a treat, and I had noticed she had put some broccoli in bags and put it in a freezer where she could find room, and promptly forgot about it.  I realized that most of the time it never works out that we would have an open shelf in one of the freezers that we keep meat in.  And, the other thing I hadn’t even considered was that I assumed she knew not to put vegetables or fruit underneath meat.  My fault. 

Then I realized maybe some of the people reading this blog are just getting their first freezer and in a flurry of preserving activity stuffing food in, anywhere they can.  We have upright freezers, and chest freezers.  It’s easy to keep shelves of different types of food separate in an upright freezer, but in a chest freezer, it isn’t so easy.

The easiest way to keep yourself and your food safe in case of a power outage, is to load your freezer the same way you are supposed to store meats and vegetables in your refrigerator.  Meat products on bottom, and vegetables on top.

To me poultry is the worst offender.  Raw poultry blood and fluids from eggs are hard to wash from dishes, I have to soak and wash the pans sometimes twice to get the smell out of the dishes that I have thawed out a chicken in.  Probably something to do with being a bird.  So with that in mind I try to load my freezer accordingly.  Asking myself, would I eat this raw or cooked.  Anything I would cook before eating goes on the bottom shelf.  For instance, if I was freezing chicken, beef and pork, I would put chicken on the bottom, then pork, and then the beef on top.  Why?  Because, I would eat beef raw, and I would never eat pork or chicken raw, or even half cooked.  So if the beef blood got on the pork or chicken, it wouldn’t matter because I would be cooking those types of meats.  But if chicken or pork blood leaked onto my beef packages, I would be upset.  No more raw beef for me.  Oh yeah – didn’t I tell you we eat steak tartare everyday.  😉  And, since all frozen blood looks the same, if you see blood on a package you won’t be able to discern what type of blood it actually is, unless you fill your freezer accordingly and make sure vegetables and fruit never are stored underneath meats, and meats you may be eating rare, will be on the top o’ the meat heap.

Happy freezing!