Every once in a while, the fridge, like any other room in the house, needs to be de-cluttered and re-organised. Instead of buying a bigger fridge, I force myself to look at the junk in the fridge that needs to be cleared out.
No, it is not because I have great self-control that I am able to restrain myself from buying a new fridge. I am held back purely by the lack of space in our home! Recently, as I was exploring the possibility of buying a freezer (more about that later), a friend recommended getting a second fridge instead. Boy was I tempted! But some other friends (thanks Angie and Aunty Helen!) think that a freezer is more practical than a 2nd fridge. Hmmm…I was in a fix!
Our family IS growing and we’ll eventually need more food which needs to be stored somewhere 🙂 So – do we need more fridge space or freezer space? And bear in mind, we have no space in our kitchen anymore. So whatever we buy has to fit into our already small and cramped balcony/laundry area!
Dh is of course against buying anything 🙂 But you see, he isn’t the one who has to find space in the fridge and freezer after each week’s grocery trip. He’s also not the one who has to pull everything out of the fridge to get the item that is wanted which has been conveniently shoved to the back coz well, there’s no space for it!
So a fridge/freezer overhaul is needed! And in view of not having any help with food this time round come March ’09, I need to get organised NOW!
So this is what I did :
FREEZER
I used to organise my freezer space by food type. Eg. all chicken goes to the bottom shelf. All pork goes to the top left hand corner, etc. But now I group the food according to the meals I have planned. Eg. Menu Plan says Chicken Macaroni Soup for Monday’s lunch. So chicken bones (for soup) and chicken breast gets bundled together and labelled as “Monday lunch – Chicken Macaroni Soup”.
This way I hope to be more efficient and I’d know if there are any ingredients missing immediately instead of finding out on Monday morning when I am doing food prep for lunch!
As I sorted and labelled the food, I noticed that I can only shove organise 2 weeks’ worth of food in the freezer. My plan for the confinement period* is to pre-prepare (cut/marinate) a month’s worth of food before baby’s arrival. Hmmm….I need more freezer space!
FRIDGE
Previously, food was haphazardly placed in the fridge – item goes where there is space 🙂 So I decided that I had to be more organised. Guess what? I threw out 4 bags of junk! Amazing the amount of stuff I had just shoved into the fridge. It really was a case of out-of-sight, out-of-mind! 🙁 And to think I thought I had no space in the fridge!
After thinking through, this is how I have organised my fridge :
From the top down, I designated half a shelf for my herbal teas (now into drinking RRL tea to tone and prepare my uterus for labour and birth) and the other half for my baking needs (yeast, extra butter, cheese, chocolate chips, etc). Then a shelf for leftovers and breakfast meats (ham, sausage) & spreads (jam, kaya).
Another shelf for de-frosting food. Tip : place a tray under the food to be de-frosted so that any raw juices that may leak out is caught in the tray and not all over the shelf or worse, drip onto cooked foods!
Next is a shelf for my leafy vegetables. Note : I keep my easily perishable vegetables in Tupperware and Lock ‘n’ Lock vegetable containers. I have found that this allows my vegetables to last at least 1 week if not more, compared to just wrapping them in newspapers and putting them into the vegetable bin. But because I use these containers, they are too big to fit into the fridge’s vegetable bin.
So I use half the vegetable bin to store my stash of longans and red date (to make red date tea for the confinement period) and the other half for the hardier vegetables and fruits.
On the fridge doors, I have one and a half shelves for eggs! Yep, we eat a lot of eggs 🙂 A small space for the butter dish. One shelf is used to store for our vitamins and our cold water jug. And the last shelf is kept for drinks, usually just milk for our cereal or baking needs but sometimes juice and soft drinks.
After all that organising and de-cluttering, it was clear that I do not need more fridge space! I do not even need extra freezer space if I do my grocery shopping once a fortnight. It seems that my disorganised fridge has led to an inefficient use of time all this while!
However, having said that, I do need to prepare to go solo after I birth and there’s no way I can store a months’ worth of food in my freezer. So…we bought a 110litre upright freezer that looks like THIS from NTUC AMK Hub.
(*) It seems at this point in time, that we will be going fully solo after the birth of this baby. We’ve usually had no confinement help. But we’ve always had someone (mom or mil) helping with food. This time round, there’ll be no help on the food front. So instead of opting for tingkat service (no one can stomach tingkat food here 🙁 ), my grand plan is to have a one month menu plan and pre-prepare (cut and marinated) all the food and freeze it. Then come meal times, I only need to de-frost and cook. Or dh can cook if he is available. This way, I still have freshly cooked food without all the hassle of food preparation. With this in mind, we’ll need lots of freezer space. And this will probably be our method of keeping on top of the cooking challenge in the days ahead with 7 children (God willing), aged 10 and below!
1 Comment on Organising My Fridge
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Reading your housekeeping is certainly eyeopening bc I always wondered how you do it! To no surprise, we both “exploit” our kids! My kids have a chore to do a day in addition to keeping toys, stationary and clothes. The older 3 (age 5 to 9) take turns to wash the dishes (i.e. rinsing them and drying them); magic mopping the floor and doing laundry ( ie. putting clothes in laundry and folding clothes). So I only cook, hang out laundry and mop the floor every day. Every wed, we change sheets and I actually iron 2x a week bc of school uniforms – urgh – if i homeschooled all i would not have this to do! But I like your point abt not washing outdoor clothes until they are worn twice – unfortunately my kids kinda mess up their clothes, yes even sunday clothes and since they were them till abt 3pm, they tend to stink in Singapore’s humid weather.
What I would like to share is my kids actually prepare Saturday’s meals. I would normally cook up spagetti sauce and they would heat it up and cook spagetti or use it to make lagsana, pizza on Saturdays. So that is my off day and I use it to plan lessons, take a breather, do ironing, clean kitchen/stove/fridge etc.