The freezer, my friend

The best investment I ever made in my kitchen?
It´s a large, upright freezer. I buy vegetables and fruit frozen and in bulk, and that way, I always have something nutritious and low in calories on hand.
Actually, using that freezer has helped me with portion control in more than one way.
First of all, I can take as much or as little as I want out of those bags of frozen produce, and leave the rest frozen.
BF (before freezer) I often took home fresh produce in packages or portions  bigger than what I actually needed, simply because there wasn´t any other size.
This led to one of two possible outcomes: either I cooked all of it because, well, wasn´t it a pity to throw it away?, or I left part of what I bought to rot in the veggie drawer of my fridge because it spoiled faster than we could eat it.
If I cooked too much food, it was very likely eaten, too. After all, one doesn´t waste good food, does one?
(You can see I was brought up as a member of the clean-plate-club).
And this, of course, added unwanted pounds and cost unnecessary expenses.Both of which were vexing and led to buying vegetables more and more infrequently.
The big freezer changed all that.
I can take out exactly measured portions of produce, and leave the rest in to use at a later time. That also means I can, on a whim, take a handful of some veggie and drop it into what I am cooking. I do that quite often when using store-bought sauces or soups, which I sometimes have to resort to for convenience´s sake, being a full-time employee with somewhat irregular hours. The addidtional produce ups the nutritional value of our meals and lowers the caloric content. So, win-win.
And I don´t have to throw away leftovers that weren´t eaten fast enough any more, but instead I just re-freeze them immediately to use at a later date.
That means having self-cooked meals ready to eat at any time, and it means not having to stuff ourselves just because it would be a pity to throw away any part of a tasty meal.

And it saves lots of money, too. Paradoxically, the frozen produce, which is pre-prepared, peeled, whatever you do to the veggie in question, and therefore one hundred percent edible, is, because it doesn´t spoil so fast, cheaper by weight than the so-called fresh stuff where you have to pay for parts of the plant that get thrown away.
So, in the contest of kitchen appliances, the prize goes to the freezer alright. It´s, apart the cooking appliances themselves, the one thing in my kitchen that I would not want to miss.


Julia