The freezer that carries you through December

It is a Tuesday in early December and it is twenty to seven. Somebody had a concert. Somebody else had a thing at work that ran. There is a wrapped present on the counter and two cards that need writing, and dinner has not been thought about by anybody, including you.

You order something. It arrives at half past eight and it is fine and it cost more than it should have, and that is the fourth time this fortnight.

The problem is not that you cannot cook. It is that in those six weeks, the evening that dinner normally gets decided in has been taken away, and nothing was put in its place.

A meal prep Sunday is not the answer

It is worth saying because it is what gets recommended, and because it fails for the same reason every time.

A meal prep Sunday asks for three hours, on a weekend, in the exact stretch of the year when weekends are already full of school events and family things and shopping. It also asks you to eat five identical portions of something you chose while you were not hungry. Miss one Sunday and the whole plan is behind; miss two and it is abandoned.

What actually works is smaller and does not need a slot in the diary, because it happens inside something you were already doing.

Cook one extra, starting now

Here is the entire method. When you cook something that freezes, make a bit more than you need, and freeze the extra.

Not a double batch, which means a bigger pan and more washing up. One or two portions more. A chilli that was going to feed four feeds six, and two dinners go into the freezer. It costs almost nothing in time because the pan, the chopping and the cleaning up have already happened.

Do that a couple of times a week from now and by the first week of December the freezer holds fifteen or twenty dinners that you do not have to think about, decide on, or shop for. Not a menu. A shelf of “this will do”, which is exactly what a Tuesday in December needs.

And it survives a bad week, which a prep Sunday does not. If you cook nothing extra for a fortnight, you have not added to the pile. Nothing is wasted and nothing is behind.

A freezer you cannot see into is a cupboard

This is the part that decides whether any of it gets eaten.

Most household freezers are a drawer of anonymous bags with a layer of older anonymous bags underneath. Anything below the top layer is invisible, and invisible food does not get chosen on a Tuesday at twenty to seven, because choosing it means kneeling on the kitchen floor with cold hands while somebody asks what is for dinner.

So the food has to be visible in the ten seconds you will actually give it. That means containers of a consistent shape, standing up rather than lying in a heap, sorted into a few bins so that lifting one bin shows you a category rather than an archaeological layer.

Freeze in the shape you will use

Two practical things that make the difference between a useful freezer and a full one.

Freeze flat, then stand it up. Anything in a bag should be frozen lying flat so it sets as a slab, then filed upright like a book. Slabs stack, defrost faster and can be read at a glance. Lumps do not.

Freeze in the portion you will actually take out. A single container holding six portions is one decision you have to make in advance and commit to. The same food in three smaller blocks is three small decisions later. Portion for the number of people who are actually likely to be in the house on a bad Tuesday, which is often fewer than the whole household.

Label it or it becomes a mystery brick

Everything goes in with two things written on it: what it is, and the date.

This sounds obvious and almost nobody does it, and the result is a freezer of grey-brown blocks that could be bolognese and could be soup and might be from last winter. A mystery brick is not food, it is a decision you have deferred, and it will sit there until you throw it out.

The date is not for food safety arithmetic. It is so that when two things look identical you take the older one, which is the whole of freezer rotation and requires no system beyond a pen.

What to actually buy

Old takeaway tubs and a marker do this and have done for decades. The reason to buy anything is that mismatched containers do not stack, and a freezer that does not stack is a freezer you cannot see into, which is the failure this whole guide is about.

The one that solves portions. Silicone freezer trays with lids freeze soups, stews and sauces into uniform blocks that pop out and go into a bag, so the tray is reused rather than occupied. Uniform is the point: identical blocks stack, stand up and can be counted without unpacking anything.

The one for anything you want to keep properly. A vacuum sealer is the difference between food that is still good in the new year and food with ice crystals on it. It matters most for meat bought on offer and for portions you are freezing for months rather than weeks, and it makes flat slabs by design.

The one that makes it visible. Clear stacking bins turn a drawer into three or four categories you can lift out and look into. This is the cheapest intervention here and the one that most changes whether the freezer gets used, because you are no longer excavating, you are picking up a box.

The one that ends the mystery bricks. Dissolvable food labels write on easily and come off in the wash rather than leaving a grey residue you scrape at. Keep the roll and a pen in a drawer near the freezer, not in a stationery drawer in another room, or the labelling will not happen.

The December version

From about the last week of November, change one thing: stop adding and start spending.

Some time in that week, pull everything out, count it, and write the list on a sheet stuck to the freezer door. Cross things off as you eat them. It takes twenty minutes and it means that on the bad Tuesday you look at a list at eye level rather than kneeling in front of a drawer.

That list is the thing that actually gets used. Not the freezer, the list.

When you open it in January and it is chaos

You will. Some of it will be unlabelled, some will be from before the system, and there will be a bag of something at the bottom that is beyond identification.

Twenty minutes fixes it. Take everything out onto the counter. Bin anything you cannot identify without unwrapping it, without guilt and without a debate; an unidentifiable block was never going to be dinner. Put the rest back standing up, in bins, and write what is there on a fresh sheet for the door.

Then start cooking one extra again. You do not need to catch up and there is no backlog. The freezer only ever holds what you put in it, and it will take whatever you add next week exactly as happily as it would have taken it in October.

Who this is not for

• If you have a small freezer compartment above a fridge, you have room for about four dinners and the honest answer is to keep those four good ones rather than build a system around the space.
• If your household eats at wildly different times and never the same thing, portions in the freezer are a better fit than batches, and the extra portion method already suits you. Skip the bulk advice.
• If December is not busy for you, none of this is urgent and the freezer is fine as it is.

Start on any Monday

The next time you cook something that freezes, make two portions more than you need.

Put them in whatever containers you already own, flat, with the name and the date on them in pen.

That is one evening’s work and it is two dinners in December you will not have to think about. Do it again when it next happens to be convenient. Nothing here needs a Sunday.