You know you’ve asked yourself that same question when you’ve opened your freezer.  We only have an apartment sized freezer, plus the one on top of our fridge, but I still manage to lose track of what I’ve put in there.  Six months or more later, I pull out badly freezer burned _______________ (insert food item here).  With my foray into big cooks (check out previous post here), I wanted to make sure that I kept track of what was in my freezer so I could be a good steward of the resources God has given me.

To keep track, I created a printable for a Freezer Inventory. Freezer Inventory (feel free to print off the Word document and customize for your own purposes)  I then took the page to Staples and had it hard laminated (hard laminated uses the 10 mil thickness, rather than the 3 or 5 mil thickness.  It doesn’t really bend, unlike the other two)

I went through my freezers and wrote down with a wet erase marker what is in them.

My plan is to write what I put into the freezer after each shopping trip and to erase what I use after each meal.  Hopefully this means that I don’t run out of bread or leave meals that I’ve made only to go bad.  That’s the idea, but we’ll see how it goes!  The final tally:

I have way more meat than I had thought tucked back in those freezers! I also realized that I need to buy a smaller tipped marker if I want to be able to read what I write.  Oh well, lesson learned.

I also took two of my meal plan templates to be laminated.  Laminating two allows me to rotate them so I can plan two weeks at a time, without having to waste paper and ink printing one each week.

I printed the templates from theprojectgirl.com.  Click here for free printable.

I’ll keep you updated on how the tracking goes.  Thanks for dropping in!