Or: How to organize your freezer the Sprinkle Fix way

Jump to recipe for black bean and chorizo taquitos

One of quarantine’s hottest trends – along with fostering dogs, baking bread and depicting the likeness of Joe Exotic out of dried beans and macaroni – is organizing. People are using this overabundance of inside-time to optimize their entire living spaces – but of course, I’m especially interested in the kitchens. Some of my favorite food authorities have recently written about how they stock and organize their pantries and fridges. They usually say at the top that they’re doing it because they’ve gotten lots of requests from readers who want to look inside their cupboards. Which makes sense. We’re all spending more time in our kitchens and taking fewer trips to the grocery store. So, we want ideas about how to store food more efficiently. I’m not sure these pantry show-and-tell posts can help though. They are full rainbows of legumes in Weck Jars; fully alphabetized spice racks; freezers packed with Tetris-like precision. They look like all the other stuff these food celebrities post – completely beautiful, and completely unattainable for normal people.

Since my blog has recently had a meteoric rise in weekly-ness, I figure it’s about time for me to host a virtual kitchen tour as well. So I’m going to take you on a journey through perhaps the most important food storage space in my kitchen right now: My freezer. True to the Sprinkle Fix brand though, I’m going to keep it real with you*. I am not going to present my freezer as it would be if I had a label maker/a Container Store sponsorship/the engineering skills to prevent any of the countless Pizza Roll avalanches I’ve caused. No – this is my freezer as it is.

*Well, not totally real. There will be no actual photographs of my freezer because I do still have a little shame left.

Quadrant 1: bread miscellany, ice cubes and a single desiccated banana

Many people use their freezers to store food they plan to eat someday. And I do use some of my freezer space for that. The rest of it, I use for food that I don’t really want to eat, but would feel guilty throwing out. For me, the freezer is a convenient, lightless cave where I can store all my best intentions and unfinished plans and never look them in the eye again. Bread gets this treatment a lot. I’ll eat through 3/4 of a whole grain loaf, or seven out of eight English muffins, then stick the ends of the bags in the freezer to succumb to its creeping, life-draining frost. Sometimes I’ll dig through the drawer when it’s time to make a strata or some emergency breadcrumbs, but I never use it all up. Then I buy more bread and the cycle begins anew.

As for the banana – I do not remember the last time I bought bananas. I have also never read a recipe that calls for a single banana. So, this banana simply is now and ever shall be. Am I going to throw it away? Of course not. I never know when it might come up in my ongoing game of, “is this food still OK to put in a human stomach? Only one way to find out!” roulette!

Quadrant 2: Grab bag o’ meat

Like the bread bits, this is where I keep all of the meats I don’t quite use up. Current contents include: nine ounces of chorizo from Christmas 2018, a single polish sausage, two chicken legs and three 1/4 pound bags of ground mystery meats. Do I ever think about labeling these bags before I put them in the freezer? No! That would take several valuable seconds – and I need that time in the kitchen for eating Triscuits and asking my Google home device how tall Whoopi Goldberg is.

Also, the grab bag approach leads to delightful meat surprises. Once, I had a friend come and look in on my current foster cat while I took a trip to India. There was about an eight-hour time difference, so I was asleep in Delhi while she visited my apartment at about 8 pm in Chicago. I didn’t see the following series of texts until I woke up, several hours after Tracey sent them:

8:00 – Caitlin, what kind of muffins are these in your freezer?

(I read this and racked my brain. I did not remember there being any muffins in my freezer when I left)

8:10 – Never mind. I’m just gonna put one in the microwave.

(I briefly consider the possibility that a very whimsical sociopath broke into my house and stuffed the freezer with poisoned muffins)

8:15 – Turns out it’s not a muffin, it’s meat! My favorite kind of muffin! What a great night.

Tracey had found some pulled pork that I had frozen in individual portions in a muffin tin – hence the muffin shape. When she stuck it in the microwave, it unfolded like the smoky pig flower it was. If my freezer had been well organized, we would never have gone on that journey of discovery together.

Quadrant 3: Fruits, vegetables and baking ingredients

I once heard a story on This American Life about people who choose to be cryogenically frozen right after they die. Their hope is that someday, when science advances far enough, they can be thawed out and their lives can be prolonged. That’s sort of what this quadrant of my freezer is like. It’s full of tomato pastes, coconut milks and chipotle chilies that have reached the ends of their natural lives – but I’ve promised to revive them as soon as science finds a cure. Of course, like in the This American Life story, it’s more likely that my freezer will malfunction before that happens, and I’ll be left with a very messy reminder that everything must die in the end…but today is not that day!

Quadrant 4: Prepared foods

Right now, this quadrant contains balls of cookie dough, pork potstickers, homemade sausage-stuffed eggplant, rice frozen into individual muffin-shaped portions and more. I like to think the whole collection puts my complex, diverse interests on display. It shows off my home cooking skills, and also my deep, lifelong love of frozen foods. When I was growing up, every Friday was “treat day.” My siblings and I would get to rent a movie from Premier Video and each pick out something from the “frozen meals for one” section at Cub foods. My parents regularly prepared nutritious meals from scratch for me and my siblings. But because most 10-year-olds are ungrateful jerks, I vastly preferred the spongy, animal-shaped chicken nuggets that came in the Kid Cuisine TV dinners. And sometimes there was a temporary tattoo under the tiny pudding cup! Treat day was the highlight of my week. Now, as an adult, I still get a small thrill out of loading up my cart with tater tots and single portions of chicken tikka masala at Trader Joe’s

Some things get eaten off the top of this section fairly frequently, but the weirder, less appealing stuff gets buried further and further down. Am I going to clean it out any time soon? Nope! It’s my “rainy day” insurance. Sure, we are facing our greatest national crisis since World War II, and the air outside is literally unsafe to breathe, but hey – maybe we haven’t hit rock bottom yet! When things really go to hell, I bet I’ll be glad to have a portion and a half of General Tso’s cauliflower at my disposal.

I suppose I could take this opportunity to fully de-clutter my freezer – but I don’t plan to. I have kind of enjoyed finding creative uses for many of the odds and ends I’ve stashed away in there. And I plan to continue cooking and freezing through the pandemic and beyond. It’s a practice born of both uncertainty and hope. I’ll boil dried chickpeas and freeze them in takeout soup containers because I don’t know when I’ll be able to get animal protein at the store again. But then, I’ll put some of the finished chana masala on ice too because, when you can finally come over for dinner again, I’m gonna want you to try it.

On the next page, there is a recipe for frozen taquitos. They are both made from ingredients I found in the freezer, and can be stored in the freezer once assembled. If you’re a freak like me who misses having a steady supply of par-fried frozen foods, these are for you! They don’t bake up quite as crispy as the real deal, but they can give you the satisfying experience of plopping them straight from cold storage, onto a baking sheet and into the oven. You can pretend it’s treat day. And they are dippable!