Freezing Your Budget at Today’s Prices

While some foods take up a lot of unnecessary room in the freezer, others can nail down the cost of a food to stop inflation and make life a whole lot easier. Previously, I’ve discussed cutting and freezing meats to save money. Here I will talk about other things, which once frozen, make life easier.

There are seasonal items to chop up and freeze. Green, yellow, and red peppers can be bought seasonally, chopped up, and frozen. Then simply grab some out of the bag and throw them in your omelet, stew, or even ice to give it added flavor. Not only have we now saved money by buying these items in season, we’ve saved ourselves time in prep work.

The same thing can be done with onions, but with a twist. If you have a face mask which covers the eyes and nose, you can chop, bag, and freeze onions without crying over the job. Goggles do not work, because they don’t cover the nose. A favorite is red onions, since they’re sweeter once sautéed in butter.

The trick to freezing all these items is every hour or so taking the bag of chopped vegetables out of the freezer and shaking it against the counter until it's all the way frozen. This stops the clumping. Many people buy frozen, grated cheese. Cheese can be bought in pre-packaged blocks and stored for a long time in the refrigerator, since they’re already sealed. Once opening a block, then it’s important to use it within a month or so in order to avoid molding. If for some reason it molds a little, simply cut off the mold, which is actually penicillin, and put the cheese in a fresh plastic bag.

Another item a lot of people do not consider freezing is butter. Butter freezes nicely, and doesn’t separate during the thawing process. Butter will often fluctuate in price by over a dollar a pound, so it’s worth freezing at the lower price.

Prepared frozen meals on the whole are much more expensive, and take up large amounts of room in the freezer. To maximize a budget, these items should be considered ‘treats’ and be bought on the weekly budget. The less we ‘treat’ ourselves, the lower the weekly food bill.

The optimal weekly budget should consist of milk, sour cream, fresh fruits and fresh vegetables. Currently this runs about $10 per person, per week. The closer we get to this budget, the more we know we’ve moved our weekly food budget onto our annual food budget. Then, when prices rise, we have made room in our budgets to handle it, and we’ve nailed down most of our prices into the past. Considering the constant rise of gas dipping into our weekly budget, freezing the food budget to today’s prices allows room for the pain at the pump.