Forget Christmas in July. Around these parts we’re having Thanksgiving in May.
You see last November I had accumulated enough points at my local grocery store to qualify for a free turkey. However, since I was not hosting Thanksgiving that year, I didn’t actually need to cook the turkey right away. So I got the free turkey and put it in the freezer.
Fast forward six months and I was reading a great article in a magazine about getting yourself organized. One piece of advice was to create a list of everything you had in your freezer and post it on the freezer door. This would help you to meal plan based on what you’ve already got frozen, which should help you save money in the long run. While inventorying the freezer, I found the turkey.
Lucky for us not too much time has passed–according to the USDA, you can safely freeze a whole, uncooked turkey for up to one year. I’d actually thought that this number was closer to six months, which is why you found us cooking a Thanksgiving turkey this weekend.
We’ve got lots of plans for working that turkey into meal plans this week. Today, I might make turkey salad, by chopping the meat, and adding mayonnaise, chopped celery and dried cranberries, and serving it as sandwiches. On Wednesday, Cinco de Mayo, we’ll likely have shredded turkey tacos to celebrate the day. And one night we may have a traditional Thanksgiving-like dinner, with warm turkey, canned cranberries I have leftover from the fall (canned goods last for years) and cooked vegetables.
Do you have anything sitting in your freezer that you ought to work into your meal plans this month before it goes bad? Let me know what you find and how you ended up using it.
READ LEAH ON HOME GOES STRONG
There’s still quite a bit of kale,chard and beet greens in our freezer that is destined to become a hearty soup with the addition of white beans and sausage. There’s also the last bit of pesto from last summer that I’ll have to incorporate into a tomato sauce before the fresh basil starts growing in the garden.
BTW, your new look is fabulous!
DeeDee:
I want to come have some pesto at your house. Bill made homemade sauce yesterday, with sausage we’d bought at the farm camp one of our daughters attended last August. He also made turkey stock. Talk about cleaning out the freezer.
Thanks for the compliment!
Leah
I’m proud to say that we’ve been working on this over the last several weeks and only have 2-3 things in the freezer. It made us think outside of the box for meal ideas based purely on what we had in the freezer and pantry.
Now the trick is not to go overboard when stocking back up.
List on the freezer door sounds like a great idea.
I don’t have an extra freezer, since for the two of us our regular fridge freeze suffices. However, so many time I don;t even know what is stuck in there..especially towards the back of the freezer.