We discovered this morning that when someone went downstairs to get bread for dinner out of the freezer, the door didn’t seal completely.

Thankfully we keep our freezer very cold, so somethings in the back were still frozen solid, and only about half the stuff in the freezer needed to be cooked or eaten. It was still an overwhelming process, trying to make sure I could use everything.

Savory squash cheddar bread

Zucchini bread with pecans

Regular zucchini bread

Stagger your cooking methods

One of the challenges of processing all the food is that it takes up so much time. By staggering your cooking times, you give yourself some room to breathe, so you can be “working” on things without having your hands in everything. When I’m cooking in bulk, I like to make a few easy things first while I have the most energy, then setup some items that I can set and forget in the crock pot to deal with the next day.

Easy long cook time crock pot items

• Broth (24-48 hours)
• Yogurt (8-9 hours)
• Chicken/Ground Meats/other meat (6-8 hours)
• Brining and smoking meat (we soak ours for 8-12 hours in a brine before smoking items like fish, smoking can take a couple of hours for fish, or 4+ hours for a big item like a turkey)

Stagger your processing times

In an ideal world, we’d all have limitless time and energy, but this is real life. You may not have time to deal with everything, so look at what you can safely leave in the fridge till the next day.

In my case I had things like gallons of milk that weren’t even done thawing, so I let them sit for several days in the fridge while I worked on everything else that was more urgent.

No one wants to have to process a freezer worth of food in a day or two. If you’re reading this blog post because it happened to you, I totally feel your pain. If you had any tips that worked well for you, let me know and I’ll add them to the post so it can help someone else out too!