Meaty Monday: Freezer Organization

With five dogs on a raw food diet, we have to stock pile meat and veggies, unless we want to go on daily visits to the grocery store to feed our dogs.  We decided that we did not want to have to go to the store weekly, either, which means that we can not simply refrigerate the dog food.  So, that means that we buy in bulk and freeze the dogs' meals.  In the books we read, the recommended method was to buy a big box of meat, stick it in the freezer, and chip off the parts we wanted to feed every day.

Since a giant 40-pound block of chicken backs will not fit in our tiny freezer in the laundry room, and the kitchen freezer was declared "human food only", we couldn't freeze the way the books taught.  We also wanted a way to facilitate feeding, and so we would remember what to feed who and when, so Olivia came up with what we dubbed "the bag method." This consisted of having a baggie for every meal of the week for each dog.  Then, we put the bags in containers labeled with the dogs' names and stuck them in the freezer.

 This method sufficed for a little while, however there were some pretty prevalent issues that could not be over looked.  First and foremost, this method took up wwwwaaaaaaayyyy too much room in the freezer.  There was also the problem of the meat freezing to the bag, so if we ever forgot to thaw the dogs' breakfast or dinner, we had to pry the meat off of the plastic while praying that we didn't rip a giant hole in the bag and have to replace it.  We also had to wash the bags by hand if we didn't want to spend a gazillion dollars buying plastic baggies.  This meant that at the end of each week we ended up with a sinkful of dirty bags that no one wanted to wash and dry.
So, that left us stumped. We wanted a simpler storage method that also had an easier washing solution.  Ideally, we could toss the meat into containers and stack them in the freezer. But how could we make the RMBs not stick together? 

Here is our solution:

Chicken wings are Tucker and Spryte's favorite RMB!

When we buy the food, we grease two of our "dog" cookie sheets with olive oil and lay out the meat so that it freezes in individual pieces. That way, when all of it is put in a container, it doesn't stick together.  The first day or two is spent freezing all the meat, but once it's done, it will last for three or four weeks! After freezing, we pull the trays out of the freezer and quickly dump all the RMBs into their designated container.  Daisy's RMB's are too big to fit in any of our containers, so we still use baggies for her.  However, instead of putting individual meals in the baggies, we use them as mass storage devices. Usually, we can fit 4-5 chicken leg quarters or 6-8 chicken backs into one gallon-sized freezer bag.

We found an old dry-erase calendar, wrote out the feeding schedule with the amounts for each dog and stuck it to the front of our freezer. Now, we just check the schedule and pull out the pieces we need as we need them.  Then, when a container is emptied, we can just throw it in the dishwasher and grab a different one to fill! Our freezer is also now spacious enough for the all important half gallon of ice cream that can't fit into the kitchen freezer.

So much more room!

 Eventually, we removed the ice maker to create even more space, and now we can fit in enough meat and veggies to last us almost a month and a half!

--Emma