When our family decided to take on the homesteading journey, our first change was the way we bought groceries, and stored food. We still live in a suburban neighborhood so we still buy certain things at the grocery store. After all we are beginning this adventure 🙂
Staple items still need to be purchased at the grocery store, first because of the city zoning regulations in suburban neighborhoods. Second, because we don’t have the space to grow enough wheat, grain, rice, and other major staple food items on our suburban property. This includes meat.
This was the start to changing our habits, so while I may not recommend the brands of meat you see in this wagon. Starting to purchase meat in bulk and then create freezer meals allowed our meat supply to last us around two months.
Now, I’ll be honest. Planning, creating, and executing freezer meals is a hard habit to develop. Quite frankly I think its an art form. So don’t worry if it feels overwhelming. Start slow, you can plan ahead without having a menu ready for the entire month.
The first thing we bought when we changed our food storage habits, was a deep freezer. Best purchase we ever made. It literally stores months of food, saving me time and money. Grocery shopping is not my calming activity 🙂
You can see in this picture we first started storing meat in store bought freezer bags, and as you can imagine by the end of the second month some of our meat was freezer burnt. And so I started double bagging, because that’s what I was taught, that’s how my mom did things 🤦♀
Little did I know this was a huge waste of plastic and didn’t really help much.
Then, I discovered the vacuum sealer. This has saved us so much in preventing food waste. It’s amazing how much more I’ve been able to accomplish towards real meal planning with the vacuum sealer. No more freezer burnt meat.
Now, that hasn’t prevented the use of plastic, if I’m honest I probably over use my vacuum sealer to make things more convenient for myself. Like having just two waffles in a bag so I can pop two in the toaster for the kids in the morning.
I don’t have to worry about trying to unstick 5 or 6 waffles from a plastic bag. And when we had left overs from eating out I used it to stick the left overs in the freezer. Super helpful when you have picky eaters and I knew my kids wouldn’t eat it for awhile.
This way I could save it for another night instead of leaving it in the fridge to go bad by the end of the week. If there’s anything that annoys me, its wasting perfectly good food.
During our transition from plastic bags, we even started using the vacuum sealer to marinate the meat after it had defrosted. You know, while I was at work the meat would soak up the marinade and then I could just pop it in the oven or the cooker when I got home.
It’s also helped with the vegetables. Vegetables get freezer burn faster than meat. The vacuum sealer made the vegetables last twice as long. Meaning I really can meal prep for at least two months and not worry about freezer burnt meals. yay!!!
I hope your journey towards the homesteading lifestyle saves you as much time and money as it has for me.
For more ways to store food, check out my journey through pickling, and dehydrating.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are ‘affiliate links’. This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission.
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