If you are interested – I have the rest of my home here under this tag – Sherry’s Home
Here is my updated picture of my fridge and freezer at the END of a the week (usually a Friday, or Saturday morning).
This is the fridge door:
We bought extra fridge separators as you can see, for about $5 each from the manufacturer because I was getting sick of plastic lids falling down and being used in lieu of actual separators.
This is where I think, I separate myself from the truly frugal folk — most of them would just suck it up, get annoyed each time the lid falls when you move a bottle, and just not bother with anything because they don’t want to spend the money.
I see it as a constant annoyance, as well as noise pollution, so we paid $60 and I am VERY HAPPY with all of the extra shelf separators in the fridge.
/end of rant
Moving on —
We have butter up top, some yeast, some cheese in that little box, milk in the first shelf (that’s fish sauce on the far left), with seltzer water.
The second shelf is yoghurt, Little Bun’s goat milk, and his Life Factory glass bottles. He still enjoys them.
All of our milk bottles are glass and reusable – we return them for $2 each when we go to get more milk. We switched over 8 years ago and have never looked back. We must have saved quite a lot in plastic and carton waste, and the only part that is wasteful is the plastic cap and the little security tab we rip off when we open the bottle – but this is a low amount of plastic from what we had before.
Our main fridge area at the end of the week is empty. There is no food waste here.
More cheese on the bottom shelf, there is some pastry roll ready for a cake my partner was baking for a little treat, and pasta in a bowl that Little Bun eats for breakfast when he is peckish.
We do not buy more than we need, we plan all of our meals, and food waste is not a thing here.
Lastly, the freezer:
We have frozen soups and stews that we thaw weekly to feed Little Bun, ice packs, and the very bottom is the result of my partner’s hard work from 50lbs of farm picked tomatoes that he peeled, removed the insides of, and cooked down into a thick tomato paste to be used for pizzas, beans and other tomato-based dishes.
We do not buy tomato paste.
Other notes:
We have no condiments except for fish sauce, and soy sauce – I am the only one who will use it on occasion – this means no ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard… we don’t eat those things so we don’t store them.
We don’t buy one-use condiments either, and aren’t into storing these things because … we don’t need them in the meals we eat.
This is why I eat out often as well – sometimes I have a craving for one bowl of red Thai curry, and I am not going to make a huge pot of it even if it is cheaper for 2 reasons: (1) My partner is very sensitive to smells and curry would basically ruin all of the nice French cheeses he has stored in the fridge, and (2) I am the only one who eats them, so I’d likely break out in acne
We do have spices – turmeric, paprika, etc… and use them.
He also meal plans really well, and each week I’ve learned just to take his base meal, and supplement with vegetables I feel like eating that are in season, like beets, etc.
It works out well and we have been eating vegan/vegetarian a lot more often which has made me feel a lot better physically as well.
That is not to say we are against meat — we are not. We just eat far less of it, and gradually have been decreasing down to about 1-2 meals a week, and only for special occasions.
I feel like this is the right approach for our health and bodies, and it has also saved some money in the sense that we can now buy much higher quality ingredients of everything else without meat in the budget. Just the other day, I picked up 2 boxes of raspberries for $6 and we ate them all happily. I normally would have balked at $6 in the past, but now… *shrug*
