In speaking with member @Abigail Ringger she mentioned that she wanted some tips to better manage her freezer and pantry. Rather than run the risk of a crazy long post covering both at once, I'll do quick Freezer tips in this post and will follow up with some video as soon as possible. After some thought, I've decided to share these three freezer tips... Quick Tip #1 - Whenever possible, avoid freezing items in packaging that has excess air space in it. The short explanation to this is simply that excess air space contributes to freezer burn. Freezer burn is the main cause of frozen food waste. I'll be doing a quick video on this after we do our weekly shop to show how you can do this if you don't have a vacuum sealer. Quick Tip #2 - If you aren't already doing this, use a permanent marker to write either the purchased date or the freeze date on your packages. Doing this will help with implementing what I call a FIFO system. FIFO is short for First IN, first OUT. This means the first items you froze should be the first items you use. This will help rotate your freezer stock so it doesn't sit long enough to freezer burn in the event you can't repackage it to have less airspace. Quick Tip #3 - If it's possible, separate your freezer space by item type. We use cardboard boxes. Chicken goes into one, Beef in another, Pork in yet another. Doing this will help find items based on the date you wrote on the package more easily. If you want porkchops, for example, look in the pork box and take the porkchops with the oldest date on them to thaw for your meal. We have multiple freezers here so this is not something we currently do, but have in the recent past. I hope these quick tips are helpful. You may be using one or all of them. If you have any questions or other tips you think may be helpful, I'd love to hear about them in the comments! Oh, and as a little extra, I've included a PDF of a freezer list that we use here at home for those times when we have a lot of freezer items.

Let's face it, in a lot of places the cost of food is getting absurd. Prices are increasing, sometimes weekly. If you're looking for actionable ways to get the grocery bill goblins under control this tip may be helpful. The tip: The next time you need to go shopping and need something like sugar, flour, or rice, i recommend taking the time to do the price comparison between a large quantity like a 10kg/22lb bag and multiple smaller quantities, such as 2kg/4.4lbs. Sometimes bigger isn't always cheaper. Using sugar as an example, my local grocer has it for $15.97 for a 10kg bag (22lbs). However if I check the price of the smaller 2kg bags(4.4lbs) they might be on sale for $2.47 each, which happens often. If we do the math, 5 small 2 kg (4.4lb) bags of sugar at $2.47 each comes out to $12.35 for 10 kg (22 lbs.) of sugar. In the case of the smaller bags being on sale, the larger single bag is no savings at $15.97 That's a savings of $3.62. It might not seem like much, but if you can do this consistently, 3 or 4 dollars here, 2 or 3 dollars there, pretty soon you've saved enough to treat the family to a real pizza or some other goodie you couldn't have before. Just for comparison if we divided $15.97 by 5 ( the number of small bags we get) the cost per bag would be about $3.19. Certainly no savings over the 5 smaller quantity bags at $2.47 each on sale. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this tip in the comments below.

Quick tip: If you want to expand the refrigerator life of cream, transfer it from the carton to a sealable jar. When we get a liter of cream, either whipping cream or heavy cream, the first thing we do is transfer it to a mason jar with a lid and ring. We use those because we have tons of them from canning preserves, but any sealable jar with a good lid will work. Doing this will help keep the air from causing spoilage, and will create a barrier that will help keep the cream from absorbing refrigerator odors from other foods. After transferring the only thing to get in the habit of doing is wiping the jar rim after pouring to avoid cream crust which will interfere with the seal between the jar and lid. We've found that doing this can extend the life of our cream by up to a month, sometimes more.

Shopping at dollar stores may be costing you more for some items than you think. As someone who frequents their local dollar store, I've noticed that certain food items are NOT really that good of a deal. Take our last dish of Tuna casserole. The recipe calls for one can of chunk or flake tuna. We had two cans of tuna from the dollar store. Great! Not so much, when we opened the can, we found that half the contents were unusable liquid. We had half a can of actual tuna. At a cost of $1.00 per can, or in this case half a can, we'd need 2 cans at a cost of $2.00. A single can of tuna at Walmart, with much less liquid and more actual tuna, would have cost us around $1.27. Consequently, the dollar store tuna robbed us of $0.72 because we needed 2 cans instead of 1. I know 72 cents doesn't sound like much, but if you lose 72 cents here and 72 cents there, it only takes about 13 times, and you've lost nearly $10. In today's economy, every penny counts. Or for Canadians, every nickle counts because we don't have pennies anymore... but you get the idea. What other food could you have bought with that $10? Milk? Bacon? Bread? See where I am going with this? The next time you're at your local dollar store shopping, ask yourself if you are actually getting a deal or not. Oh, and check your receipts for correct pricing on what you DO purchase, but that's a post for a future date. If you're reading this post in another community and want more actionable tips, tricks and information on how you can tame your food budget without sacrifice, check out The Pennywise Pantry