Depending on which weather forecast I look at, it’s possible that we might get significant ice tonight. I certainly hope not for many reasons (one being that I’m leaving Friday with 3 other women from church to go to Dallas to the DotMom conference we’ve been planning for months!), but I realized that I probably need to prepare for the worst.
Thankfully, because of my Cooking from the Pantry Challenge, my stores of frozen goods are lower than normal. However, there is still a significant amount of meat and other items I don’t want to lose.
Because any freezer keeps food colder longer the fuller it is, I needed to consider that my deep freeze was less than half capacity. Even after moving the food from my outdoor freezer to the deep freeze, I still had plenty of free space. My solution: fill jars with water to freeze them in the free space.
My mother-in-law and cousin had given me quart-size jars for Christmas, so off I went filling each jar one by one. (I left about 1″ of headspace to account for the expanding water as it freezes.) Hopefully these make-shift ice packs will help keep the freezer cold in case we lose power for an extended period.
Another benefit to having frozen water in jars is a good supply of fresh water should water quality be compromised in the event of an extremely long outage.
Now, I’m obviously hoping that all this work was for nothing!! But it never hurts to be prepared!
(Note: forgive the horribly blurry photo. I have no idea what was up with my camera this morning!)