Use the Anylist App to Track What is In Your Freezer

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll show you yet another use for the AnyList app -- keeping track of what's in your freezer.

If you've watching some of my other videos, you'll know that AnyList is one of my favorite apps that I use virtually every day.  I use it in the normal way -- for shopping and errands.  My video on that is kind of an app overview.  I have an use that is a bit unorthodox that helps me keep track of items that I have to bring when I leave the house for multiple activities.  AND I also use Today's List as a quick list to remember to bring things, buy things, or do things today.  I have one additional use for AnyList, which I will share with you today and that is to keep track of what is in my freezer.

So, I have a friend who is a "just in time" shopper.  Meaning that she buys only as much food as she needs to make meals for the week.  Her freezer is practically bare.  Imagine the exact opposite of that — and that is what I am!  In fact, a couple of years ago, we had a big snow, which closed grocery stores for a couple of days and just for kicks and grins, I went through and counted the number of meals that I could make with what I had in my cupboards and freezer.  Most of my friends could make around 10 meals, but I could make THIRTY FIVE.  I'm a bit better now about striking a balance between preparing for the apocalypse and making good use of the food I have now.  BUT, I'm still someone who really uses her freezer.

I like to buy meat in bulk, package it in useable portions, and freeze it for later use.  The thing is, at any given time, I would have no idea what was in my freezer or how old it was.  And generally, whatever was in my freezer was pretty old since you can’t use it if you don't know you have it!  AND it was inconvenient while I was doing my meal planning to walk out to our freezing cold garage and dig around in the freezer to figure out what I could do for meals, so I just wasn't doing that.  As a result, I was wasting food by not using it quickly enough.  I tried a couple of solutions, including keeping an Evernote memo, but the one that has worked the best for me is using AnyList.

I have a list called Freezer -- which I manually sort to the bottom of my lists.  In it -- I keep a list of everything in my 2 freezers.  A couple of notes:

• Categories - you can see that I have my items sorted by category.  To a certain extent, this naturally happens in AnyList.  It has a database of items for grocery shopping and tries to anticipate the category for you.  I find it extremely helpful to have freezer items in categories, so if Anylist doesn't get the category right, I change it by hitting the edit button next to the item, selecting Change Category and picking from this list.  I use the standard categories for Meat, Seafood, and Other, but I created a new category called Full Meals.  I like to cook double the pasta sauce or soup when at all possible, so I have a frozen meal all ready to go in my freezer.  As you can see, right now I have a frozen pizza, beef stroganoff, meat sauce for pasta, BBQ pulled pork, and a ravioli stew that are full meals frozen and ready to go.  To create a new category, act like you are editing the category and then choose Add Category.  Then you can choose Edit Categories to delete and reorder categories and to choose your default.  The order that you choose is not just the order the categories comes up when you edit, but it is also is the order of your list.  You can see Full Meals is at the top of my list, since I moved it to the top in the category list.
• Multiple Items - I like to shop for meat in bulk at Costco or when things go on sale, so I end up with multiples of the same item.  For example, Costco sells ground beef in an enormous package.  When I get home, I repackage it into four more useable portions of about 1 1/2lb each.  So should I put in 4 different line items for each package?  This is entirely up to you, but I have found that having each as an individual line is a little overwhelming.  So, I keep like items on one line, put a dash after it, and then enter the quantity.  So, my ground beef looks like this.  You'll notice that I do have a couple of other line items for ground beef.  That is because I DO differentiate by the weight of the package, so I have line items for 1.3lb, 1.5lb, and 1.8lb packages.  Again, if you don't care about that, you can just put them all on one line item and just realize that there will be some variability in weight.  When I use one of these packages, instead of marking off the line item, I hit Edit and change the quantity.  Putting the quantity at the end makes this update much easier.  
• Siri - I use Siri all the time to add items to my shopping list.  You could certainly do this for your freezer list also, but I tend to add and edit my freezer items manually since I have a certain format that I like to use and it is easier to remember it when I can reference other line items in the list.
• Excluded Items - This list is in no way comprehensive.  I have other things in my freezer including frozen fruit, frozen vegetables, stir fry sauces, frozen green smoothies, snack foods, etc.  I don't keep them in this list since I don't generally forget about those items and I don't use them for meal planning.  
• Undo - The other complaint that I have about this system is that it is extraordinarily easy to mark off a line item by mistake just by hitting it.  I like the single tap to cross off in all of my other uses for AnyList, but you CAN change it to Double Tap to cross off in the Settings.  What I rely on is the shake to undo.  This is a universal iOS feature, but if you find that you've deleted a line item accidentally, shake your device and you'll get the "Undo Cross Off Item" prompt to allow you to undo it.

So, that is basically it.  Freezers are particularly hard to organize these days -- particularly bottom freezers which are basically just a drawer that you dump things into, so I do a bit of physical organizing, but I rely on AnyList to help me conceptually organize my freezers so I always know what I have to use at any given time.  I'll show you a bit of how I physically organize my freezer using a vaccuum sealer in my next video.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!