Thinking on the Fly

What To Do With All Those Freeze Dried Cans


The other day someone asked what they could do with all those left over cans from their freeze dried foods, and several people were tossing around ideas. One woman recommended taking a dozen or so, and sticking them into the freezer filled with water as an emergency back up ice supply for when you lose power. She said she keeps a layer at the bottom of her freezer at all times just in case.

I thought at the time that this idea was a waste - especially of valuable freezer space for frozen foods you have stored from your garden. As the days went on, though, I thought it might be a minor sacrifice of a small amount of space to ensure that you won’t lose all those foods in a sudden outage. Now it started to make sense, but I had not bothered to do it yet because I just didn’t take the time.

Then it happened. No, we didn’t lose power, but close enough. The brand new refrigerator stopped working properly and the milk turned into cottage cheese over night. The top freezer was still working perfectly, but the refrigerator was warm. Thank goodness we didn’t have alot of spoilable foods in there, but we did have butter, milk, and 1/2 a meatloaf. The meatloaf jumped up to the freezer and I put the milk into a bowl full of ice. The butter was cool enough to keep until I could take care of things.

I called the manufacturer and scheduled an appointment because it is under warranty, but they can’t come until several days from now. A week or two ago we had just thrown out about 4-6 empty cans that I wasn’t using for anything, and I couldn’t figure out what to do with. That was BEFORE the conversation I had the other day with friends. I went through my cupboard really quick and grabbed several almost empty cans then went to it.

Two cans I filled 1/3 of the way to stick the milk jug into directly - it’s only a 1/2 gallon jug so I figured this will work great. Then I filled two cans completely to place one at a time in the fridge to keep it as cold as I possibly could. All total, I stuck four cans of ice in the freezer so that I can preserve the milk and butter and ensure we don’t lose any of the mustard and ketchup.

Thinking on the fly - I guess maybe all those years of prepping paid off in that respect, but had I been a little more prepared with some things already done, I would have been more able to live up to my claim of being a prepper!