Freezer

One of the things that was hard to deal with when we moved abroad was the size of the appliances - everything is much smaller (or maybe American things are just crazy big?). Our refrigerator here is a decent size but the freezer is sooo small. I guess it never really bothered me too much before since I never used it much, but now that we are on our new eating program and I am a cooking a ton I am really finding that I need to store leftovers and such in the freezer. On top of the eating program I have also been experimenting with a book called "The Sneaky Chef" - it's about making vegetable purees and hiding them in the kids's food. Jack's eating habits are really beginning to worry me, thankfully I at least found a chewable vitamin that he likes but I just cannot get him (or Ava for that matter) to eat vegetables. Two nights ago it took an hour for him to finally have 4 bites of the grilled pork that I made and it involved a tantrum or two and a lot of tears so I gave up on trying to get the vegetable in him as well. I bought the book a couple of years ago and tried out a bunch of recipes but Ava hated them all - Jack was a baby and it required way too much effort so I gave up, but I decided to dust off the book and give it another try (I also have the one Jessica Seinfeld wrote). Yesterday I made granola bars with oats, honey, rice cereal, ground almonds and ground flax seeds and they seemed to like them. I made a green puree of spinach, broccoli and peas and hid that in some meatballs, Ava loved them (and ate them after she finished her chicken dinner) but Jack had surprisingly eaten his chicken so he didn't want the meatballs. I will try them for lunch today. I also made a purple puree with spinach and frozen blueberries and that will go into some brownies I will be making later today hopefully. Jack loves brownies so I am hoping he will eat these. But anyway all of this is taking a lot of time and effort and most of these purees require storage in the freezer and I am running out of room. Here is a picture of the freezer - the top shelf fits two batches of soup that I made for the program, plus some muffins for snacks, a bag of frozen veggies and a box of chicken nuggets. The bottom shelf fits my ice cubes, two boxes of popsicles, bags of frozen fruits and veggies, a frozen pizza, and a loaf of bread (Mike's favorite bread here is only sold at a store that I hardly ever get to so I buy two loaves and freeze one). And because everything is packed in, if I move one thing everything shifts so you have to rearrange the entire shelf. Pretty annoying.

I was very excited when we first moved in because there is an extra refrigerator in our utility room, but when I turned it on an alarm kept beeping so I had to text the landlord's daughter and she told me the freezer didn't work, just the fridge did. It's a nice bonus to have that extra storage space in the fridge, but I am annoyed because I almost feel like it was false advertising when we looked at the place, thinking we had a fully working extra refrigerator.  Here is a picture of the three extra drawers of freezer that we can't use. I really need to buy that ice maker so I have a little bit more space....