As a young family, having meals together mean a lot to us. In Southern California where the pace is fast and the cost is higher, we turn to batch cooking to enable us to eat like a prince on a peasant’s budget, and save time on those busy days that spill into evenings.
Making extra portions and freezing them for lazier-to-cook days is relatively straightforward. However we quickly found it harder to remember what we had ready to heat/eat, which occasionally left us scrambling when we had one less portion than needed for a whole dinner, or forgot all together and succumbed to take-out or dine-out in our hunger-weakened decision moments.
Mitigation attempts had left us desiring more. The paper list taped to the freezer got messy with scribbled out tally counts over time, and only helped us when we looked at it at home. While we may have known there were 10 burritos floating around, we didn’t know when each were created. Combine that with the laziness on our part to hand-write dates on sticky notes for each item. Although we hadn’t yet encountered unidentifiable blocks of frozen blob, the potential certainly was there.
…As with anyone with legitimate engineering cred, this would not be tolerated for long without a sustainable solution.
