Saturday, July 24, 2010

I Can't Believe I Didn't Think Of This Before!

I use freezer bags a lot.  Sometimes I use gallon-size, but mostly I use quart-size bags.  I often use them to freeze smaller portions of food I buy in bulk, such was walnuts or those family-packs of meat. Or I'll buy a big bag of frozen berries and break it up into smaller bags for freezing (so I have to open each bag less often and it gets fewer ice crystals). 

But filling the freezer bags can be awkward:  they don't stand up by themselves, and they don't stay open.  This is particularly troublesome when I'm puting chicken or other meat into the bags.  I don't want to touch the outside of the bags and possibly contaminate them with any salmonella I may have on my fingers (from the meat--I don't walk around with salmonella on my fingers--not often any way).

But a couple days ago I thought of a simple solution to both problems, and tonight I got a chance to test my idea.

First, I washed out an empty #2 can, and used a can opener to remove the bottom.












Then I simply stood the bottomless can up in the freezer bag I wanted to fill, and put the contents into the can.


The can is shorter than the bag, so as I filled up the can I shook the contents down into the bottom of the bag, and slid the can up to finish filling up the bag.


It worked great.  I filled the bag with no problems.  Now I'm ready for the next time I buy a big package of chicken!

4 comments:

  1. Oh wow. I can't believe I didn't, we use the same cans for fast starting charcoal on the bar-be-que!

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  2. I wonder what other things we haven't thought of yet that would save us time or make things easier.

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  3. Is it possible to put the bag inside the can for filling? So you don't have to clean out the dirty can - and if you don't have to remove the can's bottom, it could be reused as a can?

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  4. Hey Malayla, yeah, I tried that. But the bag kept closing up. I could keep it open by folding the top down, but I was worried that I'd accidently blow out a seam if I did that. It might work if I had exactly the right size can, but nothing I've tried is exactly right. Ah well.

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