I’ve worked out why my fridge works and my freezer doesn’t.
My fridge is often pretty full but that never stops me getting in there and starting a meal because my salad makings and the general vegetables for cooking dinner are both in big, separate containers. I just grab a container, put it on the kitchen bench, and start. The containers are tall plastic bins that fit side by side on one of my shelves. They’re so tall that I rearranged the shelves to fit them and have a shallow shelf above as a result, but it works perfectly. I have vegetables in other places in my fridge as well. In a crisper drawer on the shallow shelf most of my smoothie-making fruits and greens live. Mushrooms, eggplant (aubergine) and not yet opened 1kg blocks of cheese live on the bottom shelf in a rectangular container. Extra fruit and vegetables go into my fridge’s crisper, while milk, drinks and pre-made dishes and leftovers live on the top shelf.
I save my vegetable water to use for making soup, so I have a tall lidded bottle in the fridge door for that. The bottle lives in the fridge whether it is empty or full.
But it’s the two containers for salad vegetables and cooking vegetables that I think my fridge revolves around. They’re always in the same place (they don’t fit anywhere else, so have to be) and always have the correct food in them for the kind of meal I’m planning to prepare. I’ll get extras from other spots in the fridge, but I always have the nucleus on my meal in one of those containers.
So that’s the secret. Find something that works for the long term. For me, it’s containerising items I’ll use together. My salad container also carries cheese, relish/mayo and whatever cooked meat I’m going to use. To make sandwiches, I need to grab bread and butter as well. Easy. Perhaps my freezer needs a similar kind of fit out? I’ll see what containers I have that might do the job, and make a start.