In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, a lot of us are buying more food than usual and realizing that, whoops, our fridges and freezers can’t support it. I typically buy about five days worth of food when I hit the store. My boyfriend is the worst grocery shopper in history, and goes once or twice a day to the store to just buy things for that immediate meal—something I tell him often is very silly. “Why don’t you just buy more while you’re there?” I ask. “I don’t know when I’ll be hungry next,” he says. Silly man logic.
Everything changed in our grocery habits since the coronavirus came out. My boyfriend has started actually grocery shopping—like buying enough for a week or more—and I’m buying two weeks worth of food at a time. We don’t want to have to go back out to the store, or out…anywhere, really. With both of us increasing our grocery shopping, you can imagine that our kitchen is struggling to keep up. We were loading up our fridge and freezer with our supplies recently and we realized, uh oh, we can’t fit everything in here!
We don’t want things to go bad. We can’t afford that. It would be a shame and would defeat the purpose of stocking up for the sake of staying in. So we had to get very clever about maximizing the space in our refrigerator and freezer—and the rest of our kitchen, really. Typically, you probably see a lot of wasted space in a fridge or freezer. Packaging is bulky. We have the luxury of spacing things out. But that’s not the case today. We probably all need to organize our quarantine supplies. Here are ways to optimize fridge space.
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Buy pantry non-dairy milk
Product like almond and coconut milk can take up a lot of space if stored in the fridge. So stop buying the big refrigerated cartons. These non-dairy milks come in small, room temperature, pantry-safe boxes. Purchase those, and just move them into the refrigerator on a need-be basis.
