Silver linings, lemonade from lemons, looking at the bright side and such

We had a carefully planned Saturday.  We each had a list a mile long and planned to go in separate directions and meet back at the house in the evening.  My husband got started with outside chores and I was working on some things in the kitchen, including our meal plan for the weekend. 

I requested a few items from our freezer. First, you should know that our freezer is in the basement and our basement is the old coal cellar of the schoolhouse.  There is an exterior entrance and we usually save up our trips to the freezer and combine it with a trip outside for chores or another errand.

My husband returns to the kitchen and tells me that the freezer has stopped working and we have many, many pounds of partially thawed meat.  We had retrieved something earlier in the week, so we counted up days and took stock of the food and decided that it was all still edible, but we needed to  move fast. I quickly cleaned out our freezer upstairs and we shifted all of the food that was still frozen to a new spot.  That left us with some (a lot! of)  food to prepare.

Between Saturday and today, we browned around 12 pounds of ground buffalo and three packages of buffalo sausage, cooked two buffalo roasts, some soup bones, and a whole turkey, and we grilled about eight buffalo steaks.  I ended up making a few freezer meals and adding a lot of prepared meat to our freezer.

Here are some links to recipes for the freezer meals:

Lasagna casserole

Cheeseburger casserole

Black bean taco soup

Tater tot casserole

For several weeks I had been wanting to do some cooking ahead and the broken freezer pushed me to action.  It wasn't really in my plan and I am still a little grumpy about all of the dishes I washed over two days. We just kept saying, "it could have been worse!" 

The silver lining, the lemonade from lemons, and the bright side is that our new freezer is installed and has several new food items for us to enjoy over the next few weeks.