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"I like to think of myself as a reasonably skillful user of the freezer. I know the wonders it can work on an unbaked pie. I know that one trick for insta-chilling a bottle of wine using the freezer and a damp cloth.   But that's just child's play compared to my mom. When I was young, she used to collect dead birds in the kitchen freezer\u2014a partridge, a woodpecker. I couldn't remember quite why (she was an art teacher; it made a vague sort of sense) and when I asked her about it recently, she explained she'd wanted to save the birds and learn taxidermy. Alas: the freezer broke, and the birds turned to mush before they could be transformed into an educational opportunity. It was then that I learned that for some folks, the freezer isn't a just place to chill foods. It's a place to store dreams. To stave off fears. To build community. The bigger the freezer, the stranger the stories you'll find inside. Here are just a few of them.  Related6 Things You Can Do With Frozen Pizza Dough (Besides, You Know, Pizza)View article  The Doomsday prepper  About six months ago, Jane, a prepper blogger who lives in Tornado Alley in Texas, worried about how she and her husband would survive out there after a tornado or other extreme-weather event. Other everyday concerns also started crowding in, too.   \"Our goal is, can we exist for six months if my husband lost his job?\" she says. \"Could we go six months without needing to buy major necessities because we've planned ahead?\" Six months is just one example, Jane adds\u2014her goal is to think beyond that. \"We're not going to say that we have like a year's worth of food, water, clothing, fuel, or anything, because we never want to think that's all we ever need to do.\"  So Jane (who wouldn't share her last name on the record) keeps a stocked chest freezer that she constantly adds to and subtracts from, as part of an overall prepper system. What's in there right now? About 40 pounds of sausage, five chickens, \"a year's supply of different kinds of fruit.\" Ground beef, pork chops, frozen herbs, pizza dough. Jane emails me a few minutes after our phone call; she's gone to check the inventory sheet she keeps. \"On top of what I told you\u2014I store whole wheat, graham and chickpea flours, flax, chia, and hemp seeds that I use in smoothies and baking, a year's worth of butter (can't beat $1.99 sales), bacon, 10 quarts of chicken stock, and 3 gallon bags of chicken bones to make stock.\"   Like this, but a lot more.Photo by Peden &amp; Munk  As Jane acknowledged in a recent post, using the freezer is surprisingly controversial within the prepper community. \"I had people all over me going: You can't! You can't!\" she says. \"There are a lot of people that refuse to use one, simply for the fact that if they have a power outage that lasts longer than 48 hours, they've lost all that food that they've put in there.\"  But the prepper is prepared\u2014Jane has a plan in place if the power goes. First, nobody opens the freezer or the refrigerator; the appliances get wrapped in blankets for insulation. The freezer is already stocked with a few gallons of water to keep things cool in case of a loss of power, and for another reason too\u2014if the contents of the freezer thaw completely and then refreeze, the water will turn cloudy, and Jane will know the food in the freezer should be tossed. If the water near the top of the freezer is cloudy but the water deeper down isn't, she'll only need to throw out the top layer of food.  And if the power stays off? It's time to get cooking, Jane says\u2014heat the grill or a propane stove, if you've got it, cook all the meat you're able to, and then can it; that's a much longer-term survival strategy if you've got access to a heat source. \"The first thing, go turn that grill on, go get some meat cooking,\" she says. \"If you have to, get your neighbor's. Go get it cooked.\"  So far, Jane hasn't had to deal with an outage longer than 30 hours, which isn't long enough to threaten the contents of a sealed freezer. \"Never had to throw anything out,\" she says. \"Except for the time my son left the freezer lid open, for like two days\u2014in the summer. But you know what? Nothing thawed.\" The freezer was still running, after all.  The big-time Costco hoarder  Take a tour of Meredith Gallie's stand-up freezer. No, really\u2014you can do it online, at Gallie's YouTube channel, Surviving as Mom. After glancing over some intensively stocked dry storage, you see a basement freezer filled to the gills: Blocks and blocks of butter. Pounds and pounds of cheese. Endless logs of pork tenderloin. An entire flock's worth of chicken parts. Right now, Gallie says, she has about eight or ten packages of chicken breasts, two or three to a package. Maybe a dozen packages of chicken legs, at five or six in a package. (That is, to be clear, at least 60 chicken legs.) The freezer upstairs is stocked the same way, she says.  \"If the power goes out, we're in trouble\u2014because there's probably hundreds if not thousands of dollars' worth of meat in that freezer.\"  Gallie shops at Costco, of course. She lives on Long Island with her husband and four small boys, and says that while her house is pretty well-organized\u2014she's not really a hoarder, Gallie says, though she jokes about it\u2014\"when it comes to food, we definitely over-buy.\"  She and her husband \"struggled financially here and there as adults,\" Gallie says. \"We lost our jobs at different times. It's hard when you have to ration your milk, you know what I mean?\" Now things are a little more flush, but Gallie jokes that she has a kind of PTSD. \"Now that we're stable, we overdo it. We don't mean to do it, we don't realize we're doing it, but it's like\u2014oh, we're down to six packs of chicken, we have to buy more. It's just an instinct now\u2014we have to try to hoard food. At least we'll be steady for a little while if things go bad.\"  RelatedWhy You Should Freeze Your Bacon (and Other Meats) Before CookingView article  The big-game swapper  \"One of the first things I bought when I got out here was a [chest] freezer,\" says novelist Charlotte McGuinn Freeman, who lives in Livingston, Montana. Freeman moved to Livingston in 2002 because the houses were cheap and there were plenty of fellow writers in the community. She got a chest freezer, one of those upright models that could conceivably hold a human body. At last count, it contained seven gallons of unpasteurized apple cider, which Freeman plans to turn into hard cider when the weather cools; some quarts of soup; random cuts of game; and \"the remains of last year's whole pig.\"   After all, when you've got a big freezer, why not buy a big (butchered) animal to stash inside? \"We'll buy a pig once a year, once every two years. You can get a whole pig, cut and wrapped, for 325 bucks,\" Freeman says. \"And it's a nice pig, it's not a CAFO pig. It's a nice, local, 4-H\u2014some little kid loved it, named it, and then sold it.\"  Livingston is full of hunters, and so Freeman doesn't buy meat but trades for it; her partner has access to some land, which he lets people hunt on in exchange for some of their haul. \"This time of year those of us who don't hunt tend to get the castoffs from other people's freezers because they're prepping for this year,\" she says. An ex-boyfriend, a \"delightful oddball,\" occasionally passes along \"very strange cuts of things. Like, oh: a package of antelope neck. Thanks!\" A frigid treasure trove.  get this recipePan-Seared Venison with Rosemary and Dried Cherries GourmetAdd to Recipes"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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