'New' Upright Freezer - Ideas please

Lunar_Eclipse

Hi all,

As part of my recent money saving lifestyle combined with an increasing boredom of cooking healthy, homemade meals day in day out for my family, I had a second hand 6ft freezer delivered yesterday. Very exciting. Sad I know! (Complimentary slow cooker arriving today.)

This is so I have space to buy items on offer in the supermarkets, have a selection of ice creams & lollies at home for the children and batch cook so I can freeze meals. Yippee.

I think I read on this website that it costs less to run a full freezer than a part full one. Is this true? It does make sense. I'm sure I saw a mention of freezing water in bottles for this purpose. Any advice on this front would be appreciated. In the medium term I suspect the freezer will approach capacity naturally, but it's the shorter term I'm thinking of.

Additionally, if anyone has experience of what freezes (surprisingly) well and more importantly what doesn't freeze well, I'd love to hear it. Having thought of a few items the other day, the only thing I can recall to ask about today is sliced ham and salami, that we mainly use for packed lunches. Salami in particular has been on offer a few times recently with the 50p/pack reduction or buy 2 for £2 etc scenario.

Also, fruit & veg knowledge welcome. I bought some frozen mango chunks from Tesco recently which should have been cost efficient compared to fresh mango, but sadly this was not to be the case as it thawed into soft mushy pieces that my daughter (complete lover of most luxury fruit, especially mangoes & berries) hated. I'm hoping it will work well in smoothies though.

I also read about cheese freezing recently (Sammykaye), which I had to try and appeared to work well.

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate/best place to post this - any thoughts?

Thanks!