Two nights ago we had the very enjoyable experience of finding that our (quite full) chest freezer had decided to up and quit working.

Yeah, that’s a nice sinking feeling when one opens the door expecting to be greeted by a cold blast of air, only to be greeted by soggy and melting vegetables.

Yuck.

It became a moment of, lets say, “controlled panic” though, as next to the soggy veggies and limp bread was quite a stock pile of meat.

Meat which, to be totally transparent, cost a decent amount of monays.

Yay.

After determining that the meat, although thawed, was still safe to eat, it became clear that I would spend my entire Thursday cooking, on no uncertain terms, approximately a thousand pounds of meat.

Ok, so maybe it wasn’t a thousand, but it was super close.

Like 999 pounds.

Anyways, Thursday bright and early I warmed up the oven (did I mention it was also like a million degrees outside?), busted out my crockpot, and employed all pots and pans.

My wonderful mother also appeared with additional crockpots and coolers so as to take all the freshly cooked items back to her (working) freezer until further notice.

To say I was a little less than thrilled to be devoting my. entire. day. to slaving away in an unbelievably hot kitchen in a last ditch effort to not flush previously mentioned hard earned monays…would have been an understatement.

Of course, writing it out now it seems a silly thing to be upset over, but there I was.

Don’t you judge me. You don’t know my pain.

😉

And so, in the middle of my grumbling and sweating and crockpot-ing (seriously, at one point I had three of them going…), I was hit with the realization that here I was complaining about cooking.

Food.

Lots and lots of food.

Food which I had easy access to, that I had more than the ability to safely and (somewhat) easily prepare, and that I had ample amounts of ways to store once finished.

Yeah, um…

Of all the things I choose to complain about (and let’s be honest, some days the list is rather long…..), this really didn’t qualify.

I mean, the whole “having access to good food” thing included, the day didn’t turn out all that bad.

Sure, I think I sweat off about 100 pounds (might be rounding a bit here…), but I got to spend the day hanging with my mom.

And I may never want to look at raw meat again for a loooooong time, but I have food put away to feed my family for a while.

And my crockpot may never forgive me for the whole running for almost 24 hours thing, but we ended the day with a nice cold creemee, and it just doesn’t get better than that:

So the point to my rather rambly story?

I found myself, in the middle of my torn apart kitchen (oh, did I not mention I’m also redoing our kitchen?), suddenly thankful for everything I had. From food to family, I am, in every definition of the word, blessed.

And (sadly) sometimes it takes a freezer on strike to remind me of that….