Part of my monthly meat order (above) unpacked on the kitchen counter before I put it into the fridge & freezer - here I have imported yogurts (including fat free yogurt which is like GOLD here !), berries, grapes, whole chickens, chicken pieces, cold meats and sausages, dried meat & sausages, beef & pork mince, bacon and pork cuts. (Please excuse the dull photo's as it was rather late in the day when I took them !) 
The photo above shows the meat cuts which I've portioned into individual re-sealable freezer bags, & labelled. These include chicken pieces, pork schnitzels, pork chops & kassler chops Once a month I place a large order (via email) with the butchery in the city 2 hours away from us. I specify which items I'd like frozen (e.g. whole chicken as I'll use those 'as is' for roasting; smoked salmon and fish as it defrosts quite quickly, even in a coolerbox) and which items I'd prefer just chilled (e.g. pork chops, chicken pieces, steaks - so that I can portion them out into smaller bags once I get home as it's tricky to separate, say, a whole kilogram of frozen pork chops & I don't like to defrost & then re-freeze uncooked meat).
I also have specific requests such as .... 'please supply me with any flavour yogurt except the"Tropical Mix" one' (which contains pineapple pieces & goes off quicker than the others) and flavoured milk (a special treat for my daughter) 'must not be Bubblegum flavour' - ewwwww !
The butchery (which is owned & run by an expat Zambian lady) has been supplying me for 11 years now, and is the same butchery I used for all our camp supplies when we ran luxury tented safari camps, hotels and restaurants here many years ago. So we go back a long way !
The butchery is a small shop situated on a busy road in the centre of the city - and it supplies the best quality meat and products that you can get here, and many of the products (cheese, yogurt, certain cuts of meat and cold meats) are imported from countries like New Zealand, South Africa, Kenya and Brazil. They also have a nice selection of homemade biscuits, rusks, pastas, jams & preserves, pasta sauces, dried fruits, nuts, eggs, bread & fruit.
Some people refuse to pay the prices asked for the imported items, but my philosophy is that we do without so much here, living in a 3rd world country, and have to settle for poor quality items quite a bit, so why should we have to settle for cheaper food items, too ? It's a treat for us to be able to eat good quality cheddar cheese for example, imported grapes or a decent cut of meat - we enjoy our food and I'm not going to lower our food standards by paying cheaper prices for tough cuts of meat and locally manufactured yogurt that's been thickened with cornflour & has horrible neon pink bits in it !
About a week before I am due to collect my big butchery order, I start freezing ice packs in my deep freezer's. This can take some time as we run on battery/generator electricity which is only on for part of the day. The morning I leave to collect my order, Justin gets around 3 to 5 coolerboxes ready for me, we load the ice packs into them and off we go ! The butchery is always the last stop of the day, and the coolerboxes are the first things I unpack when I return to the farm.
No matter how exhausted I am after a day in the city, I have to put all the perishable items like the berries, yogurts and cheeses into the fridge & portion and freeze all the meat items within hours of arriving home, else it will start to defrost and/or go off. I label all the bags and write out a rough stock list of what I've put in them. The next day I'll type out a proper stock list which gets stuck up in the kitchen so that I can 'see' what items are in there, & mark them off as I use them.
Because we don't have electricity 24/7 it also takes several days for the items to freeze solid, & we usually run the generator for a couple of extra hours a day after a big order comes in, to help speed the process up a little - depending on what our diesel stocks are like on the farm at the time ! (I would hate for my husband to have to stop running one of his tractors simply because I needed the diesel to run my freezer for a few extra hours !)
Because we don't have electricity 24/7 it also takes several days for the items to freeze solid, & we usually run the generator for a couple of extra hours a day after a big order comes in, to help speed the process up a little - depending on what our diesel stocks are like on the farm at the time ! (I would hate for my husband to have to stop running one of his tractors simply because I needed the diesel to run my freezer for a few extra hours !)
It's always a huge novelty for me (and a source of amusement !) when we are on holiday in the UK for example, & my mother-in-law will say "What shall we have for supper tonight - chicken ? Ahhhh .... we'll just have to quickly pop down to 'Sainsbury's' then to get some !" and off we go to buy a packet of chicken (and not dilly dally on the way home as we don't want it to go off !) - when at home in Tanzania if we want chicken on a certain night for supper, I have to plan for it well in advance - several weeks ahead of the time, infact !
So, if you ever see someone in your local supermarket, excitedly grinning at the till as she pays for a single packet of chicken, exclaiming to the (rather bored looking) cashier about the sheer novelty of it all & clutching the packet to her chest with a smug look on her face - it's probably not some crazy person, but just a woman who lives on a remote farm somewhere unpronounceable. Someone who only gets out once in a while, talks to the trees and sings to her cats. No, she's not crazy at all !
