What’s In Your Freezer?
Posted on October 3, 2015 under Storytelling with no comments yet
Seriously. When was the last time that you thoroughly examined the contents of your freezer? Do you have a stand-alone chest freezer or just one attached to your fridge? In all likelihood, you haven’t reached into its nether regions unless one of the two things has happened: a three day power outage or a move across the continent. Yes, I know that most of you diligently clean your fridge regularly, but freezers can be safely ignored for years.
I would be one of those people who never paid much attention to food storage. The fridge was the place to go to grab a snack or a cold drink or some mix. The freezer was for ice. But that was then and this is now. When I recently retired and decided that my number one priority was to improve my diet, the kitchen quickly became the centre of my universe. And, because my menu is changing, our fridge has undergone a rather dramatic metamorphosis. Instead of leftover pizza, fried chicken or a half-eaten lemon meringue pie, it now displays container after container of vegetables, some raw and some cooked, and a dizzying array of fruit.
A few years ago, a financial institution had an ad campaign that included this catchy tag line: “What’s in your wallet?” I don’t know about you, but there’s usually not much in mine. And I seem to be at the grocery store every day. As my diet now focuses heavily on plants, the need to have a side of beef choking the freezer is becoming less important. And oftentimes there are just the two of us at the table. So, I have begun to gradually purge the freezer, trying to use up some things that have been in there for a while. Those mysterious packages that were transferred, unopened, when we moved across town. Going through the freezer and doing an inventory is akin to an archeological dig. In your search for relics you never really know what you’re going to find.
Emptying out the freezer is like a history lesson for most of us. While I didn’t find all of the following in ours, one suspects that somewhere, somebody has come across these, and other items, that stir old memories. There’s a container with small meatballs. The date is December 31st, 1999 and you quickly remember the party you attended to usher in a new millennium. We all watched the clock as midnight approached to see if Y2K would render the planet inoperable.
There must have been a great sale on pork tenderloin at Sobeys in March of 2007, because you bought three packages of them. The “best before” date was not September of 2015. By the way, they’re only a deal if you eat them!
There are several bags of bread, each containing exactly two slices: the heels. Not sure why we kept this. Maybe they are a form of ballast for the fridge. And if you’re from the east coast there is always a bag of rolls with freezer burn … leftovers from a summer lobster boil.
And there it is, welded to the side of the freezer like a barnacle attached to the underside of a boat. It’s the pièce de resistance, the magnum opus: a thirty year old piece of wedding cake. These days, there is a better than average chance that the wedding cake has outlasted the marriage.
The purge is nearly complete when you notice something that doesn’t seem quite right. There is a baggy lying flat on the floor of the freezer. Why would anyone in their right mind leave a clear plastic bag in there? And then it hits you, like an icicle falling off the roof of your house onto your head; you stashed a handful of high interest credit cards there after a particularly egregious abuse of same one Christmas long ago.
What’s in your freezer?
