Tales from the freezer

Optional title: Digging where no man has gone for about a year

My first freezer was a tiny, apartment sized number that my dad bought for me when I had my own aparment. He was disgusted by the ridiculously small 70's style freezer that the apartment came with. My dad lives for his freezer. He has a large deep freeze and he fills it with all sorts of homemade creations. He makes muffins, jam, fruit in sugar syrup, pies, lasagnas, this gross spaghetti sauce with liver in it, squares, breads, chili and soup. He packages these items in tupperware containers that my mother bought in the 70's, back when tupperware came in ribbed white and disco brown and orange and avocado green. He creates a list with every item that goes into the freezer, perfectly listed in alphabetical order. When an item comes out, he checks the item off so that he knows it is gone. When I was a teenager I liked to remove things from the freezer, eat them, and NOT check them off just because it bugged him. Rebel.

That freezer saved me a lot of money over the years. That freezer followed me from that dive of an apartment, to the west end, to burnaby, to maple ridge and finally here to pitt meadows. There have been times when it is so full I can barely shut the lid and times when it looks very empty. Through it all, I have managed to avoid meticulous lists, mainly because the frezzer was so small that it was impossible to lose anything in it.

When we moved into this house, the owner had left their deep freeze as it was too big for his new place. It is easily 3x the size of the old freezer. So far it is has never been more than 1/2 full and even then about 1/6 of that was ice blocks. I always keep blocks of ice in my freezer after having an entire freezer full of food go bad after a long power outage. Despite not being full, I have found that the new freezer makes it easy to forget what lies on the bottom. Last night I decided to forage through the freezer discovered that I had completely forgotten about a significant number of items. Because of the freezer's size, things easily fall out of view into the depths... in those depths I found several forgotten items including a large salmon fillet, deer steaks, a huge bag of tomatoes (from last year) and applesauce, also from last year. I'm slightly suspicious of the applesauce but have brought it out to defrost in case it is still good. There is something about the idea of food wasting away in the bottom of my freezer that does not sit well with me so I am going to make it my mission to eat from our freezer for the next few weeks and see if we can't clear it out so that we can then replace that food with new food items to forget for another year.

Dinner #1 from the freezer as well as sticking to my almost 100 mile diet: Multigrain spaghetti with tomato sauce made from the frozen roma tomatoes purchased last fall in Keremeos and meatballs. It was the perfect type of day to simmer a rich, spicy tomato sauce on the stove and the onions, red wine and tomatoes blended together to make a deliciously thick tomato sauce. It was very good but the realization that fall is here and blah weather is fast approaching made me feel a bit melancholy.