I'll Tell Ya This For Free: Don't Use Your Freezer Too Much

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Previously in kitchen coverage:

How to win the battle against objects: “Find at least two things to blame besides yourself after an avoidable domestic accident. Ideally one of these things will be a person and the other will be inanimate: a system, a routine, an appliance. That way, if the human scapegoat refuses to accept the blame, you still have something to fall back on that can’t argue with you.”

Point/Counterpoint: Point: Look at that. I want it. Counterpoint: But there’s already so much food at home that you hate.

Buy more canned potatoes: “Weeknight dinners are always ‘coming together,’ like nation-states after a tragedy.”

Never soak a pan for longer than twenty minutes: “Fifteen minutes is plenty long enough. Set a timer and clean something else in the kitchen so your body knows it has not yet exited Chore Mode, and then when the timer goes off, go and scrub.”

Always buy a can of condensed milk when you buy a can of evaporated milk and vice versa: “From Samarkand to Santa Ana, when men of action and men of sense get together, their talk always turns to Danny Lavery: ‘Lavery sees it all. Lavery cuts through the treacle. Lavery delivers. Whereof he knows not, he is silent, but the whereof he knows not could only fill a thimble.’”

Maybe you’re nothing like me, and you keep your freezer as organized and clutter-free as a branch library in a small river resort town. If that’s the case, you have my sincere admiration and are excused from reading today’s newsletter. But I do believe you are like me, at least when it comes to to matters of domestic food preservation, and my long years of suffering have at last resulted in wisdom.

I will not tell you how to organize your refrigerator, mind you. You know as well as I do the perils of aspirational produce and forgotten leftovers, the problems of novelty and choice overload in the crisper drawer, but a man’s refrigerator is his castle, and you’ve got to be free to run your own system, in whichever way seems best to you, no matter how many salad greens you throw out every week. You can’t optimize everything. Sometimes all you can ask of your refrigerator is to slow down the rate of decisions you have to make about food this week, and that’s the best you can do.

But the freezer! My God, it’s got to stop somewhere, hasn’t it? It’s terrible in there. Aren’t you shocked, when you open it? I know I am.

Be honest with yourself, if only here: Have you ever wondered what on earth you’re going to make for dinner tomorrow and thought to yourself, Say, why not cook something that’s been in the freezer for a long time? It’s never happened to me. I’ll admit to that freely.

I don’t know precisely where the line is, but once something has been in my freezer for longer than a few weeks, no matter how much I liked it when I bought it, and regardless of whether it’s still “good,” it loses all value in my eyes. There’s a first-in, first-out system at play, whether I want to admit it or not. If I haven’t thought, “Oh, I’d like to cook _____ out of the freezer” within the first two weeks of purchasing it, the thought will never occur to me again.

It’s the same thing with the little bag of scraps we’re always being urged to store in there. How I hate the short video format people who tell you to save all the little bits of vegetable peels that you’d ordinarily throw away in a big freezer bag so you can make stock once a month. You know the people I mean. They’re lovely people, I’m sure, but what kind of life advice is that? “Keep a constantly-growing mound of garbage in your freezer, and once you’ve finished, your reward is a big, awful chore” absolutely wilts the spirit.

I don’t want to do that. I want to throw away the parts of the vegetable I wouldn’t ordinarily use. At most I am willing to compost them. And I want to buy stock someone else has made for me, in a big commercial kitchen.

The worst part is I’ll sometimes try to do it, give up halfway through the process, and then throw the bag of old freezer-burned zucchini peels away the next time I have to move house.

The problem with this approach, I’ve realized, is that the more food I put in my freezer, the more I treat my freezer as a sort of purgatory between the refrigerator and the trash can. It’s no longer something where food both goes in and comes out, it’s the place where everything goes to get out of my sight. It’s the magical but guilt-inducing tool that puts all decisionmaking on hold and that overwhelms me with pressure whenever I open it and see all the choices I’ve tried to pause indefinitely spilling all over each other. Worse, every time I went shopping, I’d get something else from the freezer section, thinking “It would be a good idea to eat this,” as if the point of a freezer is to unendingly absorb meals without ever relinquishing any.

And you’re supposed to put flour in there, too, did you know that? To prevent bugs from getting in there. So there’s even less room in there than before.

A few years ago I simply had to refuse to keep living that way.A man’s got to feel like he’s in control of his major appliances and not the other way around. Now I keep the freezer barely stocked (to the best of my ability). No bag of scraps, no more than one type of frozen meat at a time, no more frozen meals that “looked interesting,” two kinds of ice creams at the absolute most, nothing I thought I “ought to stock up on” at the store just because. I need to be able to count everything in the freezer on two hands. In this way the freezer returns to its original condition of usefulness; I eat what’s in there and I refill it afterwards. Go thou and do likewise.

If you got to the end of this newsletter and still none of this makes sense to you, presumably because you have a functional working relationship with your freezer, you’ve only got yourself to blame, because I told you from the start that you were excused from this assignment and could read a personal book quietly at your desk. Now go outside and quit bothering me.

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