Freezer Roulette: a Family Tradition

In the rush to get produce picked, prepped, and eaten during the summer a number of dishes found their way into the freezer unlabelled. So on Friday night we found ourselves playing roulette of the "is it a chilli or a bolognese?" variety. Cue all sorts of angst from Him Indoors about how to pick an appropriate wine to go with it.

It turned out to be neither: it was actually a dish I had made with the glut of runner beans and tomatoes, livened up with chunks of chorizo.

Such lax freezer management is a bit of a family trait. My Mum used to make fabulous pies of all varieties when I was little: fruit, meat, sweet, savoury, but rarely labelled. She claimed to be able to identify the filling by some mysterious combination of vents in the pastry lid. One for steak and kidney and two for black currant maybe...but I remember at least one occasion when the system failed and the golden pastry crust split to reveal a meat pie where pudding should have been. Delia Smith would not have been impressed.

It is clearly more sensible to label the contents of the freezer than rely on guesswork, but rarely as entertaining.