Tub one was orange, tub two was brown and tub three had no lid. That was the whole of my information when I pulled the three of them out of the small freezer in the cupboard under the stairs on Sunday 4 January, with the new grocery budget of £115 a week written on the whiteboard and a firm intention to buy no more freezer food until I knew what I had.
January is freezer clear-out month in this house. We have a fridge-freezer with three drawers and the little under-counter one under the stairs, and between them they hold more than I'd thought. I wrote it all down in the back of the lunchbox notebook: 34 items, some of them with labels, some of them wearing nothing but ice.
What was in there
The honest list is: half a bag of peas (Alfie will eat peas, but only frozen ones, never tinned), a bag of sweetcorn, eight chicken thighs, six sausages, a 500g pack of mince that Rob bought on offer, about 400g of leftover Christmas turkey frozen on the 27th, a ready-rolled pastry, a bag of chips, an ice cream with a crust on it, half a loaf of bread that had fused into a single brick, and the three tubs. There was also a box of fish fingers with a best-before date from last spring, covered in the sort of white crystals that make you want to apologise to the fish.
Five things went in the bin: the fish fingers, the bread brick, a bag of berries that had gone grey, an unlabelled bag of something beige, and tub three, which I couldn't identify and wasn't going to taste to find out. I priced the bin at about £9.50 and wrote it in the spreadsheet in red. My own rule, now written on masking tape on the freezer door, is to date everything, and if I can't tell what it is or when it went in, it goes out. I don't claim that's official guidance. The packs have the official guidance on them, and I read those.
Tub one turned out to be the chilli from Bonfire Night, orange from the paprika. Tub two was a brown lentil and vegetable soup from early December. Everything else I knew.
What it made
- Monday 12 January: the chilli on jacket potatoes
- Tuesday 13 January: the lentil soup, with toast and cheese
- Thursday 15 January: sausage and mash, with the half bag of peas
- Monday 19 January: chicken thighs in a tray with onions and potatoes
- Wednesday 21 January: turkey and leek pie, with the ready-rolled pastry
- Saturday 24 January: Rob's cottage pie, with the 500g of mince
Six teas for four of us. I bought a few extras to make them work: potatoes, leeks, a bag of onions, gravy granules and a packet of bacon, £9.40 in all. A home-cooked tea runs at about £1.80 a portion this year, so £7.20 for the four of us, and six of them would normally come to £43.20. Take off the £9.40 and it's £33.80 I didn't spend. It isn't life-changing, but it came out of a freezer I'd already paid for and forgotten.
What went wrong
The lentil soup was a flop with half the table. Alfie said it had bits in it and had cheese on toast instead. Isla tried a spoonful and said it tasted "brown", which was fair, and finished it anyway. The turkey pie was a little dry, because turkey that's been frozen and reheated forgets what it was. I'd put it in a gravy next time. The chilli was better the second time round, as it usually is.
The cottage pie got a thumbs up from everybody. Rob makes the mash his mother's way, with a ridiculous amount of butter, and I've stopped looking. Alfie ate every pea on the plate, in a straight line, the way he always does when they're from the frozen bag.
By Thursday night the January grocery total was sitting at £452 on the spreadsheet, with the Co-op top-ups still to come, which should land us at about £468 for the month. The freezer now has air in it, which I find unreasonably satisfying. It will fill back up by March, but this time I'll know what's in it, and the tape on the door will tell me when it went in.
