Do I need a freezer?

"The freezer can easily become a culinary graveyard, a place where good food goes to die." Nigella Lawson

So take a look at my freezer - lots of things dying in there. And mine is not even a particularly big one.

Which begs the question would I be better off with a bigger fridge and a smaller freezer? Could I exist without a freezer at all? After all once upon a time I did.

Admittedly I was living in England where temperatures were lower, but still, there were frozen foods that you could buy in the supermarket and which were a novelty. Also supposedly good. I mean vegetables picked from the plant and immediately frozen was bound to be fresher than vegetables that had travelled a long way and then sat around your greengrocer's or supermarket for who knows how long. Fish too - snap frozen on the boat as soon as it was caught. Much better surely? And back then a freezer - usually a separate chest freezer was a status symbol.

"In my childhood, freezers were a thing: a symbol of middle-class achievement that was almost, if not quite, as good as owning a Volvo estate." Rachel Cooke - The Guardian

I distinctly remember my sister-in-law having a freezer and thinking that this was amazingly upper crust. It went with the Aga (which she did not have, although my other sister-in-law did). I don't think I even had one of those small compartments in my fridge in which you kept ice blocks.

Of course when we came to Australia we bought a humungous fridge. Well I thought it was humungous at the time, which had a separate freezer section at the top, and in which we used to store a side of lamb. You could buy a side of lamb back then for a ridiculous 16c a kilo I seem to remember. I couldn't quite understand why one would want a huge fridge. I thought the Australians only had them to store their beer, and as we didn't drink much beer why would you want one? But they only seemed to come in a large size, and besides we wanted to be Australian, so we bought a big one. It was one of our first purchases - after the car - and it dominated the tiny kitchenette in our rented flat in Chadstone.

Since then I have gone through the separate chest freezer and large fridge phase to the now much smaller side by side fridge/freezer. But I am beginning to think a larger fridge with a smaller freezer section might be better. I never seem to have enough room in the fridge for all the dairy things, fresh vegetables and opened jars that wouldn't go off in England but would here. Nowadays the freezers are often a section at the bottom - almost back to the chest freezer and I suppose it makes more sense from an energy perspective. Because that's another downside of freezers (and fridges) they consume energy.

I have been thinking about my freezer - or more accurately the contents of my freezer, for a while now. Every time I open the freezer door really. I know there is stuff in there that (a) I barely know what it is and (b) should really be thrown out because it's far too old. The same happens in my fridge too of course, particularly with jars lurking at the back, and short lived vegetables like spinach that I didn't use straight away. But even so I think there is less going off in the fridge than in the freezer. There's a faster turnover.

As I say I have become increasingly aware of this of late, although I'm not sure why this is, and am half-heartedly making an attempt to clear it out. Lots of cookery books will encourage you to have a freezer and to use it for last-minute meals. Maybe if one was living alone one might use it more like this. But I think I really must stop putting prepared food in there, because this is the stuff that really gets forgotten. By me anyway.

"The difficulty I find with stuffing a freezer full of food to eat at some future date is that when that future date comes I probably won't want to eat it. This is not because the food will spoil or disappoint, but because every time I open my freezer I see the same efficiently stowed away packets of coq au vin or beef stew or whatever it might be, and I get bored with them. I begin to feel as if I've eaten them as many times as I've opened the freezer door." Nigella Lawson

My problem is not quite the same as Nigella's although maybe it is, because it is true that I sometimes notice that there is some kind of ready cooked meal in there, but somehow it doesn't appeal to me to defrost it and eat it. Besides I often don't know what it is exactly as I haven't labelled it. Not that that should be an impediment really as a 'surprise' dinner has some appeal. If you're in the mood that is. No - it's much better to keep that kind of leftover in the fridge and just eat it again a few days later.

"Leftovers are obviously better put away in the freezer if the alternative destination is several days lingering in the fridge and then the bin. On the other hand beware against using the freezer as a less guilt-inducing way of binning food you know you don't want." Nigella Lawson

If you put them in the fridge you can also sometimes convert them into something else which overcomes the boredom factor.

Nigella also proposes a slightly different problem with this type of leftover:

"If no-one including you, liked the soup the first time round (and that's why you've got so much left over) there is no point in freezing it for some hopeful future date when, miraculously it will taste delicious."

I can't really believe she cooks anything not worth eating again, but nevertheless I guess it's a point worth making. And here's another one:

"As with a store cupboard, you must be on your guard against overstocking. In fact having far too much in your freezer can be very much worse than a mouldering store cupboard, because food so easily gets buried and really forgotten about than simply ignored." Nigella Lawson

There are many other things that lurk in my freezer until it is too late to use them. What are they?

Bread. If the family, or anybody else for that matter comes over for a meal we buy Laurent's baguettes from Coles. Inevitably we buy too many because we don't like to not have enough, so the leftovers go into the freezer. Which is OK in theory if you use them fairly quickly, but if you leave them there for long, no amount of restoration by wetting and heating in the oven will restore them to their true wonderfulness. Garlic bread is a possibility, but you need to have the grandchildren here for that. And so we aggravate the problem by buying more fresh baguettes and putting more into the freezer. Recently I have been making a determined effort to use the freezer ones first - for us - I wouldn't dare use them for others. We've been eating a fair bit of soup.

Still on bread - pita bread, and pizza bases which I occasionally buy. The packets always have too many for just two of us, so the leftovers go into the freezer and they stay there far too long for them to be usable. That unpleasant freezer taste develops pretty quickly with bread.

And still on bread. I wrote about breadcrumbs in the not too far distant past, and noted that several cooks recommended making a big batch and storing them in the freezer. Which I did and indeed I did use them. It was a very worthwhile exercise. However, I think you would have to store them somewhere near to hand - they would very easily get forgotten otherwise. Ditto for the chicken carcasses to make into stock. I have not been so successful in using them.

Fish. Whenever I go to the Queen Vic market I tend to buy some fish, meaning to have it for dinner on the same day and then we get home and David makes his reluctance to eat fish known and I chicken out and freeze it instead. And you shouldn't keep fish in the freezer too long. And, of course, I still have to overcome his reluctance, which, again of course, I should just ignore.

Bargain meat. Every now and then there are cuts that I don't usually buy - fillet beef for example - which are are available at a bargain price in the supermarket, or which I fancy cooking and then get home and lose the fancy, and so I freeze it. But because they are not the constantly used items they retreat further and further back into the freezer, develop those little white spots of freezer burn and don't get used.

Rare kinds of meat or sausage that doesn't appear very often - like Debriciner sausages from Aldi. The also gradually migrate to the back and get hidden.

On the plus side there are several things in my fridge that I do use and that I sort of rely on - like pastry. I make pastry in a big batch and divide it into smaller pieces which are ideal for quiche - which is what I am doing today and which was one of the motivators for this post.

The other things that I always have to hand and which I do use in plenty of time, are chicken breasts and sometimes drumsticks, minced beef, rump steak and sausages. These are the things I use all the time. Oh and ice cream - for the grandchildren. Devondale almost butter - obviously a product we use all the time. Our poor childhoods and frugal natures induce us to only buy it when it's on a special. So we buy a few and freeze them. And chicken stock too. I do make my own chicken stock and have almost used up my freezer supply so I should dig out those carcasses. Frozen peas and frozen berries, although the berries hover in the too long in the freezer category.

I started this post because I was, yet again, uninspired and so picked up Nigella's How to Eat, which I knew had several 'quotable' quotes in it - and found her section on freezers. And I have indeed been thinking about my misuse of my freezer and the guilt that it induces, so I pounced on it as an idea to ramble around. And honestly I have been thinking about clearing the freezer of the lurking stuff. We have already got rid of the baguettes. But I do have to make myself throw out some stuff that is well past its use by date and I do have to do something with that whole chicken and fillet steak. Not to mention the fish, which is still not quite too old.