Waiting for the Dinner Bell

On the kitchen counter, there is a plastic bag full of freezer burn and what might possibly be remnants from a Thanksgiving turkey, year unknown. Next to the turkey bag is a small plastic refrigerator contained filled with something red. There is no label.

This, apparently, is going to be our dinner.

It is snowing very hard so I am hip to the idea of using what we have and making do, except for the fact that we have a couple of steaks in the same freezer from whence these anonymous and inglorious leftovers came. Never mind, I’m not that crazy about steak.

Finding these old, stowed away pieces of dinners past gives my husband great joy. And, of course, I am loathe to deprive him of such a rare thing, the times being what they are. Still, when he came into my office a few hours ago, holding his phone and announcing that he’d found a recipe for turkey curry, I backed away. He made curry last night – well, actually, an amazing lemon curry sauce broiled on two very thick, luscious pieces of Alaskan cod – so I shook my head and held my chest. I can only handle so much curry, I reminded him. Delicate constitution, don’t you know.

My husband has very high expectations of frozen food. He believes that even if something – say a pork chop or a casserole – was made one way in its first life, it could be remade another way months later in this new life. I tell him this is sometimes true but not always, my cooking expertise being much more rooted in day to day reality than his. Though, bless him, without his aimless wandering through cookbooks and the Sunday New York Times, we would have been on the same dinner rotation for the past thirty years. He is an adventurous cook. I will say that.

He also thinks food that is frozen will last forever. And because he is usually the person who packages leftovers in plastic bags and he neither labels nor dates said bags, forever becomes a fluid concept. He cannot throw anything away. This is curious to me, the child of people who grew up in the Depression. We never threw anything away either – primarily because we ate everything. There were never any leftovers unless it was a major holiday dinner. Five people, five hamburger patties swimming in mushroom soup, five baked potatoes, five cling peaches, each in its shallow dessert dish. Clean-up was easy and there was always room in the freezer for ice cube trays and cardboard cartons of ice cream.

I shouldn’t complain. My partner cooks. Sometimes, the results are show-stopping and, sometimes, there is puzzlement. There is always rum, though, and chocolate. And, later, tea. And so it goes.

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Photo by Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash

From 2021, but truer than ever. Our freezer holds many secrets.