TracyFood

What’s in my freezer? 15 May 2008 9:04 am

Posted by Tracy in : events, food storage, not even vegetarian, pictures , trackback

So Chez Us asked a good question a little more than a week ago, and a day or two after that I finally got around to taking a picture of the contents of my freezer, and a day or two after that I got distracted by this little trip to the East Coast. (New York City, by the way, is still made of awesome.) While I was easily able to name three things without looking for the Vegan MoFo survey a while back, listing the full contents of my freezer is difficult even when I’m staring it cold in the face. Now, for my amusement (and hopefully yours as well) I’m going to attempt to respond to that very good question from all the way across the country, just by looking at those week-or-so-old pictures. Here goes!

Highlights: lots of homemade vegetable stock (and just wait ’till you see the freezer door!), three bottles of booze, some coconut cream/cream of coconut labeled with an embarrassing song reference (and now it’s online for all the world to see, go me!), Thin Mints, hippie-compliant meat that was marked down for being close to the expiration date but hey it’s fine to freeze anything I plan to use in a stew), frozen dumplings from my friendly local Asian market (longevity buns maybe?), and of course the ice cream machine insert, taking up lots of room as always (though I do sometimes store stuff inside and on top of it to make the most of every last scrap of space). Also, the plastic bags of Morning Glory bread scraps are almost under control. A little explanation there: We use heels and dried-up bits of the french bread to make croutons at the café, but sometimes there’s still leftovers, and we generally just compost whole wheat and raisin bread that’s no good for neat toasty slices (heels and so on), except when I go insane and can’t bear the waste and take the random bread home, where it usually gets made into bread pudding (though also croutons and occasionally bread crumbs). One of the big yogurt tubs is frozen blueberries, picked last summer; another is curried split pea soup, the experimental brown rice instead of potatoes version.

Here’s the freezer door, for completeness:

It’s like an archaeology expedition! In particular the pine nuts and barely visible bag of bay leaves all the way on the top right — those are pretty darn old. Like, years. The pureed tomatoes on the upper left are all that’s left of last year’s harvest, and the Emerald Valley salsa tub in the middle of the top are blackeyed pea and quinoa fritters from Vegan With a Vengeance — tasty but unfortunately hard to re-heat, which is why they haven’t been eaten yet. The bottom shelf is frozen juices and pineapple (I say yay for Trader Joe’s frozen fruit, oh yes I do).

And that’s my freezer, as of last Thursday. I’m pleasantly surprised by how un-mysterious it turned out to be, even from 3,000-odd miles away, a week after I took the picture. But who knows what what I may have overlooked, lurking in the way back frozen depths….