Frozen Assets

Today

In a burst of enthusiam this afternoon I made the red cabbage and cranberry sauce for Christmas lunch. "Easy to freeze", thought I, "and less to do on Christmas Eve".

They're sitting on the worktop, cooling slightly before I bung them in the freezer. Apart from a contretemps when one container of red cabbage sprang a leak (a little of the that red juice does go a long way), they're all done and dusted. And I'll do the same with the Brazil nut loaf mix.

In My Day

It was Paul's father who first enthused about getting a freezer, back in the early 70s. They were on offer at Debenham's and he worked out that he was better off getting credit to buy it, rather than waiting till he had the money when the price would have gone up.

When we moved to Rowan Avenue (our first proper house) we decided that we could do with one as well. We measured up the front porch and decided that a chest freezer would just fit in. To raise the cash we signed up with Barclaycard (our first credit card - what a lot of firsts).

The freezer was put into the porch and we discovered the first law of chest freezers - they need feeding. We celebrated the dubious joys of vegetable freezing. Beatrice worked for a vegetable auctioneers and we bought sacks of beans, parsnips, carrots and nets of cabbages at a knock down price. We didn't count the cost of a) travelling to Wisbech to get them (we'd have probably visited Beatrice anyway) or b) the time cost of laboriously scalding, cooling, bagging and labelling every single piece of produce.

We never got into the side of beef-type purchases but we did buy packs of various cuts of meat etc. We regularly trotted off to the cash and carry and returned with huge amounts of food which was duly decanted into the freezer's capacious stomach.

When Becky was a baby I used to freeze ice-cube trays with pureed vegetables and get out so many a day to give to the childminder.

The purchase of the freezer meant that we were unable to buy a washing machine, so we shared these appliances with our neighbours and best friends. They popped over to get out their frozen goods (it seemed as though they only had ice-cream in there!) while we used their kitchen like a launderette.

Shortly before we left no 33 the freezer died, having first deposited a huge gobbet of ice on the carpet.

Since then, no longer needing to store meaty things and preferring our veg fresh, we've relied on a fridge-freezer and eschewed rapacious chest freezers.

Anyway, I'd better go downstairs and sort things out.