Why is the freezer always full?

A short while ago I wrote about the contents of my fridge, and how my fixation with efficiency prompts the purchase of a very precise amount of food each week which runs out on schedule just before I shop again. No waste, no spoilage, no running out early. I also described the shift from cans and tins and frozen products to proper, sensible, grown up cooking with actual food and real ingredients.

So this will echo some of those sentiments.

The freezer is never full. We don’t eat a lot of frozen food though there is always THE EMERGENCY PIZZA, which is there JUST IN CASE. There is also THE BIG BAG OF ICE for the making of cocktails as well. Beyond that, the freezer sits bare, sometimes for weeks. We usually have some chips knocking around (as back up for THE EMERGENCY PIZZA, probably) but that’s really about it. Our shopping is ridiculously efficient and planned. We buy everything we need for the week, it all gets used accordingly, then we restock and start the merry-go-round again.

This is basically how our freezer looks all the time

The food shopping is conducted with military precision. We have THE LIST. THE LIST is divided into lunch items which we will use to make food for work, and dinners – our main meal each evening.  There is also a small section for drinks and a small section for household. All this relevant information fits onto a small square post-it note and is taken to the supermarket for the world’s fastest speed-shop. We divide our efforts and meet at regular intervals, checking off items and making our way to the bread aisle (always the back of the shop) in amazing time, getting more and more frustrated at the sketchy, gormless and blissfully unaware patrons blocking aisles with their trolleys, stopping to chat on every corner or staring in endless confusion at the choice of different pasta options on offer.

But however painful and unpleasant this frustrating experience might be, we get through it with astonishing speed. We aren’t given to much impulse buying either.  Occasionally, but it’s rare. Then we get to the checkout and pack our bags for life, which we remember every week, with remarkable haste.

And we spend so little.

Compared to our friends who apparently spend 70 to 100 pounds on their food bill every week, we spend more like 40. I don’t know why -  probably because we stick to the list and don’t impulse buy. That could be why – we end up with no additional items and no waste.

Personally, I think it’s because we don’t buy meat.  That saves a fortune.

Well, @superlative has some for his sandwiches, but we don’t buy it to cook for dinners and things, because of THE INCIDENT. But more on that another time.

Consequently, we are not very reliant on the freezer. It’s a bit of a back-up, but nothing sits there languishing within for months on end.

If it’s not part of the plan, it doesn’t get bought. If it IS part of the plan, it gets eaten within a couple of days.

Poor freezer. Like our toaster, he will never be allowed to reach his full potential.

The Toaster. Discuss

The toaster is a sad little character in my house. He is nice, he is red, he is – naturally –  co-ordinated with my kitchen, he is efficient, he is speedy,  he has a bagel setting but HE IS UNDER-USED.

Which is not to say he is never used, but you see, I am a cheese-on-toast person. Which means that our sad little toaster generally loses out to his bigger, flashier brother, The Grill.

"I can't make cheese on toast!"

In fairness to the sad little toaster, sometimes, he is used to pre-brown the bread before cheese goes on and it goes under the grill for some real heat. But I can’t help feeling a little bad for him, as he always plays second fiddle to The Grill. His efforts are not taken seriously, despite his colour-coordination and his bagel-setting.

But he stands, ready, stalwart, standing-by, should he ever be needed. Should I ever have want for toast without cheese, should I ever have need for a lightly toasted bagel...

...He will be there. He will be waiting.

Come Dine With Me...

Channel 4 invite you to do Come Dine With Me. Who is invited & what’s your entertainment?

As you may have read, staging a Come Dine With Me is one for my bucket list, though I should clarify that I have no desire to appear on the programme itself. When I say stage, I mean only that I would like to organise a Come Dine With Me circuit with some friends. One day I’ll get round to it...

If I were asked to appear on the real thing, I would decline. I’m not sure I’d make the cut anyway.

I’m too stable and too avoidant of confrontation to make interesting viewing. In fact, I’m too good at defusing confrontation to make interesting viewing. I make a living doing it, and I feel fairly confident that I would be too calm, too polite and too tolerant to warrant televising. Even if I were paired with awful, belligerent, argumentative people.

Essentially, I’m nice and I’m boring and that isn’t what they’re after.

So who would I invite? Some friends -  hosting for strangers selected precisely for their  questionable social skills and bizarre dietary stipulations contingent not upon health needs or tolerance but on their fussiness and need for control?

No thanks.

And celebrities? Whilst in theory, the idea of eating out with Harry Judd, Colton Haynes, Tom Daley and Elliot Tittensor is tremendously exciting and titillating, I have always speculated about meeting your celebrity heroes: What do you actually say?

I recall feeling the same way as an adolescent, about people entering competitions to meet McFly, or go for lunch with Adam Rickitt or whatever. What do you say?

It would be awful!  Mind-numbing!

“HALLO!  I REALLY LIKE YOU!  WE HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON, BUT I LIKE YOU....HURRRRRRRRRHH!”

Just no. 

Adam as I choose to remember him

So I would prefer something competitive and amusing, but that I would actually enjoy.

Just me, good friends, good food and 4 naked men waiting on my every desire.

And entertainment? I’m not sure dinner ever needs entertainment. My best dinner parties have always been those where you end up sitting there drinking wine or cocktails round the table with the final course, chatting away and not noticing you’ve been talking for seven hours.

But if things went wrong, I’d probably reflexively resort to SingStar.  We never got over SingStar.

And what guests don’t want to bang out some ‘I Touch Myself’ after a bottle of wine each?

What can I get you sir?

A Gratuitous Bumshot please.

What’s in your fridge?

Well, it’s Thursday, so NOT MUCH.

We shop week to week and generally finish up everything.  We NEVER run out of food, and we NEVER throw anything away.  We have mysterious and efficient shopping practices on which there will be MORE LATER.

We buy the exact amount we need, no more no less.  On Thursday there remain sufficient ingredients to make the last two meals. Plus a bit of lunch on Saturday IF THAT WAS THE PLAN.

We used, post-university, to be frozen and jar people.  Lots of stuff in the freezer and lots of stuff in jars. Then sometime in 2004/2005 we remembered that we were middle class and this simply wouldn’t do because it was horrid.

Now we buy actual things and make actual dinners in our actual oven.

So our fridge currently contains:

Butter
Cheese (lots of cheese – we’re big on cheese)
Wraps
Wholemeal bread
Apple Sauce (Don’t ask – he puts it in sandwiches)
Some meat wrapped in foil which I am not going to open because it is nothing to do with me
Lettuce
Cherry tomatoes
Leek
Lime
Coke
Sugar-free lemonade
Sugar-free Red Bull
Black cherry Sidekick
Mango Juice
Cranberry Juice
Milk
BBQ sauce
Crutons
Sandwich pickle
Half a bottle of rosé wine (for about the next 5 minutes)
Miscellaneous food-colouring gels

None of this appears to make sense until you understand that I am having cheese and pickle salad wraps for my lunch this week, and he is having meat/apple sauce sandwiches, and that our final two dinners are pasta based, requiring fewer fridge ingredients. And that we are alcoholics and mainly use our fridge for cooling our mixers.

There you go – an insight into our lives.

And our fridge.