freezercan “The be a comfort blanket”
Food guru Kate Hall tells Patricia-ann Young how to stop giving freezers the cold shoulder.
KATE HALL has relied on her trusty freezer through thick and thin . Their friendship started when Kate was twenty years old and discovered she had a life-threatening blood clot in her shoulder.
Living in London, far away from her parents, and in and out of hospital, Kate’s stock of frozen meals was a lifeline.
“My mum came down to London for a bit and filled my mini freezer with stacks of batch-cooked meals,” Kate explains.
“It triggered a realisation that the freezer can be a comfort blanket, especially when I wasn’t quite sure if I was going to feel well or not.”
Pre-stocking her freezer saw Kate through some of the most tumultuous times in her life.
But even batch cooking couldn’t cut the mustard when Kate became mother to two young children.
“I would buy food with good intentions, thinking I would batch cook, or even just cook a decent meal,” Kate says.
“Whenever I attempted to cook, though, the baby or toddler would start crying or need attention.
“I had a C-section, too, so recovering from that was challenging.
“I thought, wait a minute, if I can freeze meals, I can freeze ingredients and use them when I need them.”
This was a game-changer for Kate – suddenly she was able to make healthy meals on a regular basis.
Wanting to share this revelation with the world, she enrolled in food safety courses and spoke with an expert on what was and was not safe to freeze.
She shared what she learned online and soon amassed a huge following.
Four years later, Kate has written a book, is frequently invited on to podcasts and TV shows and has a following of over 70,000 on Instagram.
Her Facebook group, the Full Freezer Family, has more than 15,000 members who have built a community sharing their knowledge.
Despite the success, Kate says that there are still sceptics out there.
“My friend’s husband refused to eat freezer food as he said he could always taste the freezer.
“My friend admitted to him she had been cooking with frozen ingredients for over three months – he hadn’t noticed!”
Kate wants to change how we think about our freezers.
“I think people look down on them – that old thing of ‘fresh is best’.
“But people often think about freezers as a long-time storage option, when, really, they’re a pause button.
“I want to pull people back to look at how they plan, prep and cook for their week,” she explains.
“It’s so ingrained that people might be cooking a certain way for over twenty years, but it’s not working for them any more.”