The big refreeze conundrum

We have had a power cut. And of course I wasn’t at home. I got back to be met in the road by the neighbour who announced, “The hydro’s been off,” at which I commiserated in the way one does, without much conviction, while going through the usual litany of local disasters: who couldn’t be buried because of the weather, who had got stuck all night in a ditch with someone other than his wife and how, rather gleefully, the new people had installed a pellet boiler only to find there aren’t any pellets to be had thanks to a shortage of Russian timber.

And then it occurred to me that if there had been power cuts, my freezer would have gone off. And then on again and probably off and on again. I don’t care really about those enticing packs of reduced liver snapped up in the supermarket on their sell by date (does anyone else eat liver and bacon these days?).

What I do care about is the fruits of the shooting season: the hundred or so pheasant breasts, duck breasts, grouse, various roe legs and fillets, an 8lb salmon (NB foul hooked), a fish pie and spag bol (labelled Jan 2015), plums and 3lbs of Seville oranges, frozen because I never got round to making marmalade in January. Even worse was the potential loss of all the pheasant legs and wings on which I feed Waffle. It was all still frozen of course, or rather refrozen. Or was it?

The clue that at least a partial defrost had taken place was the pink ice from the rasps and plums and berries which had leaked over everything else. In theory you are OK for 24 hours if you keep the freezer door or lid shut, so I decided, out of laziness as much as anything, that I had probably got away with it.

And my neighbour didn’t think we’d been off that long, whatever that meant. In the past I have refrozen faintly soft bits of meat with no ill effects. In the end I decided that Waffles’ wings and legs would probably be OK, as dogs eat such disgusting things anyway a refrozen wing wouldn’t do any harm.

The fruit will definitely have to go unless it can be fermented out to free alcohol. Worth a try.

The larger lumps of meat seemed to have retained their shape. I defrosted a pack of pheasant breasts and fried them in strips with no ill effects or particularly unpleasant smells or taste. Better turned into pies and casseroles perhaps. Waffle has now gnawed through several pheasant legs and hasn’t thrown up. And nor have I. Just don’t tell Prof Pennington. n