WHEN THE FREEZER BREAKS, STOP SWEARING, START COOKING
This most definitely was not the way I envisioned kicking off 2021 in the kitchen. On the first Monday in the new year, I noticed my toes felt kind of wet when I stumbled to the fridge to fetch milk for my morning coffee. Glancing down, I immediately got a sick feeling. Water was drip, drip, dripping out of the bottom of the freezer into a puddle on my wood floor.
I yanked the drawer open to discover that nearly everything inside had started to thaw. Clearly broken, the freezer was a disaster of epic proportions.
As a food writer, I always have countless ingredients on hand that can be whipped up into something tasty on a moment’s notice. When the pandemic curtailed my daily trips to the grocery store in 2020, my fridge and freezer got fuller still.
According to the FDA, when frozen food gets above 40 degrees for more than two hours, it enters the “danger zone” where bacteria can rapidly multiply and lead to foodborne illnesses like salmonella and listeria. A food can only be cooked or refrozen if it still contains ice crystals or registers below 40 degrees.
Expletives flew as I pulled bags, Tupperware containers and foilwrapped packages out of the freezer and threw them onto the counter to assess the damage.
Along with several ziplock bags of garden vegetables, the wreckage included half-used boxes of phyllo and puff pastry dough, several rounds of homemade pie dough, plastic containers of leftover chicken curry and homemade tomato sauce, and raspberries I’d picked by hand in September.
Then there was the meat — so much meat — including at least four different kinds of sausage. All I could see through my tears was dollar signs, especially because the floor boards under the fridge were starting to warp.
What do you do when your freezer breaks and you’ve suddenly got a ton of half-frozen food on your hands? After you stop swearing and determine what’s salvageable, you start cooking.
The USDA website states that a full freezer can hold for two days because the food will act like a big
block of ice. Lucky for me, my freezer not only was packed but also the digital thermometer still read 40 degrees. Many items in this cold depository of tasty leftovers and yet-to-be-cooked frozen ingredients — especially those in the bottom layer — were mostly still frozen.
While I was able to stuff a few items into a second freezer in the basement, an embarrassing (and heartbreaking) amount of food ended up either in a garbage bag or in the compost. (Actually, two bags because the first one got too heavy.) If it felt even a little mushy, or I couldn’t remember what it was or when it got there, I followed the USDA’s advice of “When in Doubt, Throw it Out!”
Then, after calling my plumber and scanning Home Depot’s website for the best sale on refrigerator/ freezers, I put on my thinking cap and came up with a few easy recipes. Because truth be told, I didn’t really feel much like cooking.
A half-dozen hamburgers and a couple of links of sweet Italian sausage went into a Dutch oven with a bag of frozen homegrown plum tomatoes, diced peppers and onion, chili powder and a bottle of leftover holiday beer to create a batch of chili. A package of bacon, meanwhile, got fried and then was tossed with shredded cheese, green onion and spices to make a filling for flaky puff pastry pinwheels.
Finally, a pound of cod I had planned on frying in beer batter for Baja-style tacos went instead into a simmering bath of lemonscented water. Once poached, the delicate flakes were folded it into a creamy mix of mayo, Dijon mustard, spices and Ritz cracker crumbs and then divided into fat patties. After being chilled in the fridge, they were fried and placed on a bed of lightly dressed salad greens. Talk about an elegant, if unexpected, supper!
It was quite a day. I’d been meaning to clean out my freezer for months, maybe years, so I will finally start the year fresh and hopefully more organized.
There was also a pair of airline-sized bottles of Bombay gin under a bag of kaffir lime leaves in the bowels of my freezer. Now if there wasn’t still a pandemic raging, I’d invite you over for a martini.