I’ve always held a fairly cavalier attitude to how long you can keep stuff safely in a domestic freezer.
My formative years were influence heavily by the Master of long-term cold storage, my mother. In addition to her mostly-beige-powders spice rack which was stocked some time in 1965, and a comically museum-like pantry cupboard (in 2014 we located a jar of Bonox which predated the Australian Bicentennial celebrations). Alongside this was a 7-foot tall frozen cabinet of wonders which we’d go spelunking in periodically to try to find a frozen pasty to heat up for lunch, or perhaps a Tupperware or carton of stewed apple or apricot – always a welcome addition to liven up a boring bowl of rice flakes [i] Don’t get me started on this.
The point being that things could seemingly exist in there indefinitely.
Sure, I’d *read* various bits of text advising that “salmon can be frozen for up to a month after purchase”, and soforth… but come on, we ALL KNOW that use-by dates are a con, and you can always rely on your personal judgement, etc.
So anyway, for lunch the other Tuesday I realised I’d failed to plan adequately and resorted to browsing the middle drawer for a tasty mid-day meal.
There was a ziplock bag with “Ghana Curry” written in marker – which I had vague memories of flinging in there, although the first warning sign is that I couldn’t tell you who was Prime Minister when it went in. Not that that’s an immediate warning sign round these parts at the minute.
Quite a tasty handful, and I came away with a little smugness knowing that I’d contributed to the ongoing endeavour to “use up some of that stuff that’s filling up our freezer”.
It wasn’t until about 3 or 4pm that I noticed anything you’d describe as “symptoms”.
Rest-assured, I’ll spare you the gory details – this was intended more to be a musing on the affects it can have on one’s mental state to be so closely and shortly tethered to the proximity of one room of the house. Having the conversation with my boss about, “No, it’s not that I’m not well-enough to work – I just can’t risk a 1-hour train trip right now”. I recall thinking that at LEAST the frequency of travel must’ve positively influenced my step count [ii] Not the case .
But the other reason for posting this was because after recovering I said to someone that I was feeling “overjoyed at being free of Bumhole Purgatory“, and Liz said “Well that’s a phrase I doubt you’ll be sharing with the general public”.
Oh, my sweet summer child.
At any rate – 4 days of downtime/recovery is not a gamble I’m winning to take in future, so there’s been a fairly ruthless editing of the freezer’s contents. Bye bye laksa paste. Bye bye 170g of diced pork shoulder leftover from lord only knows what.
