A spot of self-promotion:
I am very excited to see my latest article online: “The Irresistible Rise of Panettone.” It's for Eater London, and it’s about how panettone won Britain over, and how this centuries-old bake is changing. Writing it meant I had to eat copious quantities of delicious panettone: a cross I was willing to bear.
And now, for the newsletter:
My partner, Diya, is away for a fortnight, and I am eating down the freezer. This has needed doing for some time: the top compartment is an icy cave, and the drawer below is well on its way. Defrosting Day is waiting around the corner. But there was no particular reason it had to be done right now, except that there was nobody there to talk me out of it.
It would have been twice as easy to eat down the freezer in December, when Diya is back and there is another person to feed, but I have a habit of starting non-urgent projects on my own. At least, unlike most previous non-urgent projects — shelving units; jigsaw puzzles; trying and failing to fix very minor leaks — this one does not take up a great deal of my time. It might even save me a few minutes here and there, though it does require a bit of thought to make ‘proper meals’ out of some leftovers.
I suspect I enjoy the self-imposed challenge of eating down the freezer because I have fond family memories of Defrosting Day, when the freezer’s forgotten remainders were arranged into a discordant buffet. A solitary potato waffle; two Aunt Bessie’s Yorkshire puddings; three chipolata sausages; perhaps, if we were lucky, a whole chicken and mushroom pie.
Although similar in appearance, meals on Defrosting Day are distinct from what I still call a Party Tea. A Party Tea is a different kind of a freezer-based meal. It rarely takes place during a party, though it may come around in the run-up to the holidays. It is usually aimed at creating new space in a nearly-full freezer, perhaps for a chicken or a soon-to-be-bought tub of ice cream. A Party Tea is characterised by abundance: whole trays of chicken nuggets; a bag of Tex-Mex potato wedges; an Indian Snack Selection. Defrosting Day, on the other hand, is fragmentary; a culinary collage.
These past ten days, I have been eating down leftovers from meals made in the recent past. They tell stories, evoking memories that are not quite Proustian. They do not remind me of distant childhood, but of moments in months gone by.
In rough chronological order, I have so far eaten down:
Almost pasta e ceci
This was my gateway into eating down the freezer. I made a giant vat of it for me and Diya two days before she left for her trip, and I had always planned to freeze a few bowls’ worth for later. The purpose of this dish was to use up a veg box we had forgotten to cancel. It was not quite a chickpea pasta, strictly speaking, because I had to incorporate so many disparate pressure-cooked vegetables into the broth — kale, celery, a beautiful romanesco cauliflower — that chickpeas now played only a minor role.
My usual feeling is that cooked pasta dishes do not freeze all that well, and that it is better to freeze your soup, broth or sauce, and then, when the time comes to reheat it, add freshly-cooked pasta. In general, I stand by this, unless your meal, like this one, is a thick-ish soup containing miniature pasta shapes: the sort that feel most at home in soups. For this dish, I used a bag of tiny moons and stars; I can’t remember where I bought them, but they fit the bill perfectly.
To begin with, I enjoyed eating down this meal. A few times, I added an anchovy, or another sprig of rosemary from a nearby front garden, to freshen it up while I was reheating it. After a while, even that lost its shine, until my friend Farah gave me a bottle of delicious garlicky olive oil from her holiday to Albania. This gave my final bowl the spark I had been searching for.
Master daal
At school, I knew a boy who would postpone buying a new tub of hair gel, by combining the residues of his old tubs and mixing them into what he called a “master gel.” I do not do this, because I stopped using hair gel at the same time I stopped wearing Lynx Africa, but I see no reason why this basic principle cannot be applied to meals.
There was a time when I would treat all manner of leftovers this way: master soups, master curries, and masta pastas, left, right, and centre. These days, I generally save these dialectical meals for when two versions of the same dish need a strategic bit of synthesis. In this case, two half-pots of leftover mung daal, from different occasions: one heavy on the chilli, the other less so. I crumbled in some freezer-spinach — leaves, not cubes — and topped it off with a simple garlic and mustard seed tarka (just mustard seeds and thinly-sliced garlic, fried in homemade ghee).
Kosha mangsho
This was a real highlight in my solo dining calendar: kosha mangsho, a slow-cooked Bengali mutton dish. It was made a few weeks ago by Sohini Banerjee — friend, chef, and supperclub host — for a sumptuous Diwali meal she cooked for us a few weeks ago. By coincidence, she and her now-husband, Rijul, were getting married in Kolkata, the day after I discovered this welcome surprise in my freezer. I defrosted it overnight, and tried to copy the way Sohini roasted it when we came for dinner: low and slow with a tin foil cover, then a lid-free blast at the end. Work meant I couldn’t travel to Kolkata, but I felt symbolically present after this unexpected rediscovery.
Daal makhni
This is another happy product of that same Diwali dinner, a dish that Diya cooked and brought with her: a daal makhni, which was made quite fiery by an uncharacteristically hot batch of ‘mild’ deggi mirch. Fire is not the main point of daal makhni, so it was diluted with butter and cream, which are the point of daal makhni, Diya says. This is therefore a rich version of an already rich dish. I reheated this on Tuesday when my friend Ali came to watch the Wales v England game, in the nervous hope that this fiery daal would bring victory for the land of the red dragon. The daal was delicious, but had no discernible effect on Wales’ lacklustre sporting performance.
Miscellaneous mithai
Diya wrote a great guide to South Asian sweet shops for Eater London recently. She rightly thought that it was only proper to try a representative sample from each shop, but this also meant there were boxes and boxes of sweets left over. We couldn’t even give them away as gifts, because we had taken little mouse-like bites out of each individual piece. (There really were that many sweets; that is not our usual style). Some of them, like the balushahi, could be eaten straight from the freezer; these went first. Others, including most of the laddoos, hardened completely, and would break your teeth if you went straight in. They required either chiselling away with a knife (the impatient approach), or a quick microwave blast on the ‘defrost’ setting (the luxury approach, and on balance, the right one for the job).
Sweetened condensed milk
I don’t know why this was in the freezer, but I expect it had something to do with Nigella Lawson’s very good and quite straightforward no-churn ice cream recipe. An opened can of condensed milk doesn’t keep forever in the fridge, but by some miracle, it stays gloopy in a tupperware container in the freezer, without icing over. Every time I opened the freezer, I ate a teaspoon on its own, as a Milkybar-flavoured treat. The tupperware of condensed milk is now no more.
Eating Down the Freezer
Loved this. I've just relocated to Dublin and was so shocked at first by how tiny our freezer is (compared to my old American ones). We're in need of eating down our freezer, as well - I have some very nice (shrink-wrapped) corn tortillas hoarded away in there, waiting for the right filling.