What's In My Freezer

I love when the weather changes. There’s something so comforting in taking half a beat to reset, switch from shorts to trousers, trainers to boots, and settle into the autumnal groove. I must declare an interest up front: I’m a cool-weather guy. I once managed to coincide the three hot weeks of last summer with trips to Glasgow, the Isle of Man and then Iceland, cleverly swerving the sight of any mercury pushing over 32 degrees.

October’s when I’m pleased to see a lot of things: the rugby season’s back, fresh venison’s coming through with game birds on the way, kids are back to school, and I’ve finally got the weather to match all of the Christmas product testing I’ve been doing through summer. Our new Spiced Red Cabbage with Cranberries and Chantenay Carrot with Orange & Honey Butter are a gorgeous addition to your Christmas dinner, but a bewildering attachment to my BBQ spread in August (sending apologies and thanks to my ‘Christmas in July’ product testers).

With a bit of routine comes the opportunity for forward planning—what I’d have given for some of that in July! When you know what you’re doing for the upcoming weeks, you can get a bit of structural cladding around your plans. For example, cook a chicken on Tuesday and work through the leftovers in packed lunches and dinners, before having your Friday treat. Get a big bolognese ragu going, make a dinner for the evening, layer extra into some lasagnes for the freezer, and sacrilegiously rework what you’ve got left with some cumin, chilli, and kidney beans for chilli jacket potatoes (a friend of mine does a different Jacket Potato every week on what she calls ‘JackPot Wednesdays’, a brilliant idea). You could order your box to come on Friday, and have a good batch cook on Sunday to fill a freezer drawer with grab-and-go meals. If you’re stuck for ideas and looking for something a bit different, I thought I’d tell you all what’s on my radar to see if we can get the creative juices flowing.

I am lucky enough to have two freezers, and run one as the ‘cook’s freezer’ (aka, things I’ve tucked away ready to unleash on a rainy day) and the other as the ‘easy freezer’, with Tupperwares labelled up and ready to go, so even my dear other half, Ro, can work out how to cook and eat them. Apart from roasting joints lying dormant, I use the following make cooking from scratch much more convenient:

• • Well reduced, rich chicken stock, frozen as big ice cubes, ready to drop in. The easiest way to quickly add flavour.
• • Cooked ‘soffritto’ (carrots, onions and celery finely chopped), softened and seasoned, again ready to add at a moment’s notice. This cuts out the 10 mins at the start of your cooking. 
• • Fresh thyme, on the stalk. Freeze it in a bag, crunch it with your hand and watch the leaves fall like snow! (No need to pick the leaves off the stem individually).

• • Very thinly sliced roast beef. It defrosts in a flash and is fantastic in stir fry, noodles, even a quick stroganoff or just an awesome beef sandwich!

It gets much more interesting in Ro’s freezer, the ‘cooked and ready to rock’. As a rule, I’m batch cooking and treating the freezer like a library, swapping things in and out as I go. Last week I made a hake and chorizo soup. This was great on day 1 and even better on day 2, but the rest goes straight into Tupperware and is frozen. As that goes in, I’ll bring out a cheeky beef rendang and a pot of shredded roast chicken from the week before and hey presto! One batch cook gives total variation, and the more you cook, the more exciting the variation gets.

The real winners in Ro’s freezer, apart from the oversized ice cubes for gin & tonic, are the choices of sides, easily forgotten but always appreciated. I like to use our products to flavour up sides and take them to the next level, whether that’s Dry Cured Smoked Streaky Bacon Lardons melting in with potatoes, or Beef & Pork Chilli Meatballs imparting rich flavour through a vegetable traybake. One of my favourite Field & Flower products is our Semi-Dried Chorizo Sausages, which I’ll roll around a pan until they start to colour, add a thinly sliced red onion and caramelise, then 2 cups of rice and 4 cups of our Chicken Stock to absorb all the flavour. Stick a bulb of garlic in the middle of the dish, put the lid on and bake for 25-30 minutes until absorbed and fragrant. This is a rice dish so nice that you’ll struggle to tuck any away in the freezer but trust me, the day you pull it out when you’re at a loose end is a very good day indeed!

Like I said earlier, I’ve been lucky enough to try our Christmas range over the past couple of months, and the benefits are long-lasting. I’ve wanted to nail vegetable sides since I started in this role and am so pleased with how they’ve come out. Our gravies and stocks, particularly our SPRING Bone Broth - Turkey Leg Up, are better than ever, and our trimmings, stuffings and extras are finely tuned. I’ll absolutely make the most of our Christmas 3 for £15 and 2 for £9 this year and loading up both mine and Ro’s freezers with the goodies that are only available once a year at Christmas, ready to light up weeknight dinners and Sunday roasts right through 2026.