I'm not the only person who serves "random brown shit" for dinner am I?

[PyongyangKipperbang]

Because whenever I freeze leftover stew, soup, pasta sauce, chilli etc OF COURSE I am going to remember what it is so I dont need to label it, right?

So 6 weeks later when I defrost it .,.....well lets just say that we have occasionally had chilli with pasta and bolognaise with rice. But thats ok isnt it?

Tell me I am not the only person who does this!

I once took what I thought was a tub of frozen chicken soup to work. Upon defrosting it, I realised it was actually cheese sauce.

If left to my own devices, everything in the freezer is portioned, labelled and organised in specific drawers, so I know exactly what and where everything is at a glance and always have sufficient ingredients for a meal.

However, I'm not. I can go into the bulging freezer - bulging because things have been left in their original packaging and are solid lumps in plastic (10 portions of chicken, anyone? Half an animal of indefinite origin that might be in pieces or might not, so will defrost either in about 4 hours or 3 days? Fish for five when I'm the only person who eats it?) - ding dinners have had their packaging removed, so Heaven knows what's in it probably fucking gluten but I can't tell - or there's a ziplock of random orange shit plus four separate nearly empty bags of frozen peas and two waffles (yay! Gluten free!) in the full size box utterly wedged and taking up half the drawer that's supposed to contain frozen fruit and veg - and I'll give up and get something identifiable from the shop rather than risk it.

I took a random container out of the freezer this morning for tonight’s dinner. DH asked what we were having…. ‘No idea’ I said.
A couple of hours later he shouted ‘it’s that shitty pork thing we didn’t like when we first had it’.
Had pizza instead.

We frequently had "brown from the freezer", as obviously I was going to remember exactly what everything was . It all got a lot worse when DD2 would come back from uni and do the cooking, as she had no idea of portion sizes, and felt that every meal needed about 17 different vegetable, so a four person stew became a random number of boxes of "brown" which we ate forever after she'd gone back to uni.

An amazing dinner when the DC were younger (actually tbh, they still love it) was just using up random bits and the ends of packets of stuff from the freezer, topped up with beans (or spaghetti hoops if we were being fancy), so you'd end up with two sausage rolls, half a fish finger and a couple of hash brown, with baked beans topped with a fried egg. We could only have it when ExH was out as he massively disapproved for some reason.

I love a bit of ‘soup roulette’, is it minestrone, a wee tomato and red pepper?…all will be revealed once it’s defrosted.

This is a great thread! Am place-marking. I tend to only freeze meat not complete meals, so I don't have this problem. However, if I did freeze whole meals- it would be like the OP :-)

We call it mystery tea.

@Keladrythesaviour 😂😂😂😂
What did he do with it? Did he bring it back home 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Thats what I call "random freezer tea". It might all have pasta in it, or it might all be tomato based, or it might actually just be boxes of random shit but I CBA cooking!

We call this an out of freezer experience. I have labels but can never be bothered as I’m sure I will remember what it is 😆

I did have a system once where I put red stickers on bags for bolognese sauce. Green for chilli and blue for curry and brown for cottage pie mince Got the stickers from work but that went out the window. Should try it again.

[quote mishmased]@Keladrythesaviour 😂😂😂😂
What did he do with it? Did he bring it back home 🤣🤣🤣🤣[/quote]
I wish! He chucked it, what a waste!

We always make a chilli con carne and freeze to take on holiday for an easy meal on the first night. Family have never let me forget the time we ended up with rice with chocolate frosting which I hadn’t realised my daughter had frozen when a bit too generous with her baking. Started a new trend for first night take away.

I threw away a tub of brown lumpy stuff and a smaller tub of yellow lumpy stuff tonight. The brown one was beef casserole, which I'm certain was a stringy and tough one that I just couldn't bring myself to throw away immediately, but I have no clue what the yellow one was, and I didn't really fancy finding out, tbh.

Usually though I'm game to try anything. I don't label stuff because I like to live dangerously...

We called it "brown surprise". It was case of boiling rice/ pasta/ potatoes and hoping you'd chosen correctly!

This has reminded me of first lockdown in April last year, where we were isolating due to illness and our pre booked internet shop never materialised, when asked what was for dinner next evening I replied not a clue and found a selection of gravies, cheese sauce, stews and lumps of meat with random frozen veg. It was a legendary disastrous meal that we all happily devoured.

I tend to have bolognese, curry or chilli in freezer and could be any. Jacket potatoes work well with them all

@LadyMacbethWasMisunderstood

A friend of mine froze peeled bananas and put them in her slow cooker as part of a casserole.

I was served a casserole at my godmother’s friend’s house in the 80s which was sausages and interspersed with bananas lined up in a shallow dish and baked in a curry sauce. The family had worked as missionaries in Africa and it was a dish local to where they’d been based (though I suspect with nearest approximate UK ingredients). It sounds all kinds of wrong but it was memorable in a good way. I’m still talking about all these years later.

Happens here all the time. Is that stew or just gravy? Is that chilli or bolognaise. Thankfully we are quite good at labelling now. Back in the day mum used to but half a cow from the butcher, it had all different cuts for roasting. She lovingly defrosted and prepared a roast dinner only to discover it was actually a bag of bones that she got to boil for soup. We had a roast dinner, all the trimmings, with a tin of corned beef.

yellow lumpy stuff tonight

Yellow lumpy in our freezer is either cheese sauce or apple sauce.

I am a scientist so everything that goes into the freezer is fully labelled (although I manage to resist listing hazards). DH likes to play fast and loose. He now will (after 20 years training) write a day but fails to say which 'Wednesday' he actually froze the foodstuff.

I did once take out a container of cheese sauce to go with the cauli. I always end up overdoing cheese sauce so yellow frozen shit = cheese sauce, right?

Wrong.

It was lemon flavoured yellow fondant icing that I had made for one of the kids birthday cakes. Thankfully I worked that out before I added the cauli :o

I'm so glad that it isnt just me!

This post came about because I had to ring my father and ask him what he puts into his roasted veg pasta sauce because there were a coupleof ingredients that I dont use so I couldnt work out what it was. We confirmed it was in fact his pasta sauce and he was killing himself laughing as him and Ma play "Brown Shit Roulette" too!

Oh and yy to it being 3 years between freezing and eating....I just didnt want to get jumped on! I have random white stuff which might be celery soup or....something else, which has survived a swap from the old freezer to a "new" one which happened at least 4 years ago

Keep a waterproof black marker blue-tacked to your fridge - this way there is a higher likelihood things will get labelled before they make it to the freezer! Don't forget to write the date as well.

@violetbunny

Keep a waterproof black marker blue-tacked to your fridge - this way there is a higher likelihood things will get labelled before they make it to the freezer! Don't forget to write the date as well.

Yeah....that works right up until it gets "borrowed" for something else and never gets put back so....a week maybe? Then we are back to Brown Shit Roulette.

Quite honestly I could keep a marker taped to my forehead and I would still fail to label everything (I do manage to label some things).

Lack of handy marker pens is not the problem!