License to Chill?

Thriftiness is a dish best served cold.

“Deepfreeze Freezer” by dok1 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

I recently read this really interesting New York Times story about families with multiple refrigerators and freezers, and what that fact can say about socioeconomic class, and even race and ethnicity. That got me thinking about my own family’s fridge/freezer habits.

Growing up, our family had one freezer-fridge combo in the kitchen and then a big standing freezer in the basement (and later in the garage, when we moved to a house without a basement). The second freezer stored all the stuff Mom got on sale, made in batches, or that was part of our holiday preparations. Oh, and it was also the destination for all the bags of garden-grown collard greens or homemade beef stew or what-have-you that my great-grandmother would send us home with after a visit.

That said, there are probably items in that freezer (which just started to die after about 30+ years of use) that predate my high school graduation. In particular, there is a Ziploc bag of frozen walnuts in the shell that I’m pretty sure has survived for decades. Every visit home. I would look at them and think about tossing them, but I would get a weird wave of nostalgia and chicken out. Part of me wonders whether any bags of greens from my great-grandmother’s garden have survived the various moves and cleanouts. If they’re there, stuffed way, way in the back, they have…