Label frustration

I’m at present waiting for the filling for a chicken & mushroom pie to cool down before I put the pastry top on.

While I was waiting I had a rummage in the freezer, raising the next thing on my freezer list, cooked gammon 6½ oz, up from the depths so it will be easy to find for tomorrow’s meal.

Our freezer labels have developed an unfortunate habit of coming off the parcels in the freezer. So it is that I found two unlabelled parcels. I looked inside. Obviously cooked red meat, lamb or beef, in both cases.

One bag only had one bag in. I tasted a small crumb of iced meat lollipop – lamb I concluded. I weighed the bag. On my list there is only one such bag of that weight, dated Aug 17. A new label will go on when I re-find the bag.

The other bag had two bags in, marked 6 & 4½ oz. Those odd amounts rang a bell. I had put such a bag in the freezer, appropriately labelled only on Saturday after having some roast lamb. That I labelled immediately as cooked lamb Jan 18 before I put it back in the freezer. I checked on my freezer list on the computer & sure enough that was the only bag holding two bags of that weight of lamb.

As it is I know there’s a bag of what looks like cooked gammon somewhere in the freezer that I found on another occasion. I think I’ve located it on the list but now the bag has once more dived into the depths of our chest freezer, still unlabelled. I’ve noted down the vintage for when the bag resurfaces, then I can label it again. It joins the list with the cooked lamb  of Aug 17.

It’s very frustrating finding bags without labels. Somewhere, at the very bottom, when we empty the freezer to defrost it, there will be a pile of labels just lying there. So much for my efforts at efficiency.