2021, Business, Food, History, holidays, Science, Technology, Uncategorized

Frozen Food Day

59 Comments

I think I’ve mentioned that I got a fun “every day a celebration” calendar by Sandra Boynton for Solstice?  According to the calendar (verified on other sources), today is National Frozen Food Day.  Apparently Ronald Reagan decided in 1984 that we needed a day to celebrate frozen foods – there is actually a proclamation (#5157) to this effect.

Frozen Food Day caught my attention because I just watched a documentary last week about some of the great “inventions” of the 20th century.  It began with the Kellogg brothers and CW Post, battling it out for cereal sales.  When CW Post passed away, he left his company for his daughter, Marjorie, who turned out to be one smart cookie.  In 1929 she bought out the entire Clarence Birdseye company (one of the other great inventors in the documentary).  With the General Foods backing, the frozen food industry was able to grow by leaps and bounds. 

In our freezer there are lots of things that we have frozen: berries that we’ve picked, pineapple puree cubes (YA makes these), my sun-dried tomatoes, my jams.  I also keep my coffee and my Ralston in the freezer and we have lots of assorted fruits.  Waffles and cookie dough. Ice cream (Moose Tracks right now) .  Assorted things we find (mostly at Trader Joe’s).

This is too much for just our freezer upstairs so we have a small freezer in the basement as well.  It’s nice to have a spot for extras or the occasional bulk purchase.  I’m very glad that Clarence Birdseye developed the flash freezing process and even more glad that Marjorie Post put her considerable company and funding behind it.  Even enough to celebrate today!

Anything interesting in your freezer?  Any guilty freezer pleasures?

59 thoughts on “Frozen Food Day”

  1. Any quillty pleasures in my freezer? Are you kidding? Isn’t that what it’s for? Not really. The quilt in this freezer right outside the garage door is chock full of frozen wonderful food given to us by lovely wonderful friends. Recently I’ve gone through a few rough surgeries. Our daughter who lies across the country offered our friends to sign up on a ‘food train’ where one night they could deliver a meal for my wife and I. Oh boy talk about a delightful smorgasbord of epicurean delights which I’ve asked for recipes freely given by these wonderful people. Now I know who to pay it forward for the next persons in need of easy, healthy and not so healthy delightful meals, You can make up your own “meal train’ or probably find it one line. The guilt beside the wonderful foods come from our dear friends bringing it all over. My wife can cook and bake. But what a way for people to do instead of wondering what can we do to help? Just sign up to “door and dash” or send a “door and dash” gift card. I love Minnesota. Thank you. I’m out!

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    4. Food trains made sure I stayed fed (and actually reminded me to eat some days) last fall when dinner was the least of my worries. I am grateful to each and every meal dropped off – home cooked or delivered by DoorDash.

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  3. Well, we have tons of things. In our basement we have three freezers and a refrigerator with a small freezer qt the top. In the small freezer on top of the refrigerator we have 3 loaves of French bread that I baked last week, rye bread and sandwich bread Husband baked, sourdough starter, bags of walnuts, pecans, sliced and slivered almonds, various grains for baking, wheat berries, prosciutto, pancetta, and peach pie filling we made last summer.

    Next is the Lutheran freezer. It is an upright freezer.. It contains many jars of homemade enchilada sauce, some from red peppers, some from tomatillos, home rendered lard, 4 kinds of frozen ravioli we ordered from Colorado, 2 gallons of homemade broth, spinach, chard, peas, and shell-out beans from the garden, 4 contaners of bolognese sauce I made last weekend, blanched celeriac, tomato puree, chili, soup, stew, and other leftovers. Oh, and Mexican Popsicles.

    Then there is another but larger upright freezer for the garden strawberries and raspberries, a turkey, a duck, ground round, ground lamb, pork, and veal, two roasting chickens, chicken breasts, various beef roasts and steaks, oxtails for broth, two legs of lamb, cod and salmon filets, sea bass, scallops, and 20 jars of homemade pesto.

    The third freezer is a small chest freezer mainly for pork. There are roasts, ribs, pork shoulder in various forms, sausages, 4 lbs of coffee beans, and other miscellany that doesn’t fit in the other freezers.

    In the freezer on the kitchen fridge we have ice cream, yeast, baking supplies, and things we plan to use more immediately.

    I believe we are quite well stocked. It is ridiculous.

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  4. Today is sausage making day, and Husband is finishing up the jerk pork he started yesterday. Those things will go in the Lutheran freezer when they are done.

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      1. We bought it because we ran out of freezer storage when we were preparing meals for a weekend gathering of Lutheran seminary students from our synod at The Badlands Bible Camp. Husband also says it is because it is upright!

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  5. I freeze and vacuum seal the blanched spinach in 10 oz packages because that is the amount called for in Julia Child’s spinach quiche recipe. The chard is blanched and sealed in 2.5 lb packages since that is how much I need for a pie of greens I make from The Splended Table. I want to make sure it is all usable and doesn’t languish and need to be thrown out.

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      1. Yet one more way the pandemic affected us last summer. For the first time ever I didn’t have a couple of great big huge zucchinis that were given to me by coworkers. So no frozen zucchini for our zucchini cake this year.

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  6. When I visited my cousins who lived on a farm near Magnolia, MN, I was sometimes surprised to find pocket gopher feet in their big freezer as I hunted for ice cream treats. This was during the 1960’s when the county offered a bounty for pocket gophers. My cousins brought in the feet of the gophers they caught to the county agent and collected their money.

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    2. Gopher feet. Yep. Still happens. Next Tuesday are the Annual Township elections and Annual meetings. Happens in every township in every county in MN. And one of the agenda items is setting the gopher bounty. Around here some people will save all their gopher feet to take to the Viola Gopher Count.
      http://www.gophercount.com/
      It’s a big deal.
      But actually, any resident can bring their gopher feet to our meeting. We used to joke it was the new guys job to count them. Now we’ll pretty much take your word for it. Current bounty is $3.00 / pair.

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  7. I can’t imagine having as much frozen food as Renee. My refrigerator has a bottom drawer freezer which is maybe 2/3 full – some skinless chicken breasts, a couple of No Name salmon filets, a bag of peas, a few small containers of homemade butternut squash soup, a small bag of brownie bites, a small bag of homemade oatmeal cookies, a Trader Joe’s roasted veggie pizza, a bag of Trader Joe’s chicken fried rice, 2 bags of dark sweet cherries, a bag of bagel thins, half filled ice cube trays (don’t use much ice in the winter), and 3 cold packs. Rather pathetic! During the summer there might be Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream or some type of fruit juice bar.
    Re: frozen food. I am ever so grateful for frozen peas – so much better than the god awful canned peas I grew up with. Yuck!

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    1. Whenever we drive to Brookings to see our son we always pack a cooler full of meat and other things for him and his family. They are particularly fond of the pesto.

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      1. Son likes to share the pesto with a Croatian friend of his who grew up in Venice. Friend says it reminds him of home and could compete with any pesto in Venice.

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    2. When I was a kid my mother would make canned peas with a milk roux, salt and pepper. I still love canned peas. We often had them with salmon loaf.
      I love frozen peas, too, but they are a whole nother thing. Good with ramen noodles or mac and cheese. Any peas are welcome on my plate.

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      1. When I was growing up, almost every vegetable that ever passed onto our plates came out of a can. No frozen vegetables whatsoever. Peas and carrots were my favorites. My mother preferred creamed corn to regular corn but I can only eat that every now and then and I have to be in a really nostalgic mode.

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        1. We had a dog when I was growing up that got a lot of leftovers served to her. She liked most veggies, but if peas and carrots were in her bowl, she would only eat the peas and leave the little squares of carrots behind.

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        2. As a teenager, I knew several kids who worked, when the harvest was in, at a Green Giant plant canning corn. After working with and seeing creamed corn processed, none of them would ever eat it again.

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  8. Our freezer space is limited to the bottom third of our fridge. It seems to be perpetually full despite my efforts to limit the supply of frozen stuff on hand. Since husband started baking bread again, he has quit buying bagels, so we no longer have bagels in the freezer. Instead we now seem to always have a loaf of bread in there. There are also several bags of nuts of various kinds, a quart of pork stock, a package of cod fillets, a couple of packages of ground beef, and a couple more of ground pork. There’s a whole chicken and some frozen peas and spinach. Considering how rarely we use ice cubes, they take up an inordinate amount of space in the freezer. Finally, there’s a bag of cheese ravioli and another of pork pot sticker dumplings, nice to have for days when I don’t feel overly ambitious about cooking dinner.

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  9. Our basement chest freezer holds several gallons of our home juiced apple juice, and some odds and ends – tomato sauce, stock, beef liver from somewhere local (so it seems blasphemous to not use it), chicken breasts, lots of butter (on sale), and the ice cream, which I keep there so it’s harder to get at – that would be the guilty pleasure. Kitchen freezer has more store-bought things like frozen veggies, coffee, Parmesan, bread type things, and frozen bananas for our morning smoothies.

    I am grateful to have frozen foods, hard to imagine life without them. It’s fun to dig to the bottom or the back of freezer and find some long-forgotten treasure, still edible!

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  12. Along with some tasty beef from my friends’ cows, there is some ice cream, possibly a bag yet of shredded zucchini… and Girl Scout cookies. My best friend thinks it’s odd that I can manage to keep GS cookies in the freezer without consuming them – the secret is really that I shove them to the back where I can forget about them for months. 😊

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  13. Our large basement freezer is a lot of meat. We get pork from a local guy I know and his pork is the best we’ve ever had; the bacon, the sausage, the “cottage bacon” has wonderful flavor!
    Extra butter, misc ice cream treats. Bread, frozen corn (I cut ours off the cob and blanch it before freezing). I used to keep gallons of colostrum in the freezer but don’t need that anymore.

    I’ve told this story before of cleaning out my in-laws freezers. They had 3. None had been cleaned out for a lot of years. Multiple power failures over the years had left a solid foot of frozen chicken and dozens of bags of cranberries, all thawed and frozen, thawed and frozen.
    Now, X number of years later I’m trying to clean it out. It was half thawed and I’m fishing around in this puddle of blood red water and my 15 yr old son comes up and looks over my shoulder, puts his hand on my back and says “You’re a better man than me”.

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  14. Last summer Robin was on a rhubarb binge and panicked that we wouldn’t have enough rhubarb to last the winter, so she bought a bundle of stems every week and chopped them up and froze them. There must be eight bags of rhubarb in our freezer and not a single one of them has been used.

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  15. It’s the Baboons fault! All this freezer takeaway! Early this morning someone crashed their car into a utility pole taking out my power which includes my FREEZER!The Methodist church across the street is prepared for a long delay of service. They have generators set up to power their kitchen. If I start thawing, I might have to see if they can take in my homeless meat.

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  17. Not a single Baboon mentioned ice cubes. What else should be in a freezer except water in a tray? Oh sure, you elites get ice from a door! We peons filled a tray, spilled water all over the floor getting it into the freezer, waited and waited and waited until…..cubes! But our peon work was not complete with 32 degrees. Extracting the frozen tray was easy . Now get those segments out! Twist. Shout! Some in a glass. Most on the floor. A shame. Glass half empty or glass half full…of ice?

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    1. We buy a 10 lb bag of ice and put it in the large drawer of our new fridge with the freezer at the bottom. We don’t have an ice cube maker, and I refuse to mess with trays.

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    2. Actually, I did mention that ice “cubes” take up more space in our freezer than they reasonably should, based on how little ice we use. They are, however, NOT the kind you describe. There’s an internal ice maker that automatically spits out half circles of ice.

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  18. Don’t know that it’s ever considered OT to talk about books on the trail, but I thought this list may come in handy at future Blevins meetings:
    BOOK BLURBS – GLOSSARY OF TERMS

    Enchanting There’s a dog in it
    Heart-warming There’s a dog and a child it
    Moving The child dies
    Heart rending The dog dies
    Thoughtful Mind-numbingly tedious
    Haunting Set in the past
    Exotic Set abroad
    Audacious Set in the future
    Award-winning Set in India
    Perceptive Set in North London
    Provocative Infuriating
    Epic Editor cowed by author’s reputation
    From the pen of a master Same old same old
    In the tradition of Shamelessly derivative
    Spare and taut Under researched
    Richly detailed Over researched
    Disturbing Author bonkers
    Stellar Author young and photogenic
    Classic Author hanging in there
    Vintage Author past it

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