The Mindfulness of Defrosting My Freezer
I needed something violent to do, and my freezer pushed my buttons.
It’s fair to say that the past few weeks have been bad ones. In-between my Granny getting sick and then dying, and then hosting her funeral, I forgot to take my medicine a few times, and had a lot of missed nights’ sleep during a busy period of work. Altogether, I haven’t been on this planet.
Usually when I’m not feeling right I cook, but I haven’t had the energy. When bad things happen to me I get angry, and that makes me tired. I do this thing, right, where instead of processing traumatic events or dealing with stress, I just fall asleep instantly to avoid them. I call it aggronapping. I’ve not looked into it too deeply. Trust me, you’d rather I was all tucked up in bed in situations like these.
I finally came out of my pit at the weekend, and yesterday, I felt like cooking. That’s a good sign. It shows the clouds are clearing. I love to cook. Even though I find myself thinking about patriarchal models of behaviour while I’m finely dicing onions, I know that in my heart, the kitchen is my safe space. I’ve got food to make, snacks to eat, wine in the fridge, and weapons, should I need them. It’s a haven.
On Mondays—and this is my top tip of the month, by the way—supermarkets often have good joints of meat in the reduced section of the fridges, because they weren’t all bought up the day before for Sunday roasts. That’s how I managed to come away with 1.5kg of pork shoulder for £4.65.
What would you do with a kilo and a half of pork shoulder? Spear it with garlic and roast it? Coat it with chipotle and paprika? Chop it into manageable pieces and freeze them?
I did what I thought was the only option open to me at the time. I made carnitas.
I did it properly too, using lard and orange juice, and a little bit of milk. I saved the savoury fat, and used it to make refried beans. A sense of satisfaction as thick as the smell of rendering pork still sits in the air around my house, 24 hours later.
It takes a long time to let carnitas cook, and I got bored. I opened the freezer door to put away some fresh chillies and saw that the annoying over-frozen patches had all joined together to create a secondary lining like a vault, covering the drawers, making it impossible to get at anything inside. Aggravating. I suppose anything can be seen as an opportunity though, and this was an unexpectedly great one—the chance to make an incredible mess, plus, the god-given right to smash some shit up. I lay some old tea towels on the floor, and got to work.
I chopped and I stabbed at the thick layers of ice with an old butter knife, frosty growths potentially years in the making shattering into homemade snow. I threw away practically every item I rescued from its wintery jaws, making a mental note to stop freezing packs of wholemeal pita bread—I will never eat them. I cut my knuckle on a sharp icicle, which only spurred me on, whacking away at the shelves to loosen up the compacted debris. By the time I was done, it was like a new appliance, all white and shiny, with no loose peas and old bags of thyme dusting up the place. I chucked the chunks of ice into the sink, mopped the floor with the tea towels, and threw them in the wash. It was like my rage was never here. Completion! Victory!
There’s nothing like tackling a doable task to get your spirits up. But in the case of my freezer, there was also extreme violence. A double whammy of self-help.
I’m running another self-editing and pitching online workshop on Wednesday the 25th of September.
Here’s what a member of the last workshop said:
“I went on the first one of these a few weeks back and it was amazing! It was super practical – Katie is very generous with her time and answers. Highly recommend.”
If you’d like to reserve a spot, please grab a ticket here.
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