What’s in your freezer? I’ll confess to you, dear readers, that before I developed the good sense to buy some freezer tape and a sharpee and label the contents, my freezer was an amalgamation of unlabeled leftovers and mysterious frozen ‘stuff.’ Even when my memory was at its sharpest, I’d forget what that blob was or what that container held. I’m certain that when I deposited it, I just knew I’d remember. And, then they languished there.
Not only have there been a lot of unlabeled containers, there have been other items. For a while, there was a rooster head carefully wrapped in plastic wrap; my daughter’s former boyfriend had planned on carving a fiddle head, modeled after said rooster. Alas, he never retrieved it. Once I found a paint brush wrapped in plastic. Why do husbands do the things they do?
In her freezer, one of my friends keeps songbirds that are killed flying into her windows. She’s planning on learning taxidermy someday.
At this very moment there is a ten-year-old bottle of homemade limoncello; we’ll serve it sometime. There are six fruit-juice popsicles I made for the kids this summer. Shall I keep them? I have five Christmas cookies in a ziplock. Leftover from last year, I was certain that they would be produced as a ‘surprise’ sometime this year. Guess I’ll compost them.
Once, I declared, “I’m not sure what this is, but I’m going to thaw it and whatever it is, we’re having it for dinner!” It turned out to be a pound of crabmeat that someone had gifted us that I had forgotten. Bonus!
However, also in the freezer are the chicken bones—backs and necks I’ve saved over the past few months, when I’ve cut up a whole chicken. November, now that the weather is cool, is the time to pull them out and make some soup. I’ll use a jar of the tomatoes I canned in August and we’ll have a lovely meal for practically nothing.
Clean out your freezer, I say!
Creamy Tomato Soup
- Salvaged chicken backs and necks (or chicken parts)
- 2 stalks of celery, chopped
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 2 carrots, sliced
- 1 large jar or can of tomatoes
- 1 T. salt
- 2 T. dried parsley
- 1 pint cream
Put the chicken parts, the celery, onion, carrots, salt and parsley in your pressure cooker or Instapot. Fill no more than 2/3 with water and pressure for thirty minutes or according to Instapot instructions. Or, if you don’t have these devices, bring to a boil and then simmer for two hours.
Drain the pot contents into a colander, placed inside a second pot, and put back into the soup the bits of chicken that you can remove from the bones and perhaps the carrots.
Add the tomatoes and cook for another 30 minutes. Then leave the tomatoes whole, or crush them with an immersion blender for a smooth soup. Just before serving, add the cream and heat gently.
