The Contents of My Freezer

There are many different signs that the seasons are changing. 

The colors of the leaves turn from light green, to dark green, to vivid hues of red or yellow or orange, then turn brown and fall off the trees.  The sun grows in heat and in brightness only to fade into golden hues and bring in the colder temperatures.  The soft rains of spring turn to tumultuous thunderstorms to a cold rain that will soon turn to snow.

And the contents of my freezer change as well.

So not as romantic or poetical as the last few sentences.  But it was an epiphany that I had a few nights ago as I was trying to figure out what to make for dinner from the hodge podge of frozen meats and past cooked meals.  The things I started to pull out were not from my summer time menu. Chicken breasts in frozen in seasoned olive oil or frozen green beans from the farmer's market, frozen blueberries from a u-pick.  No, I dug a little deeper and found meals from my winter reserve.  Chili, pot roast gravy, my famous beef and barley soup.  It's time for winter foods.

It's amazing how the body just knows what it wants.  In this day and age it's very easy to get anything out of season.  You can get strawberries in February. You can eat red meat in the middle of summer with out it going bad.  You can even have ice cream in January.  And like any true New Englander I will always eat ice cream, even when it's snowing.  The point is that when you have access to everything you could possibly want for food at any time of year, you don't really need to think about the seasonality of it all.

Even with all this access though, I think we are still in tuned to the seasonality of our food.  When we think of summer we think salads, watermelon, and fish.  Foods that are light and cooling in the hot and humid summer days.  But as the cold of winter comes in the thought of a hearty stew or a good hot pot roast seems more appetizing than a tomato salad.  And it warms you up much better.

I know it doesn't seem like an epiphany.  I've already categorized these foods as summer and winter.  But it is a realization that even the habits of what I freeze, the habits of what I eat each season, change as surely as the weather, the trees, even the sun does.

Never gonna look at the contents of my freezer the same way again.