A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Freezer Tetris. Here's how to play this fun game. You arrive home from the shops with a loaf of bread, or a pack of meat, fruit or vegetables, that you'd like to preserve through the magic of ice. But you have no way of knowing what your housemate will have also purchased and put in the freezer in the interim.

So your challenge is to somehow make room for your new purchases in the freezer. However, unlike real Tetris, a row of food doesn't magically vanish when you put it together. You have to make it vanish more slowly, by consuming it.



Sorry about these blurry photos; I have a hard enough time taking in-focus pics with my stupid shaky hands, let alone when one hand is holding the freezer door open.

You can see the immediate problem – the genius who designed our fridge thought it'd be a great idea to waste a shitload of freezer space with this nifty built-in ice dispenser thing. (You fill the upper trays with water and then when they're frozen, you twist the knob and the cubes fall into the lower tray.)



Certain things sit in our freezer forever and never seem to be used. These include my leg of lamb (in that foil container) which is now at least a couple of years old. I bought it with the idea of having people over for dinner, but since I am a Shit Cook™I was worried about embarrassing myself.

Perhaps I should still try to cook it to see if it's okay. In this respect I am my dad's daughter; he has a history of cooking with meat that has been in the freezer an audaciously long time.

Other longstanding tenants of the freezer are Paul's assorted flavoured milks. He must have them in there for a reason, but I am afraid of mentioning them and hence opening up discussion of my frozen lamb leg.

The right-hand drawer is also stuffed with random muffins and bread crusts that I have been hoarding to make into croutons, breadcrumbs or bread and butter pudding. It used to be worse; I recently threw out a bunch of crusts.

And the final thing is that bag of chicken wings. I don't know whose it is, but its irregular shape makes it a frustrating item to play Freezer Tetris with.

My first Freezer Tetris strategy is to stack the relatively flat, rectangular objects up the back. I freed up room for this today by removing some half-used frozen berries from their outer packaging and stuffing them in the door shelf. The right-hand drawer is a good place for also half-used packs of things that are too wide for the door.

The irregular-shaped objects are best right up the front. If you can shut the freezer door and it stays shut, you've won!