Butter is one of the calmer things in my fridge. It does not spoil the way milk does, it does not sulk if you forget about it for a fortnight, and a block of it will happily outlast almost everything else on the shelf. But it is not immortal, and the question people really want answered is a slightly different one: can you leave it out on the counter so it is actually spreadable, and if so, for how long. Here are the honest numbers for the fridge, the counter and the freezer, plus why salted and unsalted butter behave so differently. ...

Yes, you can freeze cooked rice, and in my kitchen it has become the sensible way to deal with the fact that rice is almost impossible to cook in small amounts. The trick is not the freezing itself, which is easy. It is the hour before the rice goes in. Get that hour right and frozen rice is one of the most useful things in the freezer, a hot side dish in three minutes flat. Get it wrong and freezing will not save you, because the thing that makes leftover rice risky is not fixed by the cold. ...

Cooked fish keeps in the fridge for 3 to 4 days, provided it was cooled quickly and stored in a sealed container. Cooked shellfish is a little shorter-lived and is best eaten within 2 to 3 days. In both cases the countdown starts when the fish was cooked, so chill leftovers promptly rather than leaving the plate on the side. Free PDF ...

Cooked eggs keep in the fridge for up to about a week, whether they are hard-boiled, scrambled or in an omelette, as long as they were chilled promptly after cooking. Hard-boiled eggs last longest, and they keep best left in their shells until you want them, because the shell protects them from drying out and picking up fridge smells. Free PDF ...

Yes, you can refreeze cooked chicken, provided it was thawed in the fridge rather than on the counter, and provided it has not been sitting out at room temperature. Chicken cooked from fresh and then frozen can be safely refrozen once after thawing in the fridge. The catch is that every trip through the freezer costs you a little texture, so refrozen cooked chicken is best kept for dishes where that hardly shows. ...

Potatoes are the thing I always cook too many of. A bag looks like a week’s worth, then a Sunday roast swallows half of it, and there is nearly always a bowl of boiled or roasted potatoes heading for the fridge. The good news is that cooked potatoes store and reheat well, and cold leftover potatoes make some of the best quick meals going. The catch is that potatoes are a starchy food, and starchy foods play by a slightly stricter set of rules than most people realise. There is also one specific risk with foil-wrapped baked potatoes that is worth knowing and easy to sidestep. ...

Someone asks it in our kitchen most weeks, usually mid-argument over a pan of curry that has already done a lap of the fridge: how many times can you actually reheat this? The short answer is once. But the number on its own is misleading, because the real risk is not about counting heatings at all. It is about how many times the food has crossed the temperature range where bacteria breed. Once you understand that, the rule stops being an arbitrary rule and starts making obvious sense. ...

Eggs are the item I most often find myself with too many of. A box bought when there was already half a box in the fridge, the three yolks left over from a pavlova, the four whites left over from a custard, the dozen from a neighbour with more hens than sense. For years I treated eggs as a use-them-or-lose-them thing, and a fair few got binned as the date crept past. Then I learned you can freeze them, which felt almost like cheating. You can, and it works well, but there are a couple of rules you have to get right or you end up with something unusable. Here is how to do it properly: what to do before they go in, how long they keep, and how to bring them back safely. ...

Bread is the thing my household wastes more of than anything else, or it used to be. A loaf that seemed like a good idea on Monday is dry by Thursday and properly stale by the weekend, and half of it goes in the bin having never been anywhere near a plate. The freezer fixed that, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why. Freezing bread is not a compromise or a way of rescuing something past its best. Done right, it is genuinely the best way to keep a loaf, better than the bread bin and far better than the fridge. Here is the whole thing: what happens to bread when you freeze it, how to do it so it comes out well, how long it keeps, and the one habit that leaves you disappointed. ...

There is a particular pause that happens over an open packet of meat that has been in the fridge a day longer than you meant. You lean in, you sniff, you turn it over in the light, and you try to decide. I do it too, and the checks are worth doing, but I want to be straight about what they can and cannot tell you. Your senses catch meat that has spoiled. They do not catch meat that is dangerous. Those are two different things, and understanding the gap between them is what keeps you well. ...