Cheese is the thing I always over-buy. A block of cheddar bought for one recipe, a wedge of something nice from the deli counter that felt like a good idea at the time, the tail end of a Christmas that produced more cheese than any household could reasonably eat. For years I assumed the freezer was off limits for all of it, so a fair amount ended up going hard and sad in the fridge. It turns out I was half right. Some cheese freezes beautifully. Some really does not. Knowing which is which has saved me a lot of waste, so here is the whole picture: what freezes well, what to leave alone, and how to do it so the cheese is still worth eating on the other side. ...

Milk is the one thing my fridge is never without, and it is also the thing I throw away most often. A four-pinter comes home, the week goes sideways, and by the weekend I am standing at the sink wondering whether the last inch is still drinkable or a science experiment. For a long time I guessed. Now I know the actual rules, and they are simpler than the guessing ever was. Here is how long milk lasts once you have opened it, why the date on the bottle is only half the story, and the one line you should not cross whatever your nose tells you. ...

Buttermilk is the ingredient that always catches me out. A recipe for scones or American pancakes calls for a cupful, I go to the fridge sure that I have some, and of course I do not, because buttermilk is not something most of us keep in the door next to the milk. The good news is that you almost never need to go to the shop for it. There are several swaps that do the job well, and a couple of them use things you already have. Here is how to make a buttermilk substitute that works, which one to reach for, and, so it actually makes sense, what buttermilk is doing in the recipe in the first place. ...

Mince is the workhorse of my kitchen. A big pan of it on a Sunday quietly becomes bolognese one night, chilli the next and a cottage pie by Thursday, which is exactly why the “how long is this still good?” question comes up so often in our house. The honest answer is shorter than most people assume, and mince earns that shorter window for a reason worth understanding. So here is how long a batch of cooked mince actually lasts, fridge and freezer, and the handful of rules that keep a batch-cook from turning into a bad night. ...

This is one of those kitchen questions where the confident one-word answers flying around online are all a bit wrong, because the real answer depends on something the question leaves out: how did the meat thaw? A pack of mince that defrosted overnight in the fridge and a pack that sat out on the worktop all afternoon are not the same problem, even though both are now soft and both are staring at you asking to go back in the freezer. So let me give you the version I actually use, which starts with that one question and follows it honestly, food-safety facts and all. ...

Chicken is the one thing in my fridge I never gamble on. We cook it two or three times a week, it is cheap enough to replace, and the illness it can hand you if you get it wrong is genuinely miserable. So when a pack has been sitting a day longer than I meant, I do run through the checks: the smell, the colour, the feel. What I want to be honest about here, and what most articles gloss over, is what those checks can and cannot tell you. They catch chicken that has spoiled. They do not catch chicken that is dangerous. Those are two different things, and knowing the difference is what keeps you well. ...

Pasta is the thing I cook most when the evening has run away from me, and I almost always make too much. A bag of penne looks like nothing dry and turns into a mountain once it hits the water, so there is nearly always a tub of leftovers heading for the fridge. The good news is that cooked pasta stores beautifully and reheats into some of the best quick lunches going. The catch is that pasta is a starchy food, and starchy foods play by a stricter set of rules than most people realise. If you have read my piece on rice, some of this will sound familiar, because it is the same story with a different shape. ...

We go through a lot of milk, and every so often the maths goes wrong: a big four-pinter comes into the house on a Friday, the week changes shape, and by Tuesday there is more milk left than days to drink it. For years my answer was to pour the tail end down the sink and feel faintly guilty about it. Then I started freezing it, and the guilt went away. Milk freezes far better than most people think, and once you know the small handful of rules it becomes one of the easiest ways to stop good food going to waste. Here is everything I have learned about doing it properly. ...

A roast chicken on a Sunday feeds my household twice if I plan it, and the second meal is usually the better one: cold chicken in sandwiches, a quick curry, a pile of it stirred through pasta. So the question of how long cooked chicken really keeps is not academic in my kitchen, it decides what Monday and Tuesday look like. Over the years I have settled into a way of handling it that is safe without being wasteful, and most of it comes down to getting a couple of numbers straight and building two or three habits that then run on their own. ...

Cooked rice is the one leftover in my kitchen that I treat with genuine respect, and it took me a while to understand why. For years I did what most people do: cooked a big pan, ate what we needed, and left the rest sitting in the pan on the hob until it was cold enough to bother putting away, which on a busy evening could be two or three hours. Nobody ever got ill, so I assumed it was fine. It was not fine. It was luck, and once I understood the actual mechanism I changed the way I handle rice completely. The rules are simple, they are not fussy, and they matter more than for almost any other leftover. ...