Posts

Yes, you can freeze sausages, raw or cooked, and they are one of the better things to keep in the freezer because a pack always seems to hold one or two more than a meal actually needs. Raw sausages keep their best quality for about 1 to 2 months frozen, cooked ones for around 2 to 3 months, and both stay safe well beyond that even as the texture slowly slips. The catch is not the freezing, it is the thawing and the cooking, because sausages are the classic food that looks done on the outside while the middle is still cold. Get that part right and a multipack becomes three or four easy dinners instead of a use-by-date panic. ...

Yes, you can freeze cream, but which cream you have changes the answer more than any other freezing question I get asked. Double cream freezes well and comes back fine for cooking. Single cream tends to split into watery liquid and greasy flecks when it thaws, so it is the one to be wary of. Whipping cream sits in the middle, and it does best if you whip it first and freeze it in that form. Get the type right and you can stop pouring the last of a pot down the sink, which is exactly the sort of small waste that used to nag at me every week. ...

Cooked food should not sit out at room temperature for more than two hours, and no more than one hour if the room is properly hot, say a warm kitchen in summer or food on a table in the sun. That is the working rule the UK Food Standards Agency, the NHS and the USDA all land on, and it is the one I go by at home. The pan of bolognese left on the hob while everyone drifts off after dinner, the roast cooling on the side, the rice you meant to put away: the safe move is to get them cooled and into the fridge inside a couple of hours, not to leave them until bedtime. ...

You are halfway through a recipe, the tin is greased, and the bag in the cupboard says plain when the recipe wanted self-raising. This happens to me more often than I would like to admit, usually on a Sunday when the shops feel a long way off. The good news is that you almost never need to stop. Self-raising flour is just plain flour with a raising agent already mixed through it, so you can make your own in the time it takes to find a whisk. Add 2 level teaspoons of baking powder to every 150g of plain flour, mix it well, and you have self-raising flour that behaves exactly as the shop-bought kind. ...

Butter is one of those things I buy on offer and then find I have five blocks of, which is a lovely problem until the fridge runs out of room and the dates start creeping up. For years I did not think of the freezer as somewhere butter belonged, but it turns out butter is about as freezer-friendly as food gets. It freezes solid without any real change to how it behaves, it keeps for months, and it comes back exactly as it went in. So yes, you can absolutely freeze butter, and if you ever stock up when it is cheap you probably should. Here is how long it lasts, the small difference between salted and unsalted, and how to do it so you barely notice it was ever frozen. ...

Soup is the meal I make in far bigger quantities than any one dinner needs, and that is entirely on purpose. A big pot on a Sunday costs the same effort as a small one, and if I freeze the extra properly I have bought myself three or four dinners that heat up in the time it takes to butter some bread. So yes, you can freeze soup, and it is one of the things the freezer does best. The only parts worth getting right are how you cool it before it goes in, which handful of soups need a small tweak, and how to store it so what comes out still tastes like what went in. Here is the whole method. ...

Bananas are the fruit I most reliably fail to eat in time. A bunch that looked perfect on Monday is speckled brown by Thursday and heading for the compost by the weekend, always faster than a busy week allows. For years I treated that as waste, until I worked out that the freezer turns those sad, over-ripe bananas into one of the most useful things in the house. So yes, you can absolutely freeze bananas, and you should. Here is how to do it properly, how long they last, and how to use them without ending up with a bag of brown mush you never touch. ...

There is almost always cheese in my fridge, and it lives in that vague limbo where nobody can quite remember when it was opened. A wedge of cheddar hides at the back for a fortnight and comes out perfectly fine; a tub of cream cheese sits an extra week and turns into something I would not risk on toast. The confusing part is that “cheese” covers everything from a rock-hard lump of parmesan to a wobbly ball of mozzarella, and those two do not keep for anything like the same length of time. Here is how long each kind actually lasts in the fridge, what to do when you spot a patch of mould, and how to store it so you get to the end of the block. ...

Bacon lives a strange double life in my fridge. Sometimes a pack gets torn open on a Saturday and is gone by Sunday, and sometimes half a pack sits shoved to the back until I find it on a Wednesday and stand there wondering whether it is still a breakfast or a bin job. Because it is cured, bacon lasts noticeably longer than a plain bit of pork, which lulls people into thinking it lasts forever. It does not. Here is how long raw and cooked bacon actually keep, opened and unopened, fridge and freezer, and how to tell when a pack has finally turned. ...

Two little dates on a packet, and almost everyone I know treats them as the same thing. They are not, and the gap between them is where the two big kitchen mistakes live: throwing out a perfectly good tin because the best-before has slipped, or eating a chicken that looked fine two days past its use-by and spending the night regretting it. One date is a suggestion about quality. The other is a hard line about safety. Once you know which is which, you waste less food and you take fewer risks, and the whole thing stops being a guessing game. ...