Vegetable soup saves.

So, I made this root veggie soup. It started with a sweat of carrots, onion, garlic, and parsnip in olive oil, and then went on to include wine, balsamic, worcestershire sauce, and soy to add flavor and salt to the cooking water; bay leaves, thyme, sage, and pepper for more flavor, and turnips, roasted beets, potatoes, and finally, cabbage only at the end so the apartment wouldn't smell. If you boil large amounts of cabbage for long periods of time, your space will smell like some animal walked in, defecated, and then lay down and died. So, unless you like smelling that stank, don't add cabbage at the beginning unless it's surrounded by lots of other ingredients (like stuffed cabbage which is delicious and generally awesome). It was enough veggies to require 6 cups of water, which was just enough to have some liquid at the end. Oh, and I also used a scant 1/4 cup of corn flour to thicken it right before I turned off the heat. The remaining liquid wasn't thick per se, but it had a slightly increased mouthfeel. Anyway, it was sweet and vegetabley. Lots of flavor, light, and warming. It made a very nice lunch this last week.

Today, Danny and I were cleaning out the fridge and freezer, and we found an ancient frozen tupperware of beef stew. I have NO RECOLLECTION AT ALL of when we made it. I don't even know what, if any, recipe we followed. It's just always been in the freezer. Literally forever. But we decided to liberate the tupperware, so against Danny's wishes, I thawed it. He wanted to just toss it, but hey, it was in the freezer! It can't be spoiled! My mom would have been so proud of me.

I thawed it gently in the microwave on medium heat and cautiously tasted it. Delicious. It was mostly gravy with a few hefty meat chunks, so I just dumped it into our veggie soup. The two mixed together was AWESOME. The veggie soup saved the meaty gravy from certain death, and everyone is happy. Danny announced his intention is to take it for lunch this week with noodles.

The moral of the story? Don't throw out frozen food! It never goes bad in there! I mean, sure, it had some awesome ice crystals, but it didn't even taste really freezer burned. It was slightly freezer flavoured by itself, but when I integrated the thick meaty essence into the veggie soup, it became completely delicious without a hint of funk.