One of my very first blog posts talked about my failure to properly label items in my freezer, leading to Edie not trusting my “I’ll just pull something out of the freezer” dinner plan, unless of course, said item was properly labeled.  I made the vow then to be better about labeling things I shoved in there.

Which brings me to a few weeks ago.  I was making dinner – mushroom stroganoff to be exact – and the recipe called for tomato paste.  I knew that somewhere in my (three) freezers, I had at the very least, a large bag of portioned out homemade tomato paste, but I couldn’t quite locate it.   Poking around the freezer in the fridge in the kitchen, I found a small foil packet, with what appeared to be the remainder of a can of tomato paste wrapped in plastic wrap – just the way I package leftovers from canned tomato paste.  It was a little bit on the dark side and it wasn’t in the door, which is where I generally stash those items, but it was so small, what else could it possibly be?  I threw it in the sauce and proceeded to continue on with dinner, making a note to update my freezers spreadsheet sooner rather than later.

As dinner cooked, I noticed the sauce notably darker than I had just thrown tomato paste in there.  Perhaps that was the effect of the beef broth I had used I thought to myself.  The aroma had an almost cocoa hint to it.  Pat asked what I was baking for dessert.  That was when I realized that I had thrown a tiny little wedge of chocolate torte that I hadn’t been able to finish into the freezer for a treat ‘later’.  It was so small, I had mistaken it for tomato paste.  I quickly dumped the sauce, cleaned the pan and started fresh, deciding to wing it without the tomato paste as I couldn’t find any.  As I tried explaining to my husband what had happened, the look on his face was pretty much similar to Edie’s the time I was three bites into dinner before realizing what it was.

I have since cleaned out that particular freezer and if it wasn’t labeled, it went in the compost bin.  In the way back was the MIA bag of tomato paste that I just knew I had.  And yes, the spreadsheet has been updated.