Our new ‘starter home’ sized fridge freezer is now in place, the old one has gone to the dump….what a way to spend Valentine’s Day.

The fridge freezer replaces a massive fridge with a small freezer and a chest freezer in the garage. It’s taken a couple of days to get myself organised enough to get the new freezer on, get it chilled down so it can freeze food and get the old chest freezer empty.

The old one had only ever been defrosted once, about 7-8 years ago when it got so frosted up it wasn’t possible to shut the lid. I’d spent months chipping the ice down far enough to get the seals closed but eventually had to give in and do a defrost. Since then the amount of ice in it has just been growing and growing.

Today I emptied it and found all sorts of things that I didn’t expect. Raspberry Coulis – I hate raspberries so why did I go to the bother of making a coulis? Well, I seem to recall thinking it’d make a good garnish on dessert plates!! Frozen meringue – again a very odd thing – they’re dead simple to make, don’t take long and we rarely have any shortage of eggs….we’ve found another nest today, this time with nineteen of them in it! Several Tupperware pots of soup were there too, again I can’t see the point of that – it takes longer to defrost a deep frozen soup than it takes to rustle up a new batch.

This Tupperware dish had been in there so long, it had gone completely brittle and a great chunk broke out of it as I opened it to see what was inside. As you can see, some very sorry-for-itself looking apple pie, oh, and more frost!

The stupid thing is I hate apple pie. Well, in fact I hate most sweet food – chocolate, cakes, biscuits and all that gooey stuff. Ugh, it just leaves me cold. David didn’t believe that I hated chocolate when I met him, he said that he’d never met a woman who didn’t like it.

I’ve always hated cooked fruit more than anything else. I can remember being forced to eat gooseberry crumble at school many years ago and being sick afterwards.

But, I have a small problem, my wonderful Nan thinks I love apple pie and brings me one of her legendary homemade ones over every time she visits with my Mum and Dad. I haven’t the heart to disabuse her, especially as she always looks so pleased with herself when she presents it to me. Sometimes, I take them to work, sometimes I feed them to guests, sometimes I give them straight back to Mum and Dad to take home for Dad’s suppers. Just occasionally I put one in the freezer. That was the fate of this one, I think it may have been in there for 6-7 years.

I feel so guilty about it. She works so hard to make them and I pretend to love them. I wish that years ago I’d ‘come clean’ but it’s too late now. I can’t make up my mind if it’s more cruel to keep on accepting them or to tell her that I can’t abide cooked apple. What a terrible moral dilemma. The last thing I want to do is to hurt my Nan’s feelings but equally it seems like such a waste of her time and effort as well as the waste of food.

HELP……