The Freezer Is a Small Act of Defiance

I’ve been reading a thread on r/AussieFrugal about bulk cooking, and it’s done more to cheer me up this week than anything on the actual news. Someone posted a full breakdown of a 27-serve cook up: Mongolian beef, beef stroganoff, creamy lemon garlic chicken, pork with mushroom sauce, meatballs. Costed to the dollar. Frozen in individual bags. Four hours of work, six to eight weeks of dinners sorted. There’s something quietly heroic about a spreadsheet like that.

I am, on my best days, a competent but uninspired cook. Weeknights in our house usually involve me standing in front of the fridge asking it questions it can’t answer. So a post like this lands differently for me than it might for someone who actually enjoys cooking. This isn’t really about food. It’s about buying back a bit of headspace on a Tuesday night after a day of Zoom calls and Jira tickets, when the last thing I want to do is think.

What struck me most was the honesty about limitations. The original poster admits lentils don’t sit well for them, admits they ran out of onion one week and just… didn’t use onion. No performance of having it all figured out. Just someone working within their own constraints, adjusting the recipe, moving on. That’s the opposite of the cooking content you get shoved at you on Instagram, all gleaming benchtops and someone who’s never once burnt garlic in their life.

There’s a bigger thing sitting underneath this too, and it’s not subtle: supermarket prices have made this kind of forward planning less of a lifestyle choice and more of a necessity for a lot of households. Free-range chicken breast at $11.50 a kilo felt like a win in that thread. Skirt steak at $22. People are doing genuine cost-per-serve maths on dinner, the way you’d cost out a car trip. That’s not a hobby, that’s a response to something. I don’t love that the response has to exist, but I do love that people are sharing it freely instead of hoarding the knowledge.

We do a smaller version of this at home, mostly bolognese and curries, because my daughter will eat both without negotiation, which at fifteen is basically a miracle. My wife does the real planning; I mostly stand around chopping onions and feeling useful. We don’t have a second freezer, which apparently makes me an amateur in this particular arena, but the principle holds even at our modest scale: cook once, eat four times, spend less time each weeknight standing in front of the fridge asking it unanswerable questions.

The comments on that thread were kind, too, in a way that surprised me a little. People sharing recipe links, asking about dessert freezing, someone recommending a YouTube chef, all without the usual internet impulse to one-up or correct. Someone even chimed in to say frozen supermarket meals work out to 8 or 9 percent actual meat content for roughly the same price as home-cooked. I believe it. I’ve read the ingredients list on those boxes and it reads like a chemistry assignment.

None of this fixes the actual problem, which is that groceries have gotten expensive enough that batch cooking has become a genuine budgeting strategy rather than just a thing tidy people do on Sundays. I don’t have a neat answer for that, and I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But there’s something worth holding onto in a stranger online taking the time to type out exact grams and dollar figures, just so someone else’s Tuesday night might be a little easier. That’s not nothing.