The all-you-can-eat meat spectacular

After a busy week at the Evans household, Ryan and I thought that a quiet weekend at home was in order.

But then, on Saturday morning, as Ryan ran down to the basement to get English muffins out of the freezer for Austin's breakfast, he made a startling discovery. The English muffins weren't frozen. In fact, they were completely thawed. Which quickly led him to discover that most everything in the freezer was either partially or completely thawed.

What happened you ask? No, our freezer didn't die, nor did it accidentally get unplugged. Instead, one of the kids turned the knob on the compressor all the way to zero. And when you do that, it shuts off. By the time we discovered that the deed had been done -- 24 to 48 hours (we think) had gone by.

Most of the meat was thawed but still cold -- a select few items that had been squished between other items were actually still frozen. Bread was soft, frozen vegetables were not so frozen and popsicles were well -- liquid.

Once we finished taking stock of the freezer and throwing out what was unsalvageable, we had the following items that were still edible but couldn't be refrozen -- 15 sausages, 2 pork tenderlions, 4 pork chops, an unopened box of M&M lemon pepper chicken, 4 souvlaki sticks, a-2kg bag of chicken wings, a box and a half of spring rolls, 2 steaks, 2 racks of ribs, 2 chicken breasts, 5 chicken thighs, 5 homemade hamburgers, 2lbs of ground beef, 3lbs of bacon, 2 packages of hot dogs, 3 loaves of bread and a loaf of chocolate zuchunni bread.

So, we did what any sensible people would do when faced with the prospect of losing all that food or having to eat it all in hurry. We threw a party.

At just after 10 a.m. that morning, we called up some people to see who was free that evening to come to our all-you-can-eat meat spectacular. Responses to said question ranged from "you had me at all-you-can-eat", "you had me at meat" and "hell yeah".

Dinner consisted of five courses -- four of which were meat (the fifth was dessert). The first course was spring rolls (ok, not meat) and chicken wings; the second was ribs; the third was sausages and the fourth was chicken breasts, souvlaki sticks, steak and pork tenderlion. And yes, we did mix in a few veggies for variety -- I served veggies (from our garden) and dip and someone brought a salad.
Our friends did us proud and there are few leftovers in the fridge. Well that is, except for the ground beef, hamburgers, chicken thighs, bacon and pork chops that didn't even get cooked. The hamburgers we ate last night, the ground beef is being made into chili (so I can refreeze it) as I write this, the pork chops will get cooked and eaten tonight and the chicken thighs and bacon -- I don't know, I'll figure something out soon.

What I do know is the dial on the freezer now has a very large piece of duct tape on it.