Frozen Food

I recall asking a seller of frozen poultry if frozen was as good when defrosted and cooked as fresh. Guess what the answer was. Of course it was: all frozen foods are frozen when fresh so they keep their freshness; in fact they may be fresher than so-called fresh food because fresh food is not always as fresh as the label says.
Well, I have to say I was always a little suspicious of this and the chief reason was that a friend of mine had a cat - she was one of his eight or so cats - who was 15 years old and quite finicky with the food she ate; he told me she would not eat cooked frozen chicken, only fresh, and of course, Tony being Tony, this is what he always bought her.
Now, lions and tigers at zoos apparently know if an earthquake is imminent, so animals, you see, may not be able to reason like some of us but they instiuctively can tell us something about..... er.... earthquakes. So, ergo, they may be able to tell us something about food too, especiially the frozen kind.
The TV gardening bloke who was always pontificating in gentlemanly fashion about, well, everything, maintained that frozen peas are as good as fresh ones. He may know something about your friendly compost heap but let me tell you he knows - knew because he died (someone I knew was so fond of him she said "it was like losing a brother") - he knew nothing about peas. We used to grow peas and I used to boil them and eat them, on their own, with pepper and butter and they were delicious. I wouldn't do that with frozen peas.
Now I come to my acid test as regards frozen foods. I bought a hole hake, fresh at the fish market in Cardiff; it was too big for one meal so I froze half of it. The fresh cooked fish was ten times better than the frozen - and that was frozen fresh, just after buying it. The delicious, characteristic "hake taste" had gone; now it was just fish, any old fish, fishfinger fish.
So it'll be fresh turkey this year, not the usual frozen one we have had for the past few Christmases. Fresh turkey from Sainsbury or M&S or Waitrose and to hell with the price. A small one. A baby one.