The Injured Ice-box...


Hold your breath and cover your nose, because the news I am going to reveal is not pretty and, frankly, it doesn't smell too good either. Are you doing it? Ok...(drum roll)... the big news is that I cleaned out my refrigerator today.

Yes, it sounds innocuous enough at first, but wait until I reveal exactly what was lurking on the shelves: 1) a juicy, brown, rotten tomato in a ziplock baggie, 2) a broken jar of mayonnaise, 3) juicy, wet, rotten squash, 4) juicy, wet, squishy zuchinni, 5) a shriveled up bowl of leftover salad, 5) a juicy, brown bag of decomposing lettuce, 6) some green and moldy sandwhich meat, 7) some green and moldy cheese, 8) an entire bucket of shriveled blueberries, 9) a half-used can of kidney beans from a dinner party I threw back when my 'fridge was actually still clean, about 5 months ago, 9) a tupperware full of very very old baby-food --fyi, Issac stopped eating baby food when he was a year old-- 10) numerous tupperwares full of unidentifiable objects.

By the end of the ordeal, I had two plastic grocery bags full of discarded, decomposed items. Yech! You probably will not believe me when I tell you that I found a mass of dead fruit flies under the bottom drawers when I took them out. How the hell do fruit flies get in my refrigerator? Do they come in the fruit? I understand the principal of fruit flies erupting from rotten fruit, but this fruit was fresh when it entered the domains of my refrigerator. I'll let you wonder about that.

There was a huge, slimy brown stain dripping down the right side of the inner-wall. I took a tooth-brush to the screws in the door handle and around the seals. Luckily my refrigerator is fairly new, so it all came clean and sparkling-white pretty quickly. When I poured the last remaining cup of maple syrup into the honey-bear (in order to conserve space), a big, green, slimey, goobery thing slid out with it into the bear. Ewwh! It was a green-bean, which Issac must have inserted into the jug of maple syrup long ago, since the jug was missing a cap.

Now to restore my reputation, which has surely been injured by my honest revelations, I would like to assure everyone that I am not a slob. My house is actually clean-- my friends can attest to that. What happened is that the refrigerator somehow got neglected, mostly because of the fact that when I shut the refrigerator door, nobody can see its innards. Also, because I went on cooking strike and rarely opened the refrigerator to check on its contents. Somehow, I reverted back to old patterns and figured I just didn't feel like putting out the effort. Funny how effort doesn't ever seem to go away--if it wasn't the effort of taking care of my fridge, then was confronted with the effort of feeling guilty about its demise and hiding it from friends and family. I swear, if refrigerators were human children, I would be sitting in jail right now for abandonment and neglect.

Which brings me to complain about cooking. There was a time when I loved cooking--when I was about ten and I didn't have to do it every single night. Now, if a recipe requires me to cut something up into tiny little pieces, I can almost garauntee you that I'm not going to do it. If it requires turning on my oven or stove, and thereby making my un-airconditioned house unbearably hot, I'm not going to do it. If it involves ingredients other than milk, bread, or peanut butter, chances are those ingredients are not in my house.

You see, cooking requires shopping, and shopping requires time and money, and those are two currencies I'm always missing. Furthermore, suppose you do rack your brain for tasty recipes and go shopping and buy them--then there is the challenge of starting dinner after you walk in the door at 6 pm. Imagine: a 25 lb shrieking demon clinging to your leg as you try to relax and enjoy the beauty of cutting red bell peppers--it just takes the magic right out of it.

But suppose you do manage to find some magic in the slicing and dicing of colorful vegetables, and your toddler is actually giving his attention to an object other than you-- you still have the task of using the ingredients you bought in the proper order and time limit, before they go sour or bad or shrivel or wilt. Cooking is a never-ending race against time.

For these reasons, I buy pantry items only. I am quickly on my way to becoming the empty-carb queen: the messiah of instant mashed-potatos, the brigadier general of box-dinners, the master of macaroni-and-cheeses, the rajah of ramen-noodles, the president of lipton's quick-pastas.

The bad news: box dinners aren't so healthy. The good news: after my refrigerator-cleaning frenzy, I can actually see and identify what's inside the door. Before, when I went shopping, I couldn't really think of anything to buy, because something in the back of my head told me that I already had it, or said that I couldn't possibly find room for it inside that mess. But now this problem should be quite solved--the contents of my refrigerator are: one gallon of milk, one tub of butter, one loaf of bread, one pickle in a jar.