What’s In Your Refrigerator?

My mom often reminded me  – Always wear clean underwear, you never know when you might be in an accident, and you don’t want anyone to see your nasty pants.  

That’s the way I feel about the refrigerator.  In my mind it would be horrible to die a sudden death and have my daughters and grand daughters discover I had a dirty refrigerator. I clean out the fridge every Sunday morning, just in case!  

I take a rag to the leaky pickle jar and take a swipe at the shelves. I hate it when I can’t even recognize the sticky stuff under the vegetable drawer.  I’m loathe to taste it, but what in the world managed to run down the side panel and pool under the drawer. I love the guy who invented the refrigerator, but don’t you think he could have taken the next step made it self-cleaning?

My memory is pretty good for a lot of things but remembering when we had meatloaf and green beans for dinner, sometimes escapes me.  Wasn’t it Tuesday? Yeah, I think so because we watched NCIS after dinner.  But the bigger question is which Tuesday, last Tuesday or the one before?  

My mom had a collection of jars that was unmatched.  Whenever she had a little dab of something to save, out came the jar collection and like magic there was the perfect size for her leftover zucchini or gravy.   I’m afraid the kids will roll their eyes when they see peaches in a pickle jar or the tapenade, my sister gave me, in a jelly jar.

I’m never sure how long to keep leftovers, I’m positive I could Google it, but let’s face it, if I don’t remember when they arrived in the fridge what difference would it make.  I think yellow stickies might be the answer.  I envision opening the refrigerator door to  fifteen or twenty yellow stickies all with dates written in cursive.    

Along with not knowing how long the leftovers have been in the fridge is my lack of ability to identify items in the freezer. This has led to some very strange dinners.  Once I defrosted a plastic bag of orange stuff thinking it was sloppy joes.  The buns were toasted and chips and beans were on the table only to discover the orange stuff was spaghetti sauce.  I scrambled to get the pasta ready and whipped up a salad.  A common expression at our house, ‘it all worked out’.  

I remember stopping to visit my mom one Sunday and she tried to tempt me to stay for lunch by telling me she had tuna salad in the fridge.  She said something about just making it on Monday, now was is last Monday or the one before, she wasn’t sure, but it was probably still good.  Probably! Really? We had BLT’s for lunch that day. We made an afternoon event out of peeking into containers hiding inside that big white box.  We discovered a sour cream container with no discernible date.  At least the container said Sour Cream, at my mom’s house you were never quite sure what was in there.  It looked like a science project and joined the tuna salad in the garbage.   

My daughter regularly goes through her pantry and systematically  tosses anything that is out dated.  I feel the dates on the cans are simply a suggestion that I should think about using the item this year.  I guess I should try to make a conscious effort to purge the pantry, you know, just in case.