As The Food Turns: Nature's Bounty

Where the heck have I been?

We all know what is due here - a refrigerator clean-out post. But I kept putting it off. The refrigerator had gotten to the point where we almost couldn't use it - every time we tried to take something from it, a zillion other things would fall out. We'd shove those back in, thus making everything else fall out.

Look, if you don't understand that last sentence, go read some other blog, will ya? We don't need your kind around here.

Anyway, today I decided that if we could land a man on the moon (um, 40 years ago), I should be able to clean the old stuff out of my refrigerator. I made the kids leave the kitchen (I knew it was going to be ugly) and dove in. It wasn't too bad, once I started (I mean, by my standards - Jenn, I really advise you to leave, if you haven't already).

As we can see from the picture below at the right, it's high summer, the season of produce! Really, I don't even know where to start describing nature's bounty here. How about back row, from the left:

1. baggie with moldering scallion tips - meant to plant these in a pot outside on the deck
2. a container that says potato salad - It's lying! There's homemade cole slaw in there. I didn't open it, because I figured something frightening would happen, like in that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
   
3. grapefruit - I rescued this grapefruit from my neighbor's refrigerator to keep it from going bad during her European vacation. It went bad in my fridge instead. At least it wasn't lonely...
4. Directly behind the grapefruit is a cucumber, standing straight up on its non-mushy end. Why, yes, I am proud of that bit of photography - it took me a while to set it up. All you wildlife photographers, move over! I've got the produce covered.
   
5. a stack of baby carrots, grape tomatoes, and two withered senior citizen carrots - all casualties of our too-deep American refrigerators
   
6. one red bell pepper - I do not remember buying this; I'm thinking other people are leaving their ruined produce in my refrigerator.
   

Front row, right to left -

1. a bag of sugar snap peas from our town's farmers' market - my motto is "Buy Local, Waste Local."
2. 2 more senior citizen carrots - not withered, but sprouting those white whiskers all over
3. ah, the piece de resistance! It's an almost completely liquefied baby squash garnished with loose onion skins - I found it on the bottom of the produce drawer. (Warning! Do not enlarge this photo, especially if you have eaten recently.) And, folks, please don't try this sort of project at home - it requires time, and patience, and a knack for procrastination that takes years to develop.

So, how about a more cheerful picture? A picture, say, of one of my freshly cleaned-out produce drawers filled with my future victims? See? Over there to the right? Veggies check in, but they don't check out!

Note the empty produce drawer to the left - it still has remnants of liquefied squash and onion peels in it, because I couldn't properly scrub it without removing it from the refrigerator. But the last time I tried to remove that drawer, I ended up hurting my neck. Really. Just another example of how dangerous housework can be to your health...


Coming next week! A Condiment Retrospective!