Our fridge is on the fritz. Sometimes the temperature is normal, sometimes it hangs out at around 50 degrees F. Since there's no telling when or for how long it'll reach heightened temps, it's made us a little edgy about the quality of the food we put in our bodies from said refrigerator. There's been a lot of conversations in the kitchen revolving around whether or not we think that particular type of cheese always has that sort of kick, or if it's just getting a little gamey. My father taste-tested the milk over his bowl of cereal the other morning, and the verdict was that is was both luke warm and so soured that it was nearly good cheese. Why are we playing this game of chicken with the dairy products in our refrigerator? Because our scheduled maintenance call is still a week away, and should the refrigerator be deemed totaled by this maintenance official, Sears has informed us that the new fridge won't be available for another week after that because you now have to special order refrigerators that don't have the water and ice thingy built into the door. Why don't we want that thingy, you ask? Don't get me started, it's a long story, but let's just say my mother feels the same way about the automatic icemaker that I do about the microwave. Thank goodness for the vegetable garden that is keeping us fed, and sane.
After the breakfast cereal incident, we did decide to move the rest of the perishables over to a neighbor's refrigerator for a few days. Dinner has been relatively normal still; we just thaw some protein from the freezer that is, mercifully, chugging along, and cook it up with fresh vegetables and herbs from the garden. But lunch, now that's becoming a problem. My mother and I both take lunch to work everyday, and I take breakfast as well, and all these meals get packed in a frenzied dash to the door. So what have we been eating for the past week without the usual yogurt or sandwich fixings to rely on in a rush? Well, yesterday my mother ate the rest of the bag of the frozen mango chunks we had kicking around the freezer drawer, and I had dry cereal for three days straight, two meals a day, before getting so desperate that I "borrowed" a banana and some yogurt from my bosses.
With a carefully devised system of rotating ice packs between freezer and fridge, we are now holding the temperature at relatively dairy friendly standards, so we decided this afternoon that it was safe to retrieve the food from our neighbor's. It was not until I was scooping our food off the refrigerator shelf of this kind neighbor that I really had a chance to contemplate what we had schlepped over there to "save." Apart from the Greek yogurt and several sticks of butter, we pretty much had salvaged condiments -- ketchup, mayo, several jars of pickles, miso paste, horseradish, the measliest amount of maple syrup, a smidge of sambal, drips of lemon juice in two separate bottles, and (having seen our assortment and feeling she should contribute) a half-eaten container of cream-cheese gifted from this neighbor. Was I embarrassed? No. I was sad, sad for these things that live, forgotten, at the back of our refrigerator for so long without use. They are just the fringe foods that we use a dab of here, or a dollop of there, but they are nothing compared to the leafy greens and scrumptious proteins that sit in the refrigerator for only a day or two before being joyfully consumed. They’re unimportant to our daily food lives, and they know it – they know it by their position in the fridge (top shelf jammed against the back wall), and that thin layer of crusted food that has accumulated around the bottle neck as the lid hasn’t been twisted off in ages. But we wouldn’t dare throw out these items because eventually they will be consumed. We will have shrimp cocktail again, and we will want you, horsradish, and I will make spicy thai eggplant with miso this month, so hang in there bag of miso paste, and don't lose hope, assorted pickles, you will be devoured someday too, I promise. And you, half-eaten container of cream cheese, welcome to your new home.
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