It’s not so much that I can’t live with a filthy refrigerator. Clearly, I can. I do not have the powers of imagination that motivate most people to clean. I figure if I’m still healthy after all these years of not closing the toilet lid and conducting longitudinal fungal studies in the fridge, it can’t be all that dangerous.
So I think it was because someone was coming to visit that I saw the fridge with fresh eyes, as it were. And those fresh eyes were appalled. My friend Linda is the exact opposite of fussy. But she is more of a grownup than I am. And when it comes down to it, I was kind of curious what all that orange slime underneath the vegetable crispers was. I mean, how did anything even get under there?
The shelves in the door seemed like the place to start. Condiments! Condiments are little bonus add-ons for your regular food, serving the same purpose as hats and humor in people. But a lot of them are a puzzlement. The top shelf had the condiments I use most often, unless they were tall condiments, in which case they had to go below. The top shelf also had other shorter items that we never use. They are probably invasives. Below the top shelf are your legacy condiments, and below that yet are the ones with so much seniority that they have had permanent tenure. But after cleaning the top shelf, I got a wild hair and decided to investigate.
It was an actual wild hair and even I draw the line at that.
Oh, it would have been easier in the old days, when we could just toss things right into the garbage can without even opening the jar. Now we recycle everything and the garbage people, who of all people you would think would not be fussy, insists we remove all traces of food in our containers. Some of the stuff slid right out. Some did not.
Observation: a large subset of the condiment collection, upended into the sink, looks like baby poop. We do use mustard a lot. Apparently we do not use all our mustard. It might be possible to spoon out some of it from the legacy shelf but the tenured mustard is going to take a Dremel tool. Or a chipping gun.
You know that old saw about going through your closet and giving away all the clothes you haven’t actually worn in a year? Even if they fit you once? Yeah, that doesn’t happen either. It’s worse in the condiment shelf. We’ve saved stuff we’ve never used and never will. It’s so old it’s in glass jars from the pre-plastic era. Some of it is in pretty little glass jars with bows around the lid and hand-lettered labels. Lovely people we love make lovely things and give them away at Christmas and if you can’t regift them immediately, it only seems right to put them on display in the refrigerator for fifteen years or so.
Neither of us eats jam. We can prove it.
The very bottom shelf contains items celebrating the tenth anniversary of their expiration dates. One of them advertised itself as some sort of chutney, which is a term for vegetarian offal. One of them inexplicably involves oysters in some fashion and I’m keeping that because I’m afraid to open it.
The door of the refrigerator was looking gratifyingly clean. I could no longer put off the crisper drawers. The one I keep my limes and lemons in just needed a little wipe-down. The other one? I don’t know what-all was in there but I’m using it for mulch.
So. Under the crispers. Whatever it is has had every expectation it would remain unmolested in perpetuity, and showed it. Squatters everywhere. Eviction took longer than it should have, as eviction always does. We just got a new garbage disposal and it’s quivering under the sink like a rescue pup that is just getting the idea he ended up in the wrong home.
I made my way up. Good Lord, a half bottle of Log Cabin Syrup. I haven’t had any of that in forty years and I apologized to the entire genus of maple trees when I poured it down the sink.
I stopped short of the top shelf. You have to bend over to see how bad the top shelf is. But Linda reads this blog so she’s probably going to have a look at my refrigerator, even if she wouldn’t’ve otherwise. I’ll get to it. AND the freezer too, okay. Okay. Friends. They’re worth it.
You’ve described my kids fridge exactly. There are things in the crisper that may have once been bananas, but nobody knows for sure and I remember once using a paint scraper to chisel off whatever had congealed under the crispers. now I leave the fridge to them and no longer care what dies in there.
That’s wisdom and restraint, right there.
I’m one of those people who gets rid of stuff I don’t use, and clean my fridge a few times a year. But even I have had that orange gelatinous slime under my crisper drawer. I don’t get it anymore, but apparently something that I kept in there that I no longer do must have brought it about. I remember it was hard to get rid of. I scraped most of it off with a putty knife, then used boiling water to thin out the rest so that I could get that off.
Yeah! Orange slime! No idea what it was.
I still don’t know! I was surprised to hear that other people had it, as I thought it was only me. Wish I knew what caused it.
I wonder if all refrigerators look alike; I know that mine looks like what you have described. Maybe a clean, shiny refrigerator interior is the outlier. I prefer to think that.
I do too, but my mother probably didn’t.
Oh dear! Growing up, with a family of six kids and two parents and two dogs and two cats (okay, the pets don’t count) I was in charge of cleaning the family refrigerator once a month. I’m talking old school cleaning, comet cleanser and defrosting the freezer and washing out all the Tupperware. When we were all grown up, I asked my mom why I was put in charge of that from the age of 12 on. She said because I was her cleanest kid. And to this day, I clean my own refrigerator once a month! Thankfully my freezer is now frost free and I’m not cleaning up the sludge from a giant family of animals. 🙂
Frost-free… yeah! But even though I don’t need to defrost, I still need to wipe stuff up. And it’s SO much easier if you do it on a regular basis. When I had to get a freezer, I got an upright, simply because I wouldn’t have to defrost it. I don’t freakin’ care if it costs more to operate. (And, in actuality, our bills didn’t go much higher.) With the supply chain problems, I felt the need for a freezer.
Doug, I’ll give you my address, and the next time you’re in the neighborhood…
Who does keep track of their tracklements? Sounds like your invasives have been there so long that they’ve gained naturalised status, and are likely serving a useful ecological function.
Let’s just call it Krudzu.
Krudzu. Love it.
You clean your refrigerator? The new ones are good for seven years. Just throw them away when they get dirty. (Ours is 20 something and has life forms under the crisper drawers that are developing language.)
And attitude.
“We just got a new garbage disposal and it’s quivering under the sink like a rescue pup that is just getting the idea he ended up in the wrong home.” Literally laughing out loud.
You have described my refrigerator perfectly. I actually have quite the collection of real, actual maple syrup, because whenever I need it on vacation I buy some but don’t use it up so I bring it home.
My otherproblem is capers. We use them so seldom, and never use a whole jar when we do use them, so there are always open, half-empty jars of them in my fridge door. The next time we want to make something with capers, I think “Oh dear, I have no idea how old those capers are in the refrigerator. I’ll just open this new one.” And thus a second half-empty capers jar is added to the collection. Because I still don’t throw out the old ones. What if I had a caper emergency? I mean, do capers really go bad?
No. They don’t. They are pickled, so if there is no mold, they are okay. But the FDA insists that products have expiration dates on them, even if they are actually okay beyond that. So just sniff the capers, look at them for mold. If they look okay, use them. If not, FFS, throw them the fuck out!
Who doesn’t use up capers? Even a Costco caper jar is no match for me.
“One of them inexplicably involves oysters in some fashion and I’m keeping that because I’m afraid to open it.” I think I saw a horror movie like that back in the late 60s.
There’s really no reason for oysters.
Oh, HELL YEAH, there is! But NOT canned ones. Cajun spiced fried oyster po’ boys are the stuff, man! We are fortunate enough to have an authentic cajun restaurant close by, and Don’s oysters are the oysters I judge every other restaurant’s oysters by.
It would seem that the Laws of Refrigeration are universal. Maybe a Swedish Death Cleaning would be appropriate and some sort of funeral for the things we can no longer identify. The Tomb of the Unknown Condiment would be a ceremonial place before sealing it all up or adding it to compost if it wasn’t explosive.
Would a Swedish Death Cleaning involve putting all the condiments on a little Viking ship and setting it on fire?
I once mistook a dead mink for a frozen banana. I’ll add, it was not my freezer.
That’s ridiculous. Who would put a banana in the freezer?
Your fridge sounds like mine, but OMG you actually do wash out all your old containers before you put them in the recycle bin, you overachiever you! We have a septic system and I don’t think I want any of the well aged fridge contents going into it as it might create some alien life form or something? Bravo for getting that far along into the Process and for being so transparent about those things that most of us keep Top Secret.
I don’t do well with secrets. They fester and grow mold.
“I’m keeping that because I’m afraid to open it” You and I might be soulmates. Lately I’m even worse than I used to be if that’s possible, due to the fact that our town had to stop recycling because a plant shut down. Now everything just goes in the garbage and my recycling gene feels guilty tossing anything technically recyclable in there. So I compost everything to the point that my compost bin got full, I actually found a happy recipient for almost all my glass jars and bottles (so now I’ll never throw any out) and my fridge is…well…sketchy.
Handy tip: if you put things in the freezer they don’t smell.
Oh I know that one from WAY back. When I met Dave, he drank a lot of milk but when it went bad he put it in his freezer. I cleaned out his fridge as a birthday present. To this day we got the wrong first impression of each other. He probably thought I was tidy, and I thought he was slovenly. Well, to be fair, he totally was, then.
I’ve asked myself more than once “what would Margaret think of this drawer/shelf/closet.” Margaret-ing applies to more than just the undies drawer to me 🙂
Ooooh dear. Now I’ll have to think that too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lpj2uMFi-c
OMG. That is hilarious. Thanks!
So glad I’m not the only one!
Chocolate or yoghurt dipped bananas, frozen, are a great after school snack for kids