7 jars of dill pickles and 6 packages of Boca Burgers

Holy Mackeral!! Last week I cleaned out the fridge....really cleaned it out. Finally, after years of not figuring this out, I actually do a clean-out every pre-trash night, so nothing ever gets left in there to turn fuzzy and black. This weekly clean-out has been a fairly recent and major step in home management....definitely NOT my strong suit. BUT, even so, for quite a while there, I was still having trouble finding space to put stuff in the fridge. Sure, there's always beer in there, of course, and certainly eggs, but why oh why, with only two people in the house, was I having so much trouble fitting stuff in? So last week I went to the back row....the WAY back row. Oh good grief, there were SEVEN jars of dill pickle spears, not fuzzy or bad, just partially empty jars. Who knows how long they'd been in there. Not Pickles-Gone-Bad, but pickles just there waiting, like, forever. A couple of jars had only one lonely pickle spear, a few had three or four pickles, one jar was half full. These were fairly large jars of Vlassics, the King of Pickles. So yeah, when I finally got rid of all those jars, there was SO much more space.....amazing thing! For several days after that, I had to keep opening the fridge just to look at all that space. It felt so holy. I sure wish I'd taken a picture of all those jars....it was quite an impressive line-up!



So today, yeah, it's like way past time I did the same for the freezer. I had taken a field trip to Costco last week with Marcy.....my very first visit to this Mecca of Shopping....Costco, the super-store of super-large items and super-large amounts. At first I was so overwhelmed by the LARGENESS of everything I could only gape. Super-astonishing!! But after a few samples and a few aisles I started getting into the whole quantity thing. But I sorta forgot we only have two people at home! When I got home....well, there was no room at the inn....uh.....in the freezer. Some rearranging, some pitching and I got it all in....sort of. Three times I went back to the kitchen to find the freezer door hanging open. Just pushing the stuff in harder wasn't working. A few more things were pitched. But truly, it was a serious situation, there was no room for one thing more. So this morning I went through it all. There were things wrapped in foil of no known identity. There was some lasagne left from when I broke my shoulder and Alyssa came and made food. It became apparent that there had to be rules about what got pitched. No meat-change colors allowed to stay; nothing could stay if there was so much perma-frost that you couldn't see the surface. While I know for a fact that humans CAN survive after eating out-of-date pork that's been in the freezer for FOUR years or THIRTY-YEAR-OLD frozen pecans, I
was pretty sure we didn't want to go there. So OK! a whole trash-can of stuff got pitched and I threw out all SIX packages of Boca Burgers. I don't even like them anyway. So now all the things I got at Costco can fit into the freezer.....the twenty-meals-worth of ravioli, the 36 Mexican Grill enchilada things, the 48 pieces of spanikopeta and 98! filafel balls are holding down the fort there in the freezer. BUT, one of the best parts of this clean-out fever is that there's now plenty of room left in the freezer for some Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey if we want to get some!