The Fridge Takes a Break

Our fridge has finally decided that enough is enough, it wants a holiday.  I can’t say that I blame it, actually.

We’ve been overloading it recently. Having gone back to work, I have delegated chores. I should have known what would happen:  instead of throwing away the last inch of juice or the last tablespoon of milk, the other three members of this household, who loathe having to discard plastic containers and cartons, just put them back in the fridge. New ones are bought. The contents of the old ones sour, curdle and fester; gases build up and ugly things happen. It’s not just tiny bits of juice and milk that stick around either. It’s lunch meat, hummus, jam, margarine, cheese, vegetables, tofu.  Yesterday I counted three bottles of catsup, two jars of preserved peppers, four jars of olives, two containers of margarine –  and I’ve lost track of the mayonnaise, but lets just say that if a football team showed up and wanted a week’s worth of sandwiches, I’d be okay for mayonnaise and have plenty left over.

The kids, I am certain, know that all these quietly rotting foodstuffs are there, but to the husband they are invisible. I don’t mean that in a cruel way: you could probably test him and prove it scientifically. He just doesn’t see them. So he buys more. More juice, more milk, more sandwich meat, margarine, jam, pickles. Soon the fridge is overflowing with fresh and old stuff, all mixed up. The new stuff is quickly opened and dipped into, while the very old is left to do scary things.  New stuff is swiftly converted to sort-of new stuff, and pretty soon you have very old, sort-of old, and sort-of-new-but-dipped-into stuff. And you stand a better chance of finding an alternative to Penicillin – honestly – than finding a jar of jam that isn’t riddled with fuzzy green mold or little bits of butter and bread crumbs.

One in a while, I get manic and scrape out the last morsel of molding bread-crumbed jam for my toast. Or if I can catch it fast enough, I grate the last desiccated hunk of cheese and put it in a casserole. Put the three-day-old leftover mashed potatoes into the bread dough. Recycle the dubious ratatouille into a pasta sauce. And so on ad nauseam. They say the only things you don’t want to see being made are laws and sausages, but just come and watch me cook when it’s time to clean out the fridge some time.

Five days ago, though, it became obvious that the refrigerator had ceased to do what it is supposed to do. I went to get the milk one morning and realized that the things inside the fridge were warmer than the things outside.

Tonight we reached a new low. The entire contents of the refrigerator and freezer had to be dumped. All the milk (a total of eight cartons) had turned to yoghurt. Juice cartons were so obviously swollen no one wanted to open them up and drain the contents. 

Everything in the freezer was straight out of a horror movie. Melted chocolate ice cream (one of five tubs, all approximately 1/8^th full) mixed with the juices from defrosted mackerel.  Pumpkin puree bled into spilt, thawed peas. But what I found the saddest of all was throwing out all my carefully prepared soups, curries, and frozen home-grown fruit and veg. All neatly labelled --14 July, ’06, Spicy Dal, ’22 Aug, kedgeree, 30 Oct, Oven-roasted winter veg soup.  I had filled all those containers months and weeks earlier in a fit of energetic optimism, when I’d pictured myself coming home from work to cook the items I had thoughtfully managed to defrost that morning. But instead of making my life easier, it seems, all I was doing was stockpiling one hell of a mess.

So the fridge has packed it in. Somewhere its frost-free soul is soaring in tropical warmth, sipping pina coladas, laughing to think of all those festering jam jars and 1/16^th full milk cartons it no longer has to worry about. I’m tempted to go and join it.