For The Kitchen Counter Cooking School, my friend Lisa and I spent a lot of time with other people’s kitchens. There’s something deeply intimate about what’s lurks in the fridges, freezers and cupboards of strangers. As the site TrendCentral.com notes, the interiors of fridges have become happening places. NPR devoted one of its Food Photo Fridays to the subject, while the site FridgeWatcher catalogs what people buy and keep cold around the world.
In an interest of disclosure, I took a couple of photos of my fridge interior here at our Florida house this morning. It’s not thrilling. No foie gras, nothing too exotic except an aging bottle of champagne that we’re fairly sure is ruined from heat. We’re big SodaStream drinkers, so there are several bottles for our fizzy water and stuff to flavor it. Bread products are notably absent since we’ve been cutting down on carbs and gluten. One of the produce bins is empty, save a bag of vegetable trimmings for stock. The freezer is fairly minimal: half a bag of IQF Florida scallops, a bag of organic peas, a last container of homemade chicken stock, a few portions of soup, a single grass-fed sirloin steak and a couple of boxes of Junior Mints (for Mike).
So the question now is, what’s in your fridge? What does it say about you? How much produce do you expect to throw out this week? Pay attention the next time you open the door. Thinking about your fridge can help you pay attention to what you eat, what you buy and what you waste, all important things that we don’t think enough about these days.
Early this month I did a clean up of my fridge. I took everything out of my fridge and cleaned it. I do this process once a month, but the difference this time was I examined everything before putting it back in the fridge. If I came across something I haven’t used in the last few months (or 6 months), it didn’t go back in. I like many other people fell into the trap of jars of sauce, the so called convenience cooking. I may have used the sauce only once or twice, but it’s not part of my normal cooking.
I’ve also noticed that my cooking has change over the past year and I’ve gone back to cooking “real” food. Yesterday was grilled salmon steaks with mixed vegetables and rice. Today is pork chops, brussel sprouts and scallop potatoes.
I’ve never met a condiment I didn’t like. In addition to my own jams-pickles-relishes-sauces I always have a selections of hot sauces, asian sauces, anchovy, tomato and herb pastes, mustards, and on and on.
your good