Waste not

Our refrigerator crashed last night. Two attempts to reboot it were fruitless, so, at 7:30 this morning I started tossing food that was too sketchy to be recovered. In the tossed pile?

• Three sodden TV dinners


• One nearly full gallon and three partially eaten pints of ice cream


• 1.5 packages of gyoza


• A gazillion pounds of industrial grade hamburger patties


• 1/2 pound of sliced turkey


• 4 slices of Canadian bacon (eh?)


• 1 pint of sour cream


• 1 quart of fat free cottage cheese


• 1 mostly empty bottle of fish sauce, and


• 1 mostly full canister of fat free whipped cream.

I'm proud to report that, with the materials we recovered, we made the following:

• Succotash - 1/2 bag of frozen lima beans, 1/2 bag of frozen corn, and turkey bacon (with Old Bay for flavor)


• Curry chicken salad- 2 pounds of boneless, skinless chicken breasts, poached and tossed with lo-fat mayo and Key Lime juice (+ a bunch of other stuff)


• Mashed cauliflower - head of cauliflower, boiled and then mashed with leftover fresh parm, plain soy milk, and onions and garlic cooked in (turkey) bacon fat, and


• Spanish rice - 1 bag of frozen peas, (rice), 1 jar of salsa, 1 jar of sliced Spanish olives, and leftover cooked hamburger and crispy pork belly

We also cooked 4 steaks, and are hanging on to toaster strudels, all of our eggs (Europeans don't refrigerate eggs, why should we?), 5 pounds of hot dogs and one pound of hot dog minis (don't ask), three types of block cheese, veggie burgers and a host of cookies and spices in the freezer. I steamed green beans for salad, and have roasted asparagus leftover from a nice dinner out that will also be added to salad. Today BMG ate a bag of salami and 1/2 pound of cheese to help with the "eat down."

We could have thrown everything away. A new (to us) fridge comes as early as tomorrow, and as late as Wednesday. We don't have sufficient cold storage, save for the vaguely cool fridge. And every time we open the fridge we lose a little of the cool to the warm air. So, keep food - even cooked food - is a giant pain in the neck.

But...

I hate wasting food more than almost anything else in the world. There are people in the world who are literally dying of hunger and malnutrition. While I know I'll never send my uneaten dinner to the starving kids in China (or Ethiopia, or Boston), I do want to feel like I'm not contributing to the problem by throwing away perfectly good food just because I am inconvenienced by not having a fridge for a short period of time.

PS: Want to see what our fridge used to look like? Take a peek via our 2007 posting on Fridge Watcher.com.