Sunday

Today I woke up tired. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was the impending doom that the last day of the weekend brings. Maybe it was staying up late to watch Mariah Carey on SNL. (I am a reluctant fan.)

Whatever it was, it wasn't pretty.


I decided that I would feel better if I accomplished some tangible goals today. So after finishing some paperwork and paying some bills, I decided to tackle something truly scary. My refrigerator!



We actually have two refrigerators in the house, a full sized one in the pantry/utility room/catch all. Fran and Anne share that one and I use the half-sized one in the kitchen. However, we do find that sometimes because my fridge is actually in the kitchen, their food tends to migrate out into mine. This leads to the me opening my packed fridge and assuming that I actually have food.

On closer examination, however, my error becomes clear to me.

You know, I might complain about the food migration if I didn't think there was great potential for the tables to turn on me and the list of my bad roommate habits to be brought to light. As a person who loves confrontation almost much as dental surgery, I tend use it only as a last resort! Plus, I know I'm a nightmare roommate and I don't want to talk about it.

I decided to tackle the cleaning today because something is starting to smell and I need to get to the bottom of it.


As you can see, it was at least in need of some organization. It was getting too hard to throw something back in there and close the door fast enough to keep it from springing back out! So I pulled everything out including the shelves and the drawer.


I threw away the offending food (chicken past it's sell by date) and washed everything down with Clorox. As I was doing this, I listened to Selected Shorts on NPR. They read one story about a woman who lived two blocks from the library but still kept her library books checked out for so long that by the time she brought them back, she owed $32.00 in overdue library charges. Also, she had read them so long ago that as soon as she returned them, she checked them out again, vowing this time to read them and promptly return them . . .





'Fate has a nasty sense of humor', I thought, as I scrubbed at the encrusted surfaces that had seemed to appear overnight in the fridge, 'didn't I just do this?'!

Once it was properly sanitized again, I reloaded the food that I actually had

and found that, as I had suspected, I need to go shopping for more food to meet it's quiet demise in the back of my fridge. There seems to be an over abundance of pickles and condiments trying to pass themselves off as something that can in some way form a meal, if only I am creative enough to find the right combination.




With this project done, I poured my self a bloody mary

and looked around for my next project.


Just in case there is any curiosity about the essential ingredients for the perfect bloody mary, here they are:


After deliberating for a few minutes, I decided to make an apple carrot spice cake.

Baking on the weekends is a little bit of a compulsion for me. I generally give it away to outwardly grateful friends and neighbors. I only say outwardly grateful because I always imagine them shaking their fists at me as I walk away for sabotaging their diets.





I put tons of fruit and nuts and spices in this cake and it just smells amazing! It's dense and gorgeous. I tend to enjoy "rustic" cooking. For "rustic" read "lazy". I like to leave the skins on the apples and cut them in large chunks instead of grating them or cooking them down first.


I have not yet decided who will be getting this cake but I'm open to suggestions.