Thursday, December 11, 2008

Refrigerator Blues

As I've been thinking about preparations for the holidays and influx of guests we expect for Christmas (my parents are staying with us, and grandmother and possibly aunt/uncle/cousin/& aunt's brother will be joining us for dinner), one of the things I considered was the available room in our fridge. We have a side by side, which I love for easy access to everything. But even when we seem to have no food* in the house, the refrigerator shelves and door are always 80% full of beverages, condiments, and I don't know what else.

I know that 20% of the space isn't going to be enough for all the food that will need to go in there, and we don't have a second refrigerator (freezer, yes, but that's not the point) to take any overflow. My MIL is the queen of making it all fit (with 10% risk of something jumping out at you when you open the door), but I have yet to master that skill.

Something HAS to give. I feel so guilty tossing an expensive sauce we used once and weren't crazy about (or even disliked), but there's a bunch of things like that taking up room. I'm about to the point of saying we need to get a mini-fridge for the garage to hold soda, beer and wine to make room for other food. (Of course, if we had been able to afford finishing our basement this fall, it wouldn't be an issue since we'd have one down there already.)

So my question is, how do I decide what to toss and what to keep (and possibly keep my guilt at throwing away perfectly good, but unappetizing to us, food at bay)?

I was going to insert a picture here - so you could see for yourself, but I wasn't happy with the results of my first try to caption and point out the relevant issues, and ran out of time to re-do it. So you'll just have to use your imagination.



*As my mother has been known to say: There's always food in the house. It's just a matter of whether it's something you want to eat.

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