Cleaning out the Refrigerator

It's hard to imagine anything quite as disgusting as pulling a moldy container of heaven-knows-what out of your refrigerator. At least, after last night, that's how I see it.

I have no idea how exactly it started. All I know is that one minute, I was discussing what we were having for dinner, and the next, I was pulling condiments with expiration dates as bleak as early 2007 out of our poor refrigerator. I discovered a number of interesting things. Among them, that our family has at least 5 or 6 jars of pickles in our fridge at any given moment, and that at least half of those have gone bad, at least according to the expiration dates that have smudged and worn off over time.

Other highlights included a tub of green beans that smelled like vinegary four-bean salad, even though it was obvious that they had originated in our freezer; a jar of applesauce that was olive green; and in the farthest corner of the fridge, on the top shelf, lay a Ziploc container of something so covered in black, white, and green mold that neither my mother nor I could even remotely tell what it might have once been.

And if this is not bad enough, I had to use a butter knife, lots of scalding hot water, a heap of baking soda, and a scratchy yellow sponge to literally scrape off the pale pink sweetened condensed milk that had become encrusted on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. It was bad enough that it actually wore a hole in the yellow sponge. I made no progress whatsoever until my mother suggested that I use the baking soda, which then acted as a miracle crusty-milk-dissolving wonder and loosened up the glob enough that I could then use the butter knife and scratch the remaining goo off the poor glass shelf.

I am now pleased to report that we only have about 4 or 5 bottles of salad dressing in our fridge, as opposed to the 12+ we had before. And two full double-bagged garbage trips later, we can actually see the back of the fridge.

Next on our list is the pantry. Watch out, weevils!