U.F.O.

I didn't post a picture with today's post. I did this deliberately and you will thank me for it as you read onwards.

As part of the preparations for Thanksgiving next week I decided that it was time that the fridge got a real cleaning from top to bottom. I took out shelves and bins and actually scrubbed the inside of the fridge. Admit it. How often do you do that? When doing food shopping, unfortunately, we have a relatively small fridge (for here in the US, might I add) and when the new food arrives, the things that were already here have a tendency to migrate to the back of the fridge.

As part of the cleaning process I discovered several U.F.O.'s. These are Unidentified Food Objects. We're talking about the kind of things that your kid's biology teacher asks students to bring into class when they do the segment on fungi. We're usually relatively frugal here with the notable exception of food. Still, we do try to avoid buying too much food and having more leftovers than we can eat. DD did a segment at Nature's Classroom where they even applied the proper name to this food. Ort.

Ort : (n) a scrap or morsel of food left at a meal.

They would even go to the effort of weighing the ort at the end of a meal to show the kids how much food they had wasted. This would be conveyed at the end-of-meal "ort report".

While we try to avoid ort, the process of pushing things to the back of the fridge provides for the occasional surprise. Over the past few weeks, DW and I seem to have been spread fairly thin, so we were probably due for what we found during today's fridge clean out. I must say there were some interesting things. I'll let your imagination run wild with the colors, textures and aromas. They included:

• Psychedelic Technicolor (once) fresh Mozzerella
• Fuzzy Peach Jam
• Liquid cucumber (fortunately an "English" cucumber still in the plastic wrapper)
• Grey pickled Jalapeno peppers. (No, not fuzzy, just grey.)
• A whole wheat flatbread wrap that was more like a Saltine cracker than bread.
• A jar with a solid cake of Sesame Tahini at the bottom that required a knife to remove.
• One shriveled and totally dessicated strawberry.
• A small pool of something very sticky on the bottom shelf. (No sign of actual food or a container of any sort.)
• A small container of grapes that were more like wine-in-a-grape skin
  

To avoid totally grossing anyone out who has ever or might ever eat at my home, I have to say that a) most of the food was packaged and not cross-contaminating anything, and b) many people have (happily) eaten at my home and gone on to live normal healthy lives.

Still, I can say with total honesty that my high-school biology teacher would have been overjoyed to prepare slides from my fridge to look at under the microscope! She would have particularly enjoyed the vibrant colors of the Mozzerella!