One potato, two potato, three potato......cream cheese

I used to have a joke with my dear departed mother in law. There was a time, years ago, when I went over to their house and was wondering why in the world their refrigerator was so overstuffed, when it was just the two of them at home. She told me that she needed to clean it out, so I went to it.

I found five containers of cream cheese.

What I found, over the years, was that they never, ever had less than four containers of cream cheese, and just as many of sour cream. I could never figure it out, tll I went to work with a girl who was the daughter of Polish immigrants, who told me that if you're Polish, adding sour cream automatically makes anything taste good. (This is the same girl who has the "low fat, no fat, no way" rule, but I digress....) I think that the hubby bears out the sour cream rule, since he uses it on just about anything: carrots, chips, potatoes, pickles, anything.

His Polish grandma is up there smiling, I guess.

I guess it should've been no real surprise when I cleaned out the fridge today and found four containers of ketchup, in various stages of fullness. There were two bottles of Italian dressing, three of Ranch (two almost empty), and three containers of strawberry preserves. I combined the three mayo containers into one "Kroger Miracle Real Mayonnaise Dressing" container. No way I bought two of those containers, cause I only ever buy one brand of mayo. I think one may've come home from the fish fry at church, but who knows.

By the time I was done, I a) had some room in the fridge and b) resolved that I need to start using a grocery list when I shop. It's hard, however, to shop for groceries around here, because with three teenagers around, the food disappears before it even gets in the house some days. Whipped cream gets shot straight out of the can into the mouth, milk come straight out of the jug unless I catch them at it, and it's quite possible that a riot can break out if someone puts candy in the fridge. That's probably why they are always
hiding food.

So today, when I cleaned the fridge, I thought of my mother in law, gone now almost a year, and I smiled, thinking how funny she would have found it that our fridge now looks just like theirs did. And that she'd never find 15 year old, long expired, medications in our medicine cabinet, as I did in theirs. And I remembered how she loved my fruit salad, and how we would laugh over our husbands' eating quirks. So here's to my mother in law, and my nice clean fridge, and let's celebrate with a Vested Gentress vegetable skirt, from affair d'amour, on Babylon Mall. Coming soon, to a crisper near you.